Customer Reviews

The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney (Simpson Book in the Humanities)

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

If you were thinking of passing by The Animated Man in favor of Neal Gabler's biography of Walt Disney, think again. "...Complete access to the Disney archives..." notwithstanding, Gabler couldn't in many, many cases, figure out just what exactly to do with all the information he was supposedly buried in for five+ years. And as such, the reader comes away at times with more questions than answers about just who Walt Disney was.

This is not the case in Michael Barrier's fine biography of Walt Disney, The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. Although he may not have had the unfettered access to the Disney archives accorded Neal Gabler, one would hardly be aware of that particular handicap. He was able to utilize a great deal of information housed there, which along with interview after interview makes for a mighty informative read. And since many of the interviews utilized throughout the book date back over 30 years, Barrier was able to talk with many Disney employees who "were there" at or near the start of Walt Disney's impact on the world.

So many of the interviews captured by Barrier provide an insight into what made Walt Disney `tick' that simply don't exist from the materials Gabler was able to unearth. More than once while reading through The Animated Man did I stop to re-read a paragraph as a particular tidbit of information provided an "a-ha" moment, helping to fill in some blanks pertaining to either Walt Disney himself or the legacy he left behind.
Also, Michael Barrier was able to weave his knowledge of animation throughout the text, providing additional insights not available to authors with less refined skills in that area.

In spite of it being half the length of Gabler's tome, I feel most readers will come away feeling more than fulfilled with few asking for more as Barrier's raison d'ętre of the book is his pinpoint focus on Walt Disney and what really made him tick.

As has been stated many times, and is still true today: the definitive Disney biography has yet (if ever) to be written, but Barrier comes as close as anyone has to date. There are plenty of books about Walt Disney and the Walt Disney Company to keep most of us glued to our reading glasses for some time to come. And one could round out one's knowledge by continuing on to Gabler's bio or even Bob Thomas' and certainly The "E" Ticket fanzine for very insightful and unique interviews with those who worked with Walt (primarily on the parks) - to name but a few. But I strongly feel the best starting point would be to grab a copy of Michael Barrier's biography and be prepared to be wowed.

This book is so rich with detail! You can picture yourself there when a young Walt is growing up as a farm kid in Marceline, Missouri, or later when he's struggling to make a living.

The endless first-person accounts and interviews really bring Disney's world -- indeed, much of a whole bygone American world -- to life. At times it reads almost like an oral history. It's a great complement to Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.

The book is not published by the Disney company, and the author is no corporate flack. But he's also no muckraker. You'll come away with a definite opinion of Walt Disney the person, but it's one you'll form yourself.

This is an extraordinarily good book. After giving up on the Neal Gabler book (too many words and not enough understanding, really, of who the man was), I love the approach of this book. Barrier knows animation inside and out, and he uses his knowledge to give us a picture of a real man and boss who tried to make animation great. The nitty gritty of those details make a real life comprehensible. The immense research is felt even though Barrier doesn't try to impress us with it; the book is a captivating read that propels you along. Highly recommended.

Walt Disney is, in my view, about the most interesting a figure to work in film in the twentieth century, for all sorts of reasons. Nobody did as much for their particular corner of the film medium as Disney did for animation: proper character animation, as we now think of it, was basically a Disney invention, created during the studio's great creative period between the late twenties and the early forties. Disney took animation from a primitive form to its maturity; it seems likely that cartoons would have remained a very peripheral novelty had there not been Disney's vision of something grander on the horizon. Yet Disney is also fascinating because of the way in which he lost interest and branched off from cartoons, leading to an incredible variation in the quality of the works prepared by the studio within his lifetime (Disney deservedly went from being a seriously regarded artist in the thirties to something of a critical pariah by the sixties). His devotion to amusement parks and other non-film corners of his business also foreshadowed the economic models that would define Hollywood in the last quarter of the century, with films increasingly becoming just one element in a wider suite of cultural products sold to audiences (so, for example, we don't just get sold Spiderman the movie; we are sold Spiderman computer games, comic books, clothing, CDs, theme park rides, and the like). As a person, too, Disney is fascinating for his mix of visionary artistic ambition and staunch conservatism. So he's a particularly rewarding subject for a biography.

