The author is and always has been decidedly purposeful in his prose. A writer with a sometimes prudish and sweetly snobbish perspective, Michael Barrier’s oh-so patrician voice may evade some readers but it is worth listening to. They key to reading Barrier is understanding from the outset that he’s willing to be debated, although never willing to concede. He’s the William F. Buckley of animation and Disney, and as aggravating as his subtle editorializing can be, his analysis is divinely logical, and his arguments are better crafted than anyone writing on his subject. Anyone. He’s never intentionally cruel, and thankfully not given to absurd conjecture. As I said before, Barrier is toned down considerably in this book, and he’s at his most entertaining, without being bratty or boorish. You can rail against his sometimes obvious personal opinion of some of Disney’s films (although you’ll be hard pressed to craft an argument to ever sway him) but, you will never find more sound reasoning about the man who made those films. It’s difficult to counter Michael Barrier’s take, wrong as he may be about matters of taste (he refers to the character of Pinocchio as a puppet “reduced to a neuter before animation began…�?, and says of �?Sleeping Beauty�?’s production designer “(Eyvind) Earle was a particularly striking specimen of the kind of artist who has a splendid technique but nothing much to say�?), but his infamous over-confidence is a small price to pay for a chance to read someone who is as fare and loving a judge as ever weighed in on the life of Walt Disney the man. Michael Barrier believes in pixies, well enough, he just doesn’t always clap for them, and for all the respect he affords his subject he certainly isn’t reverent, and he sure as hell doesn’t pray to him. If you do, then fold your hands and bow your head that his next subject isn’t Santa Claus, because he pulls no punches in The Animated Man.

Barrier frames this book around what he contends was a defining moment in Walt’s life: an address delivered to the studio staff on Monday, Februay 10, 1941. Barrier writes:

A tad bit dramatic, perhaps, but quite possibly the most insightful platform from which any Disney biographer has launched their argument for their particular portrait of Walt. Barrier details the speech, made in a time of great financial crisis and all-time morale low, just prior to the now legendary crippling studio strike, and later concludes:

Thus begins and intelligent and fresh look into how Disney struggled with being an artist as well as studio boss and a visionary with whom very few people could keep pace. Thanks again to the biographer’s superb application of first-person observations, we get an unromantic look at Walt after the strike of 1941 – which has never been better accounted - and a heartbreaking look at a passionate dreamer facing mortality in the last weeks of his life. Once again, I am struck by the lingering effect of this book: a greater curiosity for the subject. Only truly great biographies can do that. Bad biographies just exhaust you. Barrier’s book makes it worth taking another look at Michael Eisner’s self-aggrandizing auto-biography, and revisiting various interviews with Jeffrey Katzenberg and Tom Schumacher, because, intentionally or unintentionally, the ambitions of Walt Disney shed a more sympathetic light on the tenures of these men. Understanding Walt as Barrier understands him makes the puzzle of Eisner and his ilk, and even the current enigma of John Lasseter, a great deal easier to crack, and puts so much of the writing on the post-Walt phenomenon into sharp perspective. (This same understanding also sets akimbo any halo over the heads of victims of recent cutbacks and layoffs – particularly the subjects and the makers of “Dream On Silly Dreamer�?, who start to sound just a little bit whiny.)

For all the reasons I can offer to buy and read The Animated Man, heed this final warning: if you need a book that will sate your desire to digest the phenomenon of all things Disney by summing up the source, then you will be sorely disappointed. If, however, you have a serious interest in understanding how and why it is that the mouse and all his kin are so ubiquitous in the 21st century, whether you’re and addict or an abolitionist, and are realistic enough to accept that this requires reading multiple works, then this book is without a doubt the best possible place from which to start. I repeat, it does not answer the question, but it begs it in proper fashion, and if you’re up for the challenge of reading or re-reading a long list of other very good books on subjects that include Walt and things beyond his lifetime, then you must, repeat must start by reading The Animated Man.

As to where to go after Barrier, the choices can be daunting. For my money a look at books as slim as Bill Peet’s autobiography, or Jack Kinney’s Walt Disney and Assorted Other Characters is a good start. As hagiographic as it is, Inside the Dream by Katherine and Richard Greene is an excellent supplement. You can also follow any of a number of tagents such as the superb Mouse Tracks: The Story of Disneyland Records by Tim Hollis and Greg Ehrbar, or Beth Dunlop’s Building the Dream: The Art of Disney Architecture. For the best insight into the artists whose genius was exploited by Disney in the making of his classic animated features, nothing compares to two books by John Canemaker – Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men and the Art of Animation, and Before the Animation Begins:The Art and Lives of Disney Inspirational Sketch Artists. All of these books, and so much more on the subject of the man and the machine, are much better for Barrier having written The Animated Man, and having the courage to confess that it is not and could not be definitive.

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