Who is my audience?

I am reading an excellent collection of essays about books and the art of writing by Philip Pullman (author of the His Dark Materials series) and, since I am in a very reflective mood at the moment, this made me think about who I try to reach with my various essays and books.

This also made me think about the magazines Nature and Scientific American. Let me explain.

Nature is the peer-reviewed journal of reference for the scientific community. It is authoritative, in-depth and focused on research. It is not for everyone. It is a publication by researchers for researchers.

Scientific American, on the other hand, is a magazine that is read by people who already know quite a bit about science but want to understand more about recent discoveries. It is a magazine which attempts to explains scientific facts clearly for the laymen. It is not easy to read but it is much easier to read than Nature. In other words, a magazine for you and me.

When I write about Disney history, I sometimes have Nature for model, sometimes Scientific American.

Let’s take the Walt’s People book series. That one is clearly in the category of Nature. It is a series by historians for historians and serious Disney history enthusiasts. A casual Disney fan—even a casual Disney history fan—is unlikely to really enjoy Walt’s People. You need to already have a good grasp of Disney history to read and appreciate this series. This is not a bug, it’s a feature.

They Drew as They Pleased—The Hidden Art of Disney, on the other hand, is a series in the vein of Scientific American. To really enjoy it, you have to have a basic understanding of Disney history, but I try and make it easy for you, by including entry points, reminders and words of explanation here and there to draw you in, whatever your knowledge level. In this series and in similar publications like Disneyland Paris—From Sketch to Reality, I consciously try to reach several audiences at once, from casual Disney fans to Disney historians.

My Disney monographs, like Mickey Mouse in the 1930s—The Christmas Season fall somewhere in between.

And then there are my articles and essays. The articles I wrote about Kay Kamen and Disneyland Paris for the late Disney Twenty-Three, by the nature of this wonderful magazine, were aimed at the largest possible audience. Those are my “Scientific American” pieces.

But Disney historians also need their Nature journal, which is why, a few years ago, the Hyperion Historical Alliance launched the Hyperion Historical Alliance Annual, a publication aimed at Disney historians and serious Disney history enthusiasts. A publication that is, by definition, not intended to be accessible by everyone.

Why did we choose to go in that direction? Because in order for books or articles to be written for casual Disney fans, in order for stories about Disney history to be simplified and popularized by the Scientific Americans and Popular Science of Disney history, Disney historians, Disney researchers must first dig very deep to find those stories, verify them, set them in stone with references to exact sources of information, etc. The results of that research can be presented in well-written and entertaining essays, and yet, the casual Disney fans will have a hard time really enjoying those essays. The same way the papers released in Nature would be a very difficult read for yours truly.

Some of you will ask: If the audience of the HHA Annual is so limited, why bother? I got the answer no later than earlier this week, when a reader of the Annual mentioned that an essay written in one of the latest issues of the journal inspired him to begin working on a series of documentaries for Disney+! In other words, as intended, our in-depth research about a wide-range of obscure Disney-related subject matters is inspiring new Disney historians and feeding projects aimed at a much wider audience.

The good news, of course, is that the editors-in-chief of the HHA Annual, Jim Hollifield and JB Kaufman, are themselves serious and talented Disney historians who know that essays for the Annual only make sense when new documents have been uncovered, when the contributing historians have conducted their research in-depth and without cutting corners, and when what they bring to the table “moves the needle” from a Disney history standpoint, be it about Walt’s childhood in Chicago in the early 1900s or about the making of a movie from the Disney Renaissance of the 1980s and 1990s.

Disney historians having their own Nature magazine, and my having the privilege of contributing to it from time to time is one of the great joys of my life.

Knowing that Jim Hollifield and JB Kaufman are at the helm makes me confident that the soul of the Annual will remain alive and unadulterated for years to come and that, thanks to it, Disney historians will have a venue to publish their in-depth research—whatever the Disney-related subject matter—in order to give other Disney historians the building blocks they need to write their books, produce their documentaries of develop their multimedia projects, some of which will be aimed at a much wider audience.

A much wider audience that is bound to be enthused by the richness of Disney history.

