The few improvements over other Disney biographies that Gabler does manage include new insights into Walt the husband and father. He brings Lillian into slightly better focus than previous books (aided in part by her having passed, and thus making it easier to solicit more candid memories from surviving family and friends) and Walt's daughters are made three dimensional, thanks largely to Gabler's having avoided editorializing in these parts. When Gabler is less opinionated and more mater-of-fact in what he writes, the book works quite well and holds the reader's attention. But when he shifts into an analytical voice, he can't seem to help from trying to read too much in between the lines. The serious scholarship he aches to bring to The Triumph of the American Imagination is solid enough in its intent, and sometimes successfully applied, but it isn't enough to make it worth holding out as the definitive Disney biography. It simply is not. Although there are only a handful of inaccuracies in the book, they all seem to be of the same kind – born of hyperbolic prose that reach for a punch line or some pathos that simply isn't required. For example, in what is an otherwise eloquent concluding chapter, and a promisingly well-crafted analysis of Walt Disney's life accomplishments

Gabler ultimately makes a ridiculous mistake in describing Walt's final resting place, and then colors it with unnecessary and excessive sentimentality in his summation of the man:

For so bright and gifted a writer to cook up such saccharine broth, given all the earthier ingredients at his disposal, is akin to an eager undergraduate who runs around analyzing his family at Thanksgiving, having just completed his first course in psychology. First of all, the statue is not of Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid, but is simply a reproduction of a fairly ordinary young woman kneeling on a rock, a romantic pose typical of the period of 19th century European art and design that Walt and (mostly) Lillian favored; it's placement in the family plot is sweetly melancholy, and nothing more. As Walt had no affinity for the Hans Anderson story or character, the irony Gabler wants to force onto the reader is a painful and inaccurate stretch at best, colored once again by what I suspect is over-familiarity with the company of today versus the man who gave his name to it nearly eighty years ago. And as for the destiny that Gabler assigns to Walt – the constant and (as Gabler writes it) semi-tragic pursuit of perfection only underscores Gabler's failure with this long awaited biography, which is easily the greatest literary disappointment I can recall in recent years.

Bob Thomas's superior Walt Disney: An American Original remains the definitive Disney biography. It's entirely possible that the plain spoken and unpretentious Thomas, himself a reporter, has the advantage of being from a generation of writers less interested in their own celebrity. More importantly, Bob Thomas actually remains open to the notion that Disney was as uncomplicated and direct as the films he crafted. This is not to say that Walt was without his complexities, it's just that they weren't of a modern world. The very real irony of that is that Walt Disney was arguably the greatest talent magnet and likely the greatest American futurist of the 20th Century, and unearthing that Walt may have been exactly what Howard Green had in mind when he cautioned Neal Gabler to write a serious book. What a terrible shame that Neal Gabler didn't manage it.