Between Books - Walt Disney & El Grupo in Latin America

I’m tired! I think Walt Disney may have been tired too!

Walt Disney & El Grupo in Latin America by Theodore Thomas, J.B. Kaufman, and Didier Ghez outlines Walt Disney’s trip to South America in 1941. The book covers the entirety of the nearly 3-month fall expedition, spreading American goodwill as a strategy to win over South American neighbors away from Nazi sympathy. Disney was asked by the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA) to use his global celebrity to strengthen Western hemisphere ties. The story is told heavily in images with the authors providing narration to the group’s daily doings. The volume does not focus on just Walt Disney but recognizes that El Grupo the 18 Walt Disney employees and family members on the journey, were at times separated into smaller traveling parties or even in the same cities separated to meet with numerous local industries or celebrities. Due to the highly visual nature of the text, it at times feels like a documentary and less than a book.

I’m tired, did I mention that? The goal of the authors is to provide a detailed account of the trip. The trio, therefore, doesn’t provide us a thesis to prove, in fact, the three have other works on El Grupo that have this as a goal. As a reader, you understand this is a very visual book seeking to provide a daily accounting. Hence, I’m tired. It feels like the group, especially Disney, rarely had a chance to rest during this fact-finding and goodwill-building adventure. Even in “downtime” artists like Mary and Lee Blair and Jack Ryman were sketching, painting, and refining ideas for potential future movies Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros. Or perhaps, Jack Cutting may visit a local studio to supervise a movie dubbing into Spanish. The book makes it clear that this group of 18 were constantly in motion. And while early in the trip, they may have spent in the reader's mind “weeks” in Rio, it becomes clear to the reader that on later stays the group seemed to only linger a day or two in a location before moving on again.

Design-wise, I was pulled into the book and it often felt like a visual experience and not a book. That is why I feel tired. This isn’t an era of perfect staged pictures. The spontaneous nature of many of the pictures helps one to feel the emotion and action, like a tired Lillian Disney asleep on a train car one can feel the stuffiness within. The closed eyes and the improperly directed glances remind us this is a different time before everyone had a camera and the time to coordinate numerous shots for the perfect social media image.

My only complaint with the design is some pages have maps on the layout that pictures and text sit upon. These maps have notations to locations on the page design. Sadly at times, I read these like image captions and not part of the page design which took me out of the journey for a bit.

Walt Disney & El Grupo in Latin America by Theodore Thomas, J.B. Kaufman, and Didier Ghez is a book for those who want to go deeper into Disney’s trip to South America in a highly visual way. For those who want to see Disney legends like the Blairs and Frank Thomas working, drawing, and immersing themselves into a culture this offering is for you. The authors help me to understand the kinetic and tiring nature of the trip, even without making this an overt goal. I wondered, can El Grupo just kick back and relax? An answer that seems like no as Frank Thomas was teaching himself Spanish even on the long-trip home.


Quick Note: While you can purchase this text on Amazon. I grabbed mine at Stuart Ng books where I was able to pick up an autographed copy. 

 

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Between Books - The Making of Walt Disney's Fun and Fancy Free

 

As a fairly busy person, I have never to my remembrance watched Fun and Fancy Free.  Okay, that’s a little bit of a lie.  I remember segments of this 1947 package film as it was taken apart to provide television and school’s shorter segments, specifically Mickey and the Beanstalk.  But it is honestly a film that I do not know a lot about or have a deep experience with.  I mean I likely have an old copy picked up and maybe unwatched from my college years.  So I was excited that the Hyperion Historical Alliance’s first monograph was a blind spot in my Disney knowledge.    

The Making of Walt Disney’s Fun and Fancy Free by J.B. Kaufman is truly the definitive book on this Disney feature.   Kaufman starts his story in 1941 as Walt Disney sought new stories in the midst of global war to justify his expanding studio.  One of the potential stories that Disney tasked to his staff was the development of Sinclair Lewis’ “Bongo” a tale of a circus bear meeting wild bears in the wild.  A story with only three main characters; Bongo the circus bear, Silver Ear a wild female bear and Lump Jaw a male bully bear was going to take a lot of development to create an animated film.  Kaufman highlights the starts and stops in the story including changing development leads, changing studio priorities and story problems which stretched out the development of the film.  For examples, as story personnel changed so did characters, endings and even how Bongo found himself in the forest.  Next Kaufman transitions to Mickey and the Beanstalk, a story that Walt Disney had visited before.  As early as 1938, Disney had considered producing a version of “Jack and the Beanstalk” again as a Mickey Mouse feature which could help put the studio on stronger financial grounds.  This feature was stalled in the World War II studio activities and revived again in 1944, among the projects like “Bongo” that Disney hoped would bring his studio in to the post-war world.  And with the war ended in 1945 and Disney needing to put a feature in theaters, the decision was made to place Bongo and Mickey and the Beanstalk together for one theatrical released feature.  The new fun spirited Fun and Fancy Free was to provide a Disney a more economical feature which already had years of development behind it.  This new film would be promoted heavily with both musical numbers found in the film and with Mickey Mouse’s 20^th anniversary, a year early. After its initial release, the film would separated into smaller segments for further release in other avenues.