 

I wish I had been aware of this spectacular 1933 ad from New Zealand at time when I was researching Mickey Mouse in the 1930s--The Christmas Season.

I just discovered it this week, though and I hope you will enjoy it.

There is a revolution taking place in the world of Disney comics in Italy and I was late to the party. As a kid, I grew up reading Disney comics.

As a young adult, after reading the seminal book by Luca Boshi, Leonardo Gori and Andrea Sani, I Disney Italiani (Granata, 1990), I learned about the work of some of the greatest Italian Disney artists from the 1940s to the 1980s:  Romano Scarpa, Giovan Battista Carpi, Massimo De Vita, Luciano Bottaro and Giorgio Cavazzano. I also learned about the tradition of Disney's Italian "great parodies."

What I have realized over past few months is that a new generation of Italian Disney artists, led by Paolo Mottura, Casty Andrea Castellan, Corrado Mastantuono, Fabio Celoni, Lorenzo Pastrovicchio, Alessandro Pastrovicchio and Andrea Freccero is taking this art to new heights. 

Some of their work has been translated in English but a lot is still missing. I hope Fantagraphics will soon fill that gap. Fingers crossed.

 

Really looking forward to this upcoming book!
 

The first Disney video game was released in 1981, more than 40 years ago. 

Shaun Jex's important new book chronicles the making of 50 of Disney's video games. Jex has done his homework and it shows. 

The book does not pretend to be an exhaustive history of Disney's video games, but it is a wonderful first step in the right direction.
 

I just finished writing the introduction of Walt's People -- Volume 32, which should be released in about 3 to 4 months, and I thought you might be interested in a preview. This one is deeply personal.

[A few days ago, I had the pleasure of watching Huz, Don Hahn’s new documentary about animator Ron Husband. As with all of Don’s documentaries, I was glued to the screen.

The sequence that moved me the most is one in which Ron—paraphrasing a line from the movie Chariots of Fire—says, “When I draw, I feel God’s pleasure.” I identified with this. While I do not draw, when I research or write about Disney history, I feel God’s pleasure.

This is ironic, of course, since, unlike Ron Husband, I am agnostic. And yet, when I think about how I approach Disney history and the place it takes in my life, the words that immediately come to mind are “religious mission.”

Some recent crises—among them significant differences of opinion with the Hyperion Historical Alliance Board about how the HHA should be led—made me decide to greatly reduce my activities as part of the HHA for the foreseeable future. They also made me reflect on what I have been trying to achieve, on why I have been trying to reach those specific goals, and on how I have been approaching the challenge over the past 35 years.

When, back in 2007, I met Diane Disney Miller to pitch a concept which became the Hyperion Historical Alliance, I had two dreams in mind: preserving digitally all the Disney-related documents not already preserved by the Disney Archives, and launching a series of books and magazines focused on little-known aspects of Disney history that would become the definite publications about the subjects they focused on. These had been my dreams since childhood.

I can still picture in my mind this very vivid dream: Two or three whole bookshelves filled with in-depth Disney history art books written by the most serious and talented Disney historians: Books by J.B. Kaufman about the making of Make Mine Music, Melody Time, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, and more; Elizabeth Spatz’s volume about Kay Kamen and Streeter Blair; Paula Sigman-Lowery’s book about Robin Hood; Todd James Pierce’s and Christopher Merritt’s series about Disneyland; Tom Morris’ series about Walt Disney Imagineering; Joe Campana’s book about Walt Disney and the Space Program; Michael Singer’s The Making of Walt Disney’s Treasure Island; Kevin Kidney, Jody Daily and Aaron Willcott’s The Making of Walt Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson; Jim Hollifield's volumes about some of Disney’s best live-action projects; and my own books about Mickey Mouse in the 1930s—On Stage and On Radio, Walt Disney and El Grupo in Mexico and Cuba (1942 - 1944), co-written with Jim Hollifield and Ted Thomas, Walt Disney’s Adventures in Music, History and Nature, Walt Disney, Roald Dahl and the Gremlins (co-written with Fox Carney), and The Making of Darby O’Gill and the Little People (co-written with Jim Hollifield), to name a few.