Michael Barrier's The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney is one of two recent biographies released on Disney, the other being Neal Gabler's Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. Gabler's book is - as Barrier frets on his website - the more high profile release, backed by a bigger publisher. Yet I think most animation buffs will go straight to Barrier's book. Barrier has been researching animation for decades: he started interviewing important figures in the industry in the late sixties, and was publishing serious scholarly writing on the subject from around the same time in his magazine Funnyworld. Barrier's research in the field therefore started decades ahead of most writers who now write on the subject, and there is certainly nobody who can match the breadth of research and longevity of serious writing in the field. The first book-length result of Barrier's years of work was Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation In Its Golden Age, which quickly staked a serious claim as the definitive book on the subject. Yet in many ways The Animated Man is the superior book. Hollywood Cartoons suffered from its breadth; by necessity Barrier had to switch his attention from studio to studio, and that meant some areas had to be glossed over very quickly or not at all. In The Animated Man his focus is squarely on Disney, which makes for a much neater, more linear structure. And of course, the focus on one man, rather than an industry, gives the book more of a human focus.

Barrier declares his hand early, noting in the Preface that his chief focus is Disney's work, and particularly animation. This latter point would perhaps be an obvious conclusion, but there are a lot of Disney cultists who see things like Disneyland as his chief achievement. Barrier, rightly, takes the view that it was in animation that Disney was a first rate artist, and while he doesn't neglect Disneyland and the live action films, the book is strongest when focussing on cartoons. The early chapters are particularly interesting. It's easy to forget how long Disney struggled to find his feet in the industry (he started literally from nothing) and there's something comical about a small animated film ad company in 1920 unwittingly having the man who would revolutionise animation as an entry-level employee. But Barrier makes it clear how uncertain Disney's early years were. Other accounts tend to imply that Disney had high ambitions for the medium from very early days, and that the various setbacks he had in the 1920s were roadblocks on a journey towards inevitable greatness. Yet one thing that struck me in Barrier's account was that in the mid twenties Disney was more entrepreneur than artist; his interest in these years was in making his business a success, but that didn't seem to involve grand ambitions for the cartoons themselves. Hugh Harman, one of Disney's employees from the twenties who later made cartoons for MGM and Warner Bros., tends to come off in other books as a pale imitator of Disney. Here, though, Barrier suggests that in mid-twenties he was briefly ahead of Disney in his vision for where the medium could go. Yet it was Disney who would soon make the great strides ahead. This is partly a result of changes in Disney's thinking that occurred in the latter part of the decade, but it is also instructive about the blend of personality traits that made Disney the figure he was. Harman might have harboured similar aspirations, but it was Disney who had the ability to make it happen.

Barrier writes with a critical eye, and in Hollywood Cartoons that occasionally got frustrating, because if your idea of what was interesting varied from his, the things you wanted to read about sometimes dropped from view. The narrower focus of The Animated Man means that's less of a problem, but it might still occasionally bother readers. I had no problem with Barrier's dislike of Mary Poppins, for example, but found it a little off-putting that his narrative of the early animated features is so shaped by his relatively low opinions of Pinocchio and Fantasia. There are also a few areas where I was left wanting to know more, such as the fascinating relationship between Disney and Ub Iwerks. Iwerks started as the studio's key talent and Walt's closest collaborator, and finished doing technical work for the studio; in The Animated Man the latter period of his career isn't mentioned. Usually, however, these omissions are pretty defensible. Iwerks' significance to Disney in his later years was pretty marginal, for instance, and to include all such little asides would have brought its own hazards of length and focus.

There is such a large gap between the time Disney was doing his best work (between 1928 and 1941), and the period in which he became an avuncular public figure on his television show (in the late fifties and sixties), that the picture of Disney is often clouded by preconceptions and urban myths. These get further magnified by those wishing to push an agenda: for example, I have often seen left-wing critiques of Disney tie up their arguments with a grab-bag of ridiculous claims, such as those in Marc Eliot's execrable biography Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince. Barrier combats this with a methodical attention to detail and a rigid determination to rely on primary sources wherever possible. This can occasionally seem dogmatic or argumentative - Barrier is keeping a running list of errors in Gabler's biography on his website - but it is exactly the kind of attitude needed in a biography of a figure so surrounded by mythology. That Barrier is also so lucid and perceptive is the icing on the cake.

I'm in full agreement with other reviewers that this is one of if not the best Biography of Walt Disney ever written. The recent Neil Gabler biography has received more publicity (and it not bad) and is the most obvious book to compare to, I found Michael Barrier's "The Animated Man" much better in terms of the insight into the life of Walt Disney. I read Barrier's biography about 2 months after Gable's and found Mr. Gabler delved way to much into speculation where Barrier seemed to give insight into Walt.

