Free Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out by Sean Griffin Page B

inker from desk number 17 rather than the mother of their children. You’d be surprised who woke up with whom next morning.”80
    Walt and his wife quickly left the resort the next day, and the incident was not spoken of at the studio for a number of years. Yet, the explosion of rampant uninhibited sexuality exemplifies how much of a conscious construction Disney’s “happy little family” was.
    Of course, these events were never reported by the mainstream press—which was quite happy to help Walt and his brother Roy maintain the image of their studio as a happy leisurely family-oriented studio and even played down the extremely divisive strike that erupted at the studio in 1941.81 This is not to say that behind the studio’s calm fa-cade was a cauldron seething with passion and scandal that rivaled the rest of Hollywood. The studio was probably no more open than any other studio in the ways male and female employees expressed their sexuality. What marked Disney as different from other studios was the constant publicity about the “family” atmosphere at the studio, the wholesomeness of the environment (complete with pictures of Walt standing on the studio lawn benevolently watching over employees picnicking their lunch) and how such a climate supposedly transferred into the films the studio was making.82 After the enforcement of the Code’s restrictions in 1934, other studios would also attempt at various points to portray themselves as big families led by benevolent fatherly figures (most notably MGM’s Louis B. Mayer and his roster of young contractees, such as Freddie Bartholomew, Jackie Cooper, Mickey M I C K E Y ’ S M O N A S T E RY
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    Rooney and Judy Garland), but Walt had been there earlier and with greater frequency.
    By the end of the 1930s, it seemed that Disney’s successful climb to economic prosperity and artistic independence had been achieved. A new distribution contract with the RKO studio resulted in the studio receiving more revenue from box-office returns than ever. Walt and his animators took the lessons that they learned (technical and otherwise) in making the Mickeys and the Sillies and applied them to creating animated feature-length films. The combination of moral-driven narrative and “illusion of life” character-based animation was used in all of the features of Disney’s “Golden Age”: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942).83 The release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was successful beyond almost everyone’s expectations, becoming for a short time the most popular film in the history of American cinema.84 The Disney studio seemed to have solidified its formula for success.
    Bambi, possibly more than any of the features from this era, functions as the acme of the studio’s changes in attitude towards sexuality and the body. Critics and film analysts often point to Bambi as the high point of Disney’s push towards a “realistic” style in animation. Deer and other animals were brought to the studio for animators to study and sketch, and test footage was shot of various species in motion so that animators could isolate the body movements. As R. D. Feild, writing in 1942, described, “it was decided that the animals must be allowed to tell their own story as far as it was possible! The continuity must be based not upon what man has read into nature but upon what man can learn from nature.”85 The emphasis on rendering the illusion of animal figures in motion has consequently been criticized for negating the purposes of animation—to do what live-action film cannot. This is not entirely true, for the characters are not necessarily drawn realistically. The young Bambi is only vaguely related to what a true fawn looks like. Furthermore, the background paintings are often very impressionistic in their design, and certain sequences (Bambi’s dream of love, his fight with the rival buck) approach a type of