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
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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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