Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out (9 page)

According to many historians, the government also helped Walt through the drawn-out strike. Animator Jack Kinney points out that the State Department arranged for Walt’s goodwill trip to occur at the height of the strike, thus removing him from the debate and countering the news reports with widespread, favorable counterpublicity.91 Eric Smoodin goes even farther in his assessment of governmental support during the strike:

Memos show that the government had an even more active role during the strike, supporting Disney financially or at least planning to support him. [John Hay] Whitney [producer and member of the Office of Inter-American Affairs] wrote that “we are proposing to execute the contract immediately on the understanding that he [Disney] cannot af-ford to continue his present outlay and risk and that he will have to abandon the project if we cannot support him temporarily.”92

The implication in the memo points out just how close the working relationship between Disney and the federal government had become during this period.

The work that Disney did for the armed services during this period was posited as strictly educational: technical, scientific and objective.

Through the use of “cutaway” or “x-ray” diagrams, drawings purported to show how the interior of guns or motors actually looked and worked. The use of the term “x-ray” by the studio to describe this animation technique emphasizes its scientific use. This conception, though, was often challenged by the fact that a significant amount of the films ended up presenting erroneous information. The series that Disney did to help identify war planes was entitled WEFT, standing for the four areas of the plane that could be examined for identification: Wings, Engine, Fuselage and Tail. Richard Shale reports that the Navy regularly rejected films in the series because of rampant errors. “The WEFT

series . . . proved to be less successful than originally hoped and became M I C K E Y ’ S M O N A S T E RY

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jokingly referred to as Wrong Every Fucking Time.”93 The series was discontinued before the contract was completed.

The use of animation immediately compromises the veracity of the lessons being taught. The films do not display actual guns or war-planes, but only representations of them—drawn and then filmed. Yet, just as Disney’s prewar theatrical output attempted to naturalize a specifically constructed image of sexuality, Disney’s military films often used a “scientific” attitude to mask wartime propaganda. This seemed to be precisely what the United States government wanted from the studio. Disney’s use of character-based “illusion of life” animation and moral-driven narrative to “educate” viewers proved to be ideal for the government’s needs. With the war, the pedagogy became even more explicit and manifest.
Stop That Tank
(1941), one of Disney’s shorts for the Canadian government, displays this ably. While ostensibly made to train personnel on the use of the Boys MK–1 Anti-Tank Rifle, the film includes a sequence of a caricatured Hitler in a tank being blown literally to hell by Canadian Anti-Tank Rifles being fired from “trees, haystacks, barnyards . . . , and even a latrine.”94 Disney’s feature film
Victory
Through Air Power
(1942), although released to domestic audiences, was basically a feature-length version of an instructional film that used maps, charts and scientific theory to explain how important air power was to Allied victory. Yet, it too included blatant propaganda in the midst of supposed objective argument. The film concludes with Japan animated as a giant octopus strangling the world, until a giant flying eagle, in a brutal and strongly visceral scene, attacks and vanquishes the beast. The victorious bird then turns into a gold eagle on top of a flag pole waving the Stars and Stripes as a patriