by Neal Gabler
The profs couldn’t agree either, though, on the source of Mickey’s appeal. Some thought he drew his appeal from the cultural currents of the 1930s. Animation historian John Culhane would say that in his very circular design, signaling a kind of impregnability, Mickey was the “perfect expression of what he symbolizes—survival,” which, at the time he rose to prominence in the early days of the Great Depression, was a powerful attraction to a nation that was itself trying and hoping to survive. More pointedly, writer and producer William de Mille saw in Mickey an idealistic altruist in the mold of Franklin Roosevelt whose whole life suggested the “beloved Don Quixote, with Minnie Mouse as the fair Dulcinea and good old Pluto [Mickey’s dog] fulfilling the duties of Sancho Panza.” Still another scholar saw him as a representative of a new jittery machine age in which “the jerky rhythm of his movements, the constant collisions, explosions, and projections, are symbolic of nervous modern man living in a whirl of mechanical forces that multiply every physical action by ten to a thousand.” Naturally, anyone subject to the same forces—and everyone was—empathized with Mickey. Still others, looking at the rise of totalitarianism in Europe at the time, believed Mickey to be a counterweight and antidote to an “age of dictators and tyrants…who stride the world like a colossus”—in effect, meaning Mickey Mouse displaced reality for everyone the way he displaced reality for his own creator.
He was so much a part of his time that, writing nearly forty years after Mickey’s first appearance, cultural historian Warren Susman claimed that while political historians were likely to call the 1930s the age of Franklin D. Roosevelt, cultural historians would consider it the age of Mickey Mouse, both for the way the mouse seemed to confront the period’s dislocations and agonies and for the way he seemed to suggest a remedy to them. “The Disney world is a world out of order: all traditional forms seem not to function,” Susman observed. “And yet the result is not a nightmare world of pity and terror, a tragic world, but a world of fun and fantasy with ultimate wish-fulfillment, ultimate reinforcement of traditional ways and traditional values.” “No matter how disordered the world appears,” he wrote, “Disney and his Mickey Mouse—any of his heroes or heroines—can find their way back to happy achievement by following the announced rules of the game.”
Meanwhile some psychological approaches regarded Mickey as striking deep psychic lodes. These analysts found Mickey’s visual iconography to be reassuring (“[C]ircles never cause anybody any trouble,” observed longtime Disney associate John Hench, comparing Mickey’s shape to breasts, babies, and bottoms, while people have “bad experiences with sharp points.”); or suggestive of the human, since Mickey’s face was flat like the human face; or as Iwerks once explained with a nod to Jung, expressive of wholeness since his face, a “trinity of wafers and the circular symbol,” unites the irreconcilable. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould applied to Mickey anthropologist Konrad Lorenz’s argument that certain features of juvenility—“a relatively large head, predominance of the brain capsule, large and low lying eyes, bulging cheek region, short and thick extremities, a springy elastic consistency, and clumsy movements”—trigger innate responses of affection, so that Mickey Mouse, who had all these characteristics, was virtually constructed to elicit love.
Children’s author Maurice Sendak located Mickey’s appeal in his plasticity. Sendak found in the early Mickey cartoons, which featured “kicking the ass, pulling the ears, tweaking noses, twisting necks,” a “passionate investigation of the body.” “Eminently gropable” in Sendak’s view, and like a baby, Mickey finally gave the viewer the “license to touch.” New York Times film reviewer and later screenwriter Frank Nugent took a different slant on the theme of plasticity. He believed that Mickey Mouse “stole” screen slapstick from its live practitioners and then extended it because his elasticity exceeded theirs, and that it was slapstick that made the cartoons appealing.
Other observers traced Mickey’s appeal to the way he summoned memories of childhood in the viewer himself: “the spirit of the child in man [which] would delight in caricaturing all those heroes whom ordinarily we should regard with awe and reverence,” as Harvard professor Robert D. Feild wrote. A Dr. A. A. Brill, writing in 1934, thought Mickey Mouse “narcotized” his adult audience by taking them back to childhood, when “everything could still be attained through fantasy,” as Mickey attains things. Another doctor, drawing on Freud, called Mickey an “ego ideal” who appeals to that part of childhood that is happy.
