Description
Good dust jacket, edge wear, illustration on front, some staining, small tears, chips on rear, stains on rear. The Very Good+ binding is blue paper over boards, grey cloth-backed, silver stamping on cover and spine, slight corner bumping. The binding is tight and pages are clean. A section of photos and illustrations can be found in the center of the book. Biography of Disney.
About the book: (from the dust jacket)
Disney’s World, A biography by LEONARD MOSLEY. Here is one of the most revealing American biographies of our era, of a man who cre- ated a legendary business out of his imagi- nation and himself became the stuff of legend.
Walt Disney, whose creations charmed the world, was a visionary. But even after success, he encountered stiff opposition to every new idea. He had to fight to introduce sound into his short subjects; he did battle to go from black and white to color; when he wanted to make his first full-length car- toon feature, even his own brother and partner opposed him; and when he conceived the idea of combining classical music with a feature-length animation film called Fantasia, they were ready to send for a straitjacket. And Walt had to finance Disneyland on his own because the Disney Board of Directors didn’t believe in what became the company’s most profitable enterprise.
Disney’s first success, Oswald the Rabbit, was ripped off by another studio, along with most of his staff. Undaunted, Walt then modeled his most famous creation, Mickey Mouse, on himself by making faces in front of a mirror. Even Mickey’s screen voice was Walt’s.
What kind of man was he? Walt Disney’s previous biographies have portrayed him as the Snow White of American film and fantasy. Yet his closest friend and partner during his formative years, Ub Iwerks, was abused and humiliated by Walt. He never shared screen credit with any of his fellow creators, developed a terrible temper, treated colleagues with scorn, and then was baffled by their increasing lack of devotion to their once-benevolent master.
Long concealed was the fact that Disney had a nervous breakdown in 1931 when he was unable to father a child and doctors hinted that the problem was not his wife’s. His second daughter was adopted. He preferred to look at pretty women, but had no real interest in sex–or women as people. Actually he liked animals better than people.
Here, then, is the full story told for the first time of a man who created some of the best-known symbols of America, who gave joy to tens of millions and drank to blot out pain, an artist who had no business sense but eventually made himself rich and others richer. Businessmen and fans will be fascinated by what happened to Walt’s world when he died and the others moved in. Disney’s World is an essential–as well as an essentially American–biography.
