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About two weeks ago I was standing at the corner of Hyperion Avenue and Griffith Park Boulevard in the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles, drinking in the vibes. An upscale market stands there now, but from 1926 to 1940 it was the site of the old Walt Disney Studios; the period almost perfectly coincides with Disney’s active interest in animation. This was where Disney brought Mickey Mouse to life, where he pioneered the sound animation (Steamboat Willie, 1928), the Technicolor animation (Flowers and Trees, 1932), and the feature-length animation (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937). Here Disney pushed the animator’s art from crude and elastic black-and-white drawings to highly detailed renderings of the human form with delicate chiaroscuro effects. Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942), and the Depression-era touchstone Three Little Pigs (1933) were all hatched on Hyperion Avenue.
Finance often explains a lot about filmmakers’ creative careers (take Tom Darden’s Buster Keaton biography The Man Who Wouldn’t Lie Down), and Gabler shows how the business model for Disney’s films was fatally flawed: his obsessive attention to quality and detail drove up labor costs, and the independent studio he and his brother Roy operated was constantly mired in debt. The financial windfall of Snow White impelled Disney to design and build an elaborate new studio in Burbank, but its follow-ups, Pinocchio and Fantasia, lost money on their first release. The lack of revenue and the cost of keeping the studio going forced him to discontinue animated features in favor of government-training and wartime-propaganda films.
