It's silly to review a book that I've only skimmed but I'm going to do it anyway while the first impressions are still vivid in my mind. I'll go back and read it cover to cover next week when I finish the book I'm currently reading. My tentative opinion? It's great! Buy it! You'll regret it if you don't!
The book is full of suprisingly drastic opinions. I've never heard some of these ideas before so I'm at a loss to know what to think of them. For Mike the most important thing Disney ever did was to make Snow White and Pinnochio. Everything else was downhill from there. Disney never had the money or the time to make comparable films again.
Mike also believes Disney's impact on the American consciousness is over-rated. Changing demographics would have skewered things toward his kind of family entertainment even if Disney had never existed. He goes on to say that Disneyland was a creative disaster for Disney because it locked him into doing media for kids exclusively, something he hadn't done in the early films. The book is full of thoughts like this.Mike is no stranger to drastic ideas. In his online review of John Canemaker's book on Mary Blair he says that Blair's flat style didn't fit with the kind of stories Disney was trying to tell. He then goes on to speculate that Disney knew it didn't fit and deliberately introduced the new style to subvert the animation department which he was no longer interested in. That seems doubtful to me but then I'm not an historian. Well, whatever the truth of the assertion you can't deny that it's interesting.
This is a suprisingly drastic book and admirers of Disney will find much to disagree with. It doesn't provide a lot of insight into how the films were made, maybe because Mike believed he'd covered that in his last book. On the other hand Mike also genuinely loves his subject. I'll have more to say about it after I've read some more.