Words From Walt
Page 11 of 20
December 18
I don't pretend to know anything about art. I make pictures for entertainment, and then the professors tell me what they mean. |
For someone widely regarded as a genius, Walt Disney was about as much of an everyman as one could ever meet. He had an incredible knack of knowing what the general public wanted and he relied on his instincts to deliver. He often said that he'd rather take his chances with the public than with the critics and certainly that choice would prove the correct one to make throughout the years.
Walt felt comfortable making pictures for the audience that would be the consumers of his entertainment - his neighbors, people that he worked with, the people he did business with. He never underestimated them nor spoke down to them. He simply created what he felt was entertaining and hoped that others felt that way too.
Throughout his career, the critics would try to predict failure for projects Walt was working on. This seemed to make Walt even more determined to prove them wrong. He must have taken a certain glee in succeeding because he would often mention how he was told that he would fail. And yet his creations would be overwhelmingly welcomed by the public.
But make no mistake that while Walt professed to not know anything about art, he was actually quite a student of his craft. And as such, he encouraged his artists to become students as well. In 1931, Walt had his artists begin to take night classes at the Chouinard Art Institute at his expense. Eventually, Walt would have instructors from the school come to the Studios to conduct classes. These classes would help Walt's animators learn about "traditional" art, which in turn helped them to raise the level of their animation to new artistic heights. Life art classes would imbue the Disney artists with a measure of realism and believability that would contribute to the overall quality of their pictures.
But for all of his attempts to advance the field of animation, Walt understood that what he did was for the pleasure of his audiences. He never allowed the process to detract from the story. The art was never the star but rather the characters were. Personality was more important to Walt than pencil and ink. Walt understood art better than he may have let on but he realized its place in his pictures and never let art for art's sake dominate the viewer's attention.
Walt Disney brought animation further along in the late 1920s and early 1930s than it would advance for many decades following. By training his artists and improving the quality of his motion pictures, Walt Disney was creating art. The professors and the critics made observations about whether Walt succeeded in turning these cartoons into respectable artistic endeavors. But it was the general public, who Walt put his trust into, that ultimately decided on whether Walt's tastes were too highbrow or too lowbrow. It was the general public that would ultimately celebrate Walt's genius. The professors could only step back and attempt to explain his success.
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-- Matthew Walker
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