One of the most popular veins of analysis was the idea of Mickey as a representation of freedom, which was inherent in the animation medium itself. “He can break all natural laws (he never breaks moral laws) and always win,” observed Time in 1933. “He lives in the moment, has few inhibitions.” It was not too great a stretch from this freedom to incorrigibility—Mickey as “quick and cocky and cruel, at best a fresh and bratty kid, at worst a diminutive and sadistic monster,” in Richard Schickel’s words, or possessing a “scandalous element in him which I find most restful,” in E. M. Forster’s. Indeed, some found Mickey too suggestive. A board of Ohio censors rejected one Mickey cartoon in which a cow was reading Elinor Glyn’s scandalous novel Three Weeks, while the midwestern Balaban & Katz theater chain objected to Mickey milking a cow in The Karnival Kid, to which Walt protested that it has “never been our intention to insert anything of a smutty nature,” but wrote, “I still cannot see where anyone could take offense at any of the ‘stuff’ contained in our pictures.” Even so, Maurice Sendak found an “anarchy” and “greediness” in Mickey’s grin, the “gleeful beam [of] a sexual freedom,” and said that when he designed his own Wild Things for the book Where the Wild Things Are, he based his drawings on this lascivious Mickey.
That lasciviousness tied Mickey Mouse to another motion picture icon: Charlie Chaplin. Nearly every analysis of the early Mickey invoked Chaplin and cited the correspondences between the two—their leering aggressiveness, their impertinence, their sense of abandon, and especially what film historian Terry Ramsaye at the time called “the cosmic victory of the underdog, the might of the meek” that they shared. Walt himself was certainly aware of the similarities because he had consciously used Chaplin, whom he once called “the greatest of them all,” as a model. In devising Mickey Mouse, he said, “We wanted something appealing, and we thought of a tiny bit of a mouse that would have something of the wistfulness of Chaplin—a little fellow trying to do the best he could.” Ben Sharpsteen said that Walt was constantly screening Chaplin films trying to pinpoint Chaplin’s basic appeal, and another animator, Ward Kimball, recalled that Walt was “always showing us how Chaplin did a certain thing.” “He just couldn’t get him out of his system,” Dick Huemer said of Walt’s obsession with Chaplin. “Walt kept the feeling of this little droll kind of pathetic little character who was always being picked on. But cleverly coming out on top anyway.” When Edward Steichen photographed Walt for Vanity Fair, Walt sent him a sketch of Mickey impersonating Chaplin.
But if Walt Disney had thought of Mickey Mouse as an animated surrogate for Charlie Chaplin, Mickey’s other father, Ub Iwerks, had thought of him in very different terms—as Douglas Fairbanks. “He was the superhero of his day,” Iwerks said of Fairbanks, “always winning, gallant and swashbuckling.” As for Mickey, “He was never intended to be a sissy. He was always an adventurous character…. I had him do naturally the sort of thing Doug Fairbanks would do.” Thus Mickey Mouse was born between two conceptions—between Chaplin and Fairbanks, between the scamp and the adventurer, between sympathy and vicariousness, between self-pity that translated into power through ingenuity and the bold assertion of power itself. From the first he was an unstable creation, often veering from one pole to another, in one cartoon to the next, Plane Crazy to Steamboat Willie, which meant that he could satisfy a wide spectrum of demands but that he would always be on the verge of self-destructing. That is why the early Mickey seems so random and rootless, less a character than a visual icon. He does not know
who he is.
In the end, though he was patterned after both Chaplin and Fairbanks, he would find his identity elsewhere. He would find it as a projection of Walt himself. Walt identified intensely, almost passionately, with his creation, as if Mickey were not just his brainchild but an extension of him. “Walt and Mickey were so simpatico,” Lillian said, “they almost seemed like they had the same identity.” Playwright, film critic, and later presidential speechwriter Robert Sherwood, meeting Walt in 1931, wrote, “Whenever he mentions Mickey Mouse a note of reverent awe is evident in his voice. He loves that weird little animal as any mother would love her favorite child.” Animator Les Clark said that “Walt was Mickey and Mickey was Walt,” observing that even Mickey’s gestures were copied from Walt’s when he performed Mickey at story meetings, and one of Walt’s most frequent story criticisms was, “I don’t think Mickey would act that way.” Years later Walt insisted, in an expression of just how bound to Mickey he was, that “as long as there is a Disney studio, there’ll be Mickey Mouse cartoons” because “I can’t live without him!”
