Walt Disney

Few figures of the 20th century have made so deep and indelible an impact on world culture as Walt Disney. Few people have direct knowledge of Walter Elias Disney’s life, his precise contributions to cinema, or the television programs, toys, and attractions that bear his name, but Disney is nevertheless a name familiar to hundreds of millions. Since the early 1920s, Disney, his companies, and his collaborators have been at the forefront of many cinematic and industrial innovations, including synchronized (and later stereophonic) sound, Technicolor, television, and computer-generated animation. Disney expanded into animated features, fiction and documentary live-action filmmaking, self-distribution, and theme parks. Today, the Disney organization stands alone among the few survivors of the studio era with much of its core business and its brand still intact, a brand constantly renewed, vigorously policed, and sometimes aggressively protected. The Disney Company preserves, shapes, and profits by its own history and that of its celebrated founding father-figure. While Disney artifacts can be found in many a middle-class home, the principal archives of Disney materials are curated and controlled either by the company itself or by his heirs through the Disney Family Foundation, and the company and foundation’s various publishing imprints add more than any university press to the ever-growing Disney literature. With Disney’s nominal oeuvre constantly expanding on screens big and small, this bibliography is, of course, anything but complete. Rather, it is a sampling of the historical, critical, theoretical, and aesthetic perspectives on the man, his times, his company, and the motion pictures and places he helped to create. Many more critiques of individual films have been published than could be included here, but you will find examples of most of the prevalent methodologies and approaches used in such critiques. The selected pieces of certain particularly prolific scholars are representative of their scholarship and style as a whole. Likewise, only a fraction of the mammoth resources available online are included here—Cartoon Brew, edited by Amid Amidi, and Dan Sarto’s Animation World Network, are both excellent jumping-off points into that vast terrain. Some readers will no doubt find cause to disagree with some of those selections. Finally, the author is deeply indebted to Dr. Richard Neupert, who began this expedition and contributed much to it.