AFTER DISNEY

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.