In some sense, twenty-eight-year-old Walt Disney, whose previous cartoons had purveyed a discrete world but not an attitude, found his voice in Mickey Mouse. Mickey’s intrepid optimism, his pluck, his naïveté that often got him into trouble, and his determination that usually got him out of it, even his self-regard, branded him as Walt’s alter ego—the fullest expression of Walt Disney. This was true of the themes of Mickey’s films as well as his characteristics. When Mickey engaged in fantasy only to have it punctured by reality, as so often happened in his cartoons, he was acting out the central tension of Walt Disney’s life. And if Walt found his voice in Mickey, Mickey Mouse literally found his voice in Walt Disney. The ninth Mickey, The Karnival Kid, released in July 1929, was the first in which Mickey spoke—his first words were “Hot dog, hot dog”—though henceforth, Walt told his distributor, the cartoons would regularly include singing and talking. But Walt was not satisfied with Mickey’s voice, which was low, flat, and uninflected (it may have been Carl Stalling’s), and he promised to find someone whose voice would better fit Mickey’s personality, even postponing the synchronization of the next Mickey while he spent a week testing candidates. By one account, a woman named Helen Lind temporarily performed Mickey. But while Walt continued to search, he demonstrated one day how he thought Mickey should sound, assuming a falsetto. One of the staff asked him why he didn’t just do the voice himself, and Walt agreed, joking, “I knew I’d always be on the payroll, so I did it.” Walt was often embarrassed at performing Mickey, and he later admitted that there were others who could do it, but he said his was the best voice because “[t]here is more pathos in it.”
While Mickey served as an expression of Walt’s personal mythology of trial and triumph, he also provided a self-reflexive commentary on his creator’s own imagination, and this, as much as the cultural resonances or the invocations of childhood or the sexual suggestiveness, may have accounted for Mickey’s deep and abiding popularity. Whatever else he is—and he is indistinctly many things—Mickey Mouse is in thrall to his own abilities of imaginative transformation. Whether he is turning an auto into an airplane or a cow into a xylophone, Mickey, like Chaplin and like Walt Disney himself, is always in the process of reimagining reality, and this is his primal, vicarious connection to the audience—the source of his power. He sees and hears things others don’t. He makes the world his.
It was no accident that Mickey arrived with sound and music because music became the metaphor for his inner muse and the sine qua non of his existence. In his early cartoons, some of which are musical revues, he is wholly a musical creature—as much Fred Astaire as Charlie Chaplin. Hearing notes, Mickey cannot help but dance, sing, and make music himself, turning everything he spots into an instrument and converting reality into happiness. Even his relationship with Minnie Mouse is musically inspired; they literally make beautiful music together and bring joy and harmony, even fluidity, out of what is often threat and chaos. And this is also why the cartoons typically end with Mickey beaming or laughing, a chipper spirit, no matter what has befallen him. For all the subliminal attractions of his shape or his size or his sexuality, Mickey’s secret, the appeal of which is obvious and not limited to Depression America, is that he can always make things right in his head—just as Walt Disney, the escape artist, could. In the end Mickey Mouse was the eternal promise of cheerful solipsism.
