Everyone knows about Walt Disney the entertainer, animator, producer, promoter, and mogul. But how about Walt Disney the teacher, lecturer, art historian, and cultural sage? To see him smoothly operating in all these roles, watch The Story of the Animated Drawing, an hour-long essay first shown in the second season of Disneyland, the fondly remembered television show that premiered in 1954 and has lasted with different titles, formats, and venues to this day.

Unlike conjurors who pull rabbits out of hats and make elephants disappear, Disney was always happy to pull back the curtain and reveal the tricks his studio used to create its magical illusions. The first documentary showing the studio dates from the 1930s, and Disneyland episodes like The Plausible Impossible (1956) and Tricks of Our Trade (1957) explain the history, evolution, and possibilities of animation techniques through the ages, genially discussed by Disney himself. Thanks largely to Disneyland and its descendants, he was one of the few filmmakers - along with Alfred Hitchcock, also a TV star - to become an instantly recognizable media celebrity. Watching him in action, it's easy to understand why.

The Story of the Animated Drawing is not the catchiest title in the world, but it tells you exactly what you're going to see, and it captures the respect for the audience's intelligence - never speaking down to the viewer or dumbing down the material - that makes watching it such a pleasure. Although he produced plenty of live-action comedy, adventure, and drama during his long career, Disney had a lifelong attachment to the art of animation, the field where he got his start and achieved his first success. Beneath his calm, informative delivery lie a quiet enthusiasm and an eagerness to share that enhance the show even when you realize - especially in the last few segments - that among its other purposes, it's a prime-time infomercial for popular Disney pictures that reappeared in theaters at carefully calculated intervals.

The episode has historical scope to spare. Disney begins it with age-old cave paintings from Lascaux and Altamira, showing how animals drawn in a running position or with multiple legs manifest a desire to capture motion that has motivated artists since prehistoric times. Knowing the value of camera trickery in putting across ideas, he illustrates the point by "animating" a Lascaux bison, then does the same with successive images from an ancient Egyptian mural and Leonardo da Vinci's iconic diagram of proportions of the human body (note the strategically placed fig leaf - this was 1950s TV, remember).

Things get more modern in the next portion. "True animation awaited the recognition of a strange trait of the human eye," Disney says, "a principle known as persistence of vision." This introduces a display of the thaumatrope (a spinning disc with images on both sides) invented by Paul Roget in the 1820s. From there we go to the phenakistoscope and zoetrope of the 1840s, and thence to Charles-Émile Reynaud's praxinoscope and the Théâtre Optique motion-picture show - nicely reconstructed here - that he created with the gizmo.

When the time arrives for actual movies to enter the scene, Disney skips straight to early animations like J. Stuart Blackton's amusingly titled Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) and Winsor McCay's classic Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), presented the way McCay showed it in vaudeville theaters, conducting an onstage dialogue with the filmed brontosaurus. Excerpts from other silent attractions follow, including John Randolph Bray's long-lasting Colonel Heeza Liar series (1913-24), Raoul Barre's animated segments for the Edison Studio's live-action Animated Grouch Chaser films (1915), and Otto Messmer's crafty Felix the Cat cartoons (1919-28).

Disney staff composer Oliver Wallace sits at a vintage movie-house organ to accompany a 1919 example of Max Fleischer's mostly animated Out of the Inkwell shorts, and then the sound era commences with the first Mickey Mouse musical, Steamboat Willie, directed by the legendary Ub Iwerks for Disney's four-year-old production company in 1928; as critic Leonard Maltin has pointed out, however, the original soundtrack is replaced here by a newly recorded version. Next comes The Skeleton Dance, the first Silly Symphony, made in 1929. And from there on it's all Disney all the time, with brief nods to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), his first feature-length cartoon, and Pinocchio (1940), one of his very greatest. The finale is the Nutcracker Suite section of Fantasia (1940).

The Story of the Animated Drawing cuts a few corners here and there. At the beginning, for instance, Disney flips through some Mickey Mouse images that are supposed to be initial drawings but are obviously almost finished, as Maltin notes; and when Disney repeatedly refers to (and pitches) a hefty book - The Art of Animation, by the Staff of the Walt Disney Studio - you wouldn't guess it was not yet published when the show originally aired.

A bigger weakness of the program, though, is philosophical. Expanding on the theme of modern animation as a full-fledged art form, Disney makes a pronouncement that sounds sophisticated but is more than a bit simplistic: "The principle object of any of the fine arts is to rouse a purely emotional reaction in the beholder." The way I see it, vaunting the purely emotional means elbowing the intellectual out of the picture, which is hardly a desirable move.

I think Disney believed in that statement, and it helps explain why, despite his prodigious gifts as a storyteller and imagemaker, his art always remained underdeveloped and childlike - entertainment for the family, not nourishment for the mind. The Story of the Animated Drawing is a quick, lively tour through selected high points of the movie landscape Disney knew most intimately. It gives you an enjoyable, profitable ride, but you shouldn't take its philosophizing too seriously.

Directors: Wilfred Jackson (animation), William Beaudine (live action)
Screenplay: Dick Huemer, McLaren Stewart
Cinematographer: Charles Boyle
Film Editing: Everett Dodd
Special Effects: Ub Iwerks
Music: Joseph S. Dubin
With: Walt Disney, Oliver Wallace
BW-52m.

by David Sterritt