An eye-opening history of one of the most culturally impactful American companies.
O’Brien undertakes a deep dive into the turbulent arc of the Disney corporation after its founder’s death.
When Walt Disney died in 1966 only a few days after his 65th birthday, the company that bore his name was plummeted into turmoil, and its employees were “utterly devastated.” In response to the uncertainty generated about the company’s future, the New York Stock Exchange temporarily ceased trading its stock. Disney, who opened a modest cartoon studio in his uncle’s garage in 1923, was, per the author, a “once-in-a-lifetime visionary” and seemed to many to be irreplaceable. To make matters worse, the company was already struggling to navigate the “upheaval of the late 1960s” and remain artistically and commercially relevant during a rising demand for more mature content as the company feared that its own movies were “increasingly unhip to some film audiences.” Amazingly, the company, now under the direction of Roy Disney, Walt’s brother, nearly ditched its feature animation department, a narrowly averted strategic blunder that would have changed the face of American cinema. Instead, after surmounting some extraordinary challenges, the company experienced a major renaissance beginning in the late 1980s with the release of the now-classic The Little Mermaid.
O’Brien leaves no stone unturned in charting the travails and triumphs of the iconic company after its founder’s passing in this relentlessly meticulous work. The author burrows into the bowels of the company’s history—its training program for young animators, the establishment of the Touchstone studio, the massive success garnered under the stewardship of Michael Eisner— and offers an astonishingly thorough treatment, given the brevity of the book. At the heart of the tale is the effect of the death of Walt Disney, a man of such profound talent and drive that the company was left all but rudderless in his absence. Even while alive, he had struggled to create edgier movies without tarnishing the company’s reputation for wholesomeness—he often felt a “creative straitjacket” restrained him. O’Brien adeptly illuminates these difficulties, and by extension the more general problem of combining artistic productions with large-scale commercialism, one of the most impressive achievements of Walt Disney. The narrative can become bogged down by the weight of minute detail—the author seems anxious to leave no single data point unscrutinized. This obsessive attention can slow the story down and rob it of some of its drama; at its worst, the book has all the liveliness of an investment prospectus. However, O’Brien does lift the reader out of the quicksand of miscellany to discuss, with great insight and intelligence, the grander aspects of Disney’s story and the reasons for its success. “To keep Disney Animation alive after Walt’s death required an unusual mix of ingredients: raw talent and skilled artistry, tradition and innovation, youth and experience, reverence for the past and a dissatisfaction with the status quo, the incubation of talent and an impatience with being held back.” Ultimately, this is an edifying look into the company’s remarkable triumphs.
An eye-opening history of one of the most culturally impactful American companies.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9798888451380
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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