Walt Disney was a great artist.
An innovator. He invented cartoons as we know it.
He invented the theme park.
He all but invented animation, and took it to the level of mature genius, took it to the level of a Raphael or a Renoir.
He invented the family movie as we know it today.
He had his own studios.
Everything to come out of Walt Disney Studios was his personal project.
Others followed him.
Mister Rogers and Captain Kangaroo followed his invention of the family movie to develop children's television as it was known at its peak on PBS at the peak of the American Golden Age in the 1970's and 1980's.
Others followed him in developing sophistocated children's and family movies.
Others made classic cartoons.
And then there was Walt Disney Studios itself.
A hundred talented artists working as Walt's own team on Walt's own personal projects.
Disneyland. The 1964 World's Fair.
Great movies. Polyanna. Mary Poppins.
EPCOT.
And then Walt died.
He was only in his mid 60's.
They could be forgiven for thinking that he would surely be around another 10, 15 years or so.
Or at least another 5 or 6 years.
A hundred talented artists.
Without their leader.
They could still carry on.
Disneyland made enough money that they could still carry on.
Their movies did not have to make money.
Disneyland kept the company afloat.
And so they carried on.
Mind-numb, going through the motions, holding on to Walt's personal vision.
Then they decided that they had to save Animation.
They had to make sure that the one art form that no one else was doing didn't die.
The animated feature film.
Animation not as cartoon comedy, but as real art.
Real beauty.
Real storytelling, even if it was aimed at children.
And so as the 1970's began, Walt Disney Studios, led by the 'Nine Old Men', the great animation directors who had worked with Walt all those years, set out to find and train the next generation of great animators.
And they did.
And by 1973, the 'Nine Old Men' felt that the new generation was ready.
Ready to take leadership, for now alongside the 'Nine Old Men', in time without them as the new leaders.
And so they set out to make a real Disney movie.
One that was magical.
Like Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty.
Like Pollyanna and Old Yeller.
And so they set to work on the first project they had attempted since Walt's death that was truly ambitious.
Not quite as ambitious as Pollyanna or Bambi or Fantasia.
But more than just a little cartoon comedy.
And something magical.
And still holding on to Walt's personal vision, while trying to move forward with it and experiment with finding their own creative direction.
And so they worked on an animated movie called The Rescuers.
And as they began serious work on The Rescuers, the people making live action movies set about to recapture the magic themselves and move forward.
And attempted the second ambitious project since Walt's death.
A movie to be magic.
Escape from Witch Mountain.
Which was a huge influence on me as an artist, since it reinforced all the things that I was getting from Steven Spielberg and E. T., and it reinforced all the things that I was getting from Jim Henson.
And these two ambitious movies completed, two movies that were more than just little cartoon comedies, with true magic, they set about to combine live action with animation once again, as once Walt had in Mary Poppins.
And that was Pete's Dragon.
And then they set out to make one last animated movie before the last of the 'Nine Old Men' retired.
Before the last of the great creative people who had worked so extensively with Walt himself retired.
And this was, I'm sure, intended as another like 'The Rescuers'.
But this was the last movie for the last of the 'Nine Old Men' before they retired.
They had been mourning Walt, their old mentor and leader, for years.
And it all came out in the animated movie.
The Fox and the Hound.
The movie that mourned Walt Disney's death.
Walt's death was not refered to directly.
But the movie mourns.
It mourns for lost innocence.
In the mid 1960's many people mourned the lost innocence of the Kennedy era.
The Kennedy era had been just a flash in the night.
Soon another flash in the night, just as beautiful, would follow.
And another. And another.
Until people caught up in Woodstock, and Led Zeppelin, Star Wars and Star Trek, Apollo and Close Encounters of the Third Kind thought nothing of loss of innocence.
There was nothing in the Kennedy and Eisenhower eras that was innocent that was not reborn in the Summer of Love.
There was nothing in the Kennedy and Eisenhower eras that was innocent that I did not grow up with in the 1980's- in a more perfect, less flawed era than the Eisenhower era by far!
But as America mourned the lost innocence of the loss of Kennedy's era, as the next flash in the night started to emerge, Walt Disney died.
And the people who had worked so closely with Walt Disney for so many decades mourned Walt's death as a loss of innocence.
And then made their final animated movie.
The Fox and the Hound.
The animated movie that mourned Walt's death by mourning the loss of innocence in the star crossed friendship between the fox and the hound.
And so the 'Nine Old Men' mourned their old leader, Walt Disney.
And some of the talented young animators left with Don Bluth and made The Secret of NIMH
An American Tail
The Land Before Time
and All Dogs Go To Heaven
And some of the talented young animators stayed at Walt's company
Walt Disney Studios
Searched for their own vision
Found it
And created the Disney Renaissance.
The Little Mermaid.
Beauty and the Beast.
Aladdin.
The Lion King.
Pocahontas.
Mulan.
Walt had been mourned.
And his legacy passed on.
And other parts of Walt's legacy had given other visionaries a place to start
Leading to genius beyond belief.
Steven Spielberg. Close Encounters and E. T.
Jim Henson.
Fred Rogers.
Doing things with directions only hinted at by Walt Disney that Walt himself could never have imagined.
Things that in Steven Spielberg's case had more to do with Michelangelo and Raphael, and the traditional mythic storytelling of Tolkien and Wagner and George Lucas, than anything from Walt Disney
But still drew from Walt's vision of the family movie in movies like Polyanna and Mary Poppins.
Things that drew more from the spectacular originality and genius of Jim Henson, and Steven Spielberg, or the spiritual vision of Fred Rogers, and drew on many things that Walt did not draw on
But nevertheless still walked through doors that Walt had opened.
And animation too found its new genius.
Walt's legacy had become the beginning of a tradition.
Or many traditions.
And Walt himself had been mourned by those closest to him.
With The Fox and the Hound.
God loves you!
Look to the Light!
Mourn loss and still look to the sky!
Sincerely,
David S. Annderson