V
With Mickey’s surging popularity and with the new, potentially lucrative Columbia contract, Walt Disney’s sanctuary on Hyperion Avenue was undergoing its own transformation. Once again, as he had previously done when things were going well, Walt was hiring—cherry-picking the best talent. That winter of 1930 he brought aboard Ted Sears, an animator and gagman at the Fleischer studio who was said to be responsible for some of the Fleischers’ funniest material. Sears had made a “semi-promise” to the Fleischers that he would stay, but Walt, in a signal of the studio’s increasing specialization, enticed him as the studio’s first storyman and held out the possibility of his helping Walt produce live-action comedies—an idea to which Walt kept returning. Another animator, Harry Reeves, who had been working for Pat Sullivan on the Felixes, also signed on, his abandonment of Felix for Mickey a sign of just how the animation tables had turned. He was so eager to join the Disneys that he even offered to pay his own traveling expenses. At roughly the same time Walt approached Grim Natwick, another Fleischer veteran and the designer of the Fleischers’ Betty Boop character, about coming west to the Disneys despite a competing offer from Walter Lantz at Universal. Natwick decided to stay in New York, but he had been tempted because, Sears told Roy, he “thinks a lot about the ‘art’ of it, and wants to be associated with only the best.” (Several years later he did join the studio.)
The physical studio was also undergoing yet another series of makeshift additions and alterations to accommodate the new staff. Early in 1930, shortly after the Columbia deal, Walt had the office wall moved six feet to the sidewalk to provide more space, though the operation was still squeezed into the one snug bungalow and several even smaller cottages. A visitor in January 1931 found a
quiet little building, one story high, a spot you would hardly notice as you drive along Hyperion Avenue. Inside smallish rooms, an over-full office, a council chamber with a big table and a piano, then narrow hall-like rooms in each of which sit rows of men and women with not much more than elbow room between them, each bending over a desk which sometimes has a panel of light in its center—about fifty people in all. Everything is quiet. Everything suggests definite and ordered work.
Already the previous summer Roy and Walt had purchased an adjoining lot, the old chimes factory, and made plans to erect a two-story stucco neo-Spanish combination business/animation building, fifty by eighty feet; a two-story concrete recording studio into which the recording operation would move from Tec Art; and a one-story music scoring room—all of which were completed early in the summer of 1931 at a cost of roughly $45,000, not including new equipment. Atop the new animation building, declaring his new status, Walt had placed a twelve-foot-square sign with the name “Walt Disney” in two-foot-high blue neon letters, “Mickey Mouse” and “Silly Symphony” in red neon, and a five-foot-high figure of Mickey in blue, red, and gold tubing. The once-nondescript studio was nondescript no more.
Yet inside, despite the growing staff and growing plant, the old spirit of camaraderie prevailed. Many in Hollywood in the 1930s sought solace in political community. The Disney employees found their community in the artistic enclave of Hyperion. One animator, obviously proud of the new Disney cachet as the best animation studio, said that working there made them all feel “as if we were members of the same class at West Point.” Others recalled the fraternal atmosphere—the story sessions that frequently lasted into the night with Walt acting out Mickey or some character in the Silly Symphonies, the practical jokes, the weekend picnics and games in the park. “My
, how the day flew!” said one gagman, fondly. And presiding over it all was Walt—as Wilfred Jackson said, “all day, every day, to talk with us about whatever we were doing, each step of the way.”
At twenty-nine, with his sharp youthful features made even sharper by his thinness and his still-unruly mop of brown hair, he didn’t look like the head of a studio or the king of animation. He didn’t dress like one either. No more fashion-conscious in Los Angeles than he had been in Kansas City, he usually wore knickers and long wool socks, “very gay and colorful things,” said his secretary at the time, “with lots of design in them.” And he almost always wore a sweater rather than a jacket. When Roy Williams, who would become an animator and gagman, first applied for a job at the studio, he waited in Walt’s office—“nothing but a pile of junk in those days”—and chatted with someone he thought was a messenger boy. When Williams finally said that he would come back another day since Mr. Disney was obviously too busy to meet with him, he discovered that the messenger boy was Walt Disney. Still, for all his youthfulness and informality, he radiated a sense of authority and certitude. “Walt struck me as being absolutely sure of himself,” said Ben Sharpsteen. “[H]e was positive about what he was going to do. He impressed me as being ‘young’—[but] the very fact that he was several years younger than I and had been in the business several years less, and yet had the ability to diagnose those requisites for better pictures, impressed me very much.” And with his confidence came an ethos that permeated the studio and governed it: that, in Grim Natwick’s words, “whatever we did had to be better than anybody else could do it, even if you had to animate it nine times, as I once did.”