I don't often write a review, but I thought this book was worth giving the positive review.

Mr. Barrier tells the life of Walt Disney, warts and all. Walt comes off a real person with real problems while doing great things. I have over 100 books on Walt Disney and the things he helped to create including many books and articles by those that new Walt first hand, and Barrier's book seems to give the most accurate and unbiased view of Walt of any biography I have ever read. It seems to give an accurate picture of Walt behind the scenes.

...if not the best, period! Though Bob Thomas' official bio has been the established source of info on Walt Disney since it came out, Michael Barrier's book gives us an insight in what drove Walt in his search of excellence. It shows that Walt was a real person with real ideals and dreams, and the personal make-up to make these come true.

Barrier is an animation scholar of highest degree, and one of the few who personally interviewed many of the key artists that worked for Walt. He has justly found Walt to be intensely interested in whatever he got involved in, be it animation, theme parks, trains or his Gulfstream airplane. We learn to like Walt, and I do feel closer to him after having read this book.

A lot of effort has been put into marketing Neil Gabler's bio, but I must say I found Barrier's book much more readable and enjoyable. Gabler gives dry facts (often wrong!) and clearly despises his subject (Disney's daughter Diane was outraged by Gabler's making Walt sound like a nutcase), while Barrier is truly interested in him - and we feel this, too! My advise is to FIRST read Barrier's book for the continuity and insight he gives us, THEN, if you must, read Gabler for the dry facts - after getting seven pages of errata on Gabler's book from Barrier's website.

Note that the quote by a negative reviewer here does not appear in Barrier's book and is clearly only given to put the book in a bad light. This book deserves the opposite: it should be read by all Disney-interested readers! They will enjoy it!

As someone who avidly reads everything available on Walt Disney, I can say that the bag of Disney biographies is a wildly mixed one. Some are good, some not so good and some flat-out terrible. Barrier's book is so unreservedly excellent that I have no hesitation in recommending it as the best, most accurate Disney biography in print. Barrier is, for all practical purposes, our first animation scholar and still our best. He is not only a thoughtful and conscientious biographer, but he has a thorough working knowledge of what makes films (and specifically animated films) tick. I learned a lot from this book and came away with a new appreciation for Disney and his many accomplishments. Barrier provides the insights of a good film critic, some of which may not agree with your own views, but are in all cases enlightening. If you only pick up one book on Disney, this is absolutely the one you want.

A page-turner, a very precise biography, a fantastic historical document and a window into the fascinating world of Mike's interviews. One may be frustrated at some of Michael's opinions or at the way the second part of Walt's life seems neglected when compared to what Michael considers Walt's most creative period, however the book remains a Masterpiece.

Here at Denny Magic Studios we make it a point of acquiring any and all books about the Disney Brothers because we are attempting to follow their lead. We have all the previous biographies, and although they are informative there was something special about "The Animated Man" that REALLY painted what we feel is the most accurate picture of Walt. We knew going in some 40 years ago, that Walt was human, and flawed just like the rest of us... however we knew that previous biographies might take creative license by eliminating certain things that may have painted Walt in any unfavorable light. But this is life. And... Life, in order to be portrayed accurately, must include the good with the bad. Therefore we think that this book may just be one of the more accurate biographies ever printed, and we especially recommend it to anyone who is really struggling to "know" Walt Disney better. We bought the book because we must buy and read everything Disney... And... because it had already garnered good ratings from others.If you are a detailed person, this book will provide some insight into the Walt Disney persona.

I have been fascinated with animation since childhood, and have avidly read animation history books for over twenty years. I discovered Michael Barrier relatively recently, and he has quickly become my favorite writer on the subject. The Animated Man and Hollywood Cartoons are two of the most enjoyable, compelling books on the subject of animation that have been written.

Barrier writes with an academic thoroughness, yet his prose style is a pleasure to read. He analyzes the merits and faults of Disney's body of work, and his conclusions are always compelling, well-researched and well-supported. Even when I do not agree with Barrier's opinions, I always find them riveting.

The Animated Man had the misfortune to see print not long after Neal Gabler's widely publicized Disney biography. Barrier's is the superior book. Among professional animators, it is already the Disney biography of choice. I am convinced that in years to come, it will be regarded as the definitive book on Walt Disney.