I pictured all those books as being written by true experts who, for years, had accumulated in-depth knowledge and writing skills. Experts who would leave no stone unturned, be it in outside archives or within The Walt Disney Company. Experts who would tell us about the elements that made it to the screen (or into the parks), about the artists who took the projects from sketches to reality, and about the roads not taken. True historians who would list their precise sources of information to allow future historians to retrace their steps and build on what they had discovered.

In other words, a Disney history revolution which would further our understanding of the most important cultural institution of the 20th and 21st century and which would preserve our knowledge for generations to come.

Why is this critically important?

·       Because there has never been, in any organization, past and present, such an astonishing concentration of great artists working together and inspiring each other

·       Because you cannot write a proper art history of the 20^th and 21^st centuries without writing a multi-volume history of the Walt Disney Studios and Walt Disney Imagineering

·       Because the clock is ticking: the documents that are not preserved at the Walt Disney Archives are being thrown in the dustbin; the accumulated knowledge of Disney historians will be lost forever if those Disney historians—who are not getting younger—do not urgently put it in writing

·       Because losing that precious history is and will be a disaster for art historians, film historians and anyone passionate about modern culture.

Which takes us back to my life-long mission and how, very early on, I decided to approach it.

I realized, almost from the start, that this mission was so important to me that I had to keep it “pure.” In other words, I wanted everyone around me (family, friends, fellow Disney historians and members of The Walt Disney Company) to realize that neither money nor ego were at play. The goal, the only goal, was in-depth Disney history research and preservation.

This meant that I could not expect any financial rewards to come out of this endeavor. In fact, I should expect to subsidize most projects from my own pocket with no hope of ever breaking even.

This also meant that, given the choice between conducting research that would be released under someone else’s name and not conducting research at all, I would always choose the former if needed.

It is not about fame, about ego, or about image-building. It is, first and foremost, about preserving Disney history, whatever it takes… (Whatever it takes, that is, with the exception of going against the wishes of The Walt Disney Company, which has to be able to control what is said about its own history since its brand is its most important commercial asset.)

And if you take money and ego out of the way, the driver becomes the task at hand, the unadulterated joy of researching and writing. It is as pure as it gets, and it is at this point that I began to feel God’s pleasure.

Over the past decade, I have felt God’s pleasure in a particularly intense way, because I now know exactly where and how to look for new documents and in-depth information about Disney history, and because I have finally acquired the writing skills needed to produce books I am really happy with.

However, there is a dark side to this story. Pure passion is bound to be misunderstood. Someone undertaking a complex project that does not involve money or ego is suspicious. One will be suspected of hiding one’s true motives. Or one will be deemed to be an unrealistic dreamer, which, in the mind of many will be synonymous with madman. In other words, you frighten them. You see the possibilities; they see the obstacles, the unclimbable mountains.

And yet passion can move mountains or help build a plane to fly over them. And passion is often contagious and can inspire others.

Mountains were moved to create the HHA and to launch the HHA Annual and the HHA Monograph project. These endeavors were impossible dreams when they were first conceived. Passion allied to creativity and to a network of like-minded historians helped bring them to life. Without passion you would not hold the thirty-second volume of Walt’s People in your hands. And it was John Canemaker’s, Michael Barrier’s and Paul F. Anderson’s passion for Disney history that inspired me and made me who I am.

What gives me hope, despite recent setbacks and worries, what gives me hope at a time when I see many of my dreams crumble and my soul being crushed, is the fact that my own passion has inspired and still inspires others.

At no point was this more apparent than when a new generation of animation historians, led by Lucas Seastrom, Devon Baxter and Rosana Shushtar, contacted me to take over a project that has been on my backburner for years, the companion series to Walt’s People about Warner Bros.’s animation artists: Bugs’ Buddies.

I may no longer be sure of what the road ahead looks like, but I have a feeling this new generation will soon show me the way.]

Alberto Becattini's new book about Disney animator and comic book artist Jack Bradbury has just been released. If you read Italian it is well worth picking up.