Kaufman’s work is solid, informative and entertaining. The Making of Walt Disney’s Fun and Fancy Free is full of images.  The book does not just tell you about the evolution of characters but shows you.  And along with concept art, Kaufman shows us the artists crafting the film’s development.  But my biggest concern about image heavy books is the narrative.  Here, Kaufman does not scrimp on his words giving a strongly researched historical narrative.  For such an image heavy book, the words provide equal value.  The Hyperion Historical Alliance has stated they wish to support image driven books which also have historically strong research.  This first volume definitely meets that goal!  And I as a reader look forward to seeing future volumes. 

In the age of Disney+, Fun and Fancy Free is available at anytime to me.  Though I think I may still have a VHS copy of it…but a streaming channel seems so much easier for searching and starting/stopping.  J.B. Kaufman has given me the excitement to watch it again for the second or third first time in a whole new historical light. 

 

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Between Books - 2019 Hyperion Historical Alliance Annual

The Hyperion Historical Alliance is a relatively new to the public association with a charge for professional historians to preserve Disney historical documents, artwork and materials. Additionally members will continue to grow Disney scholarship both through an annual and the support in publishing historical monographs. While the group has been in existence since 2009, it is only now in 2019 that the scholarship publications have moved the group into the public eye. And with a membership that includes Didier Ghez, Todd James Pierce and J.B. Kaufman among others, to me the promise of this group and truly professional Disney history seems promising.

The “2019 Hyperion Historical Alliance Annual” is really the first public facing effort of the Alliance. The publication serves as a true professional journal publication, helping to move forward the concept of professional Disney history. The journey fills a niche found in other historical societies by allowing members to provide the community professionally researched and written short articles on Disney history topics. And the publication truly feels like a professional journal with serious historical scholarship. Perhaps the only things missing are book reviews, calls for papers and membership opportunities (which is not available at this time.)

The “2019 Hyperion Historical Alliance Annual” offers six articles. The topics range from profiles of former Disney employees who are generally not known in the Disney community, two articles on Ward Kimball, and The Little Mermaid. The topics establish that the Alliance covers numerous decades of Disney history. The articles are all generally written as one would expect a historical journal article, professional, lacking a fan voice and relying heavily on primary sources many of which are not available to the general public. And overall, the authors succeed in providing a professional historical journal complete in tone and style.

Content wise, I really enjoyed “Jack Cutting, an Artist Abroad” by Jim Hollifield. The article did an excellent job of capturing the life of Cutting from artist to Disney executive working with international markets. Cutting served as an employee who could unite the Walt and Roy sides of the company. But perhaps what struck me the most is how examining one individual can show us historical trends at large. This lesson was most highlighted for me in Past Time by Jules Tygiel. While this monograph is focused on baseball, it demonstrates important immigration and industrialization trends in American history. The Cutting article demonstrates how corporate America functioned in a post-World War II environment and the growth of international markets for American businesses.

Sadly, the article I would have liked to see excluded is one of the best written, “Ward Kimball and the Making of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” by Todd James Pierce. I really enjoy Pierce’s written. But much of this content is already available in The Life and Times of Ward Kimball, an excellent monograph. Additionally, Pierce also adapted this content in an audio form as a podcast. And his work is so successful, I actually read the article hearing his voice including pauses and inflection. But I would have really enjoyed new content from this excellent historian, as I believe the audience for the annual may have likely read the Kimball book already like I have.

As someone with two history degrees I really support the idea of professional Disney history. And I plan to look into the both the monographs and future annuals. If anything I would ask right now is how can I support this effort? Membership at the moment is closed to the association. And there are no casual or supporter memberships. I am fully prepared to purchase the future offerings. But I do wonder if in the future there could be membership options like The Society of Baseball Research, which would offer merchandise or provide avenues for publication. Because the “2019 Hyperion Historical Alliance Annual” makes me hopeful for future of professional Disney history along with a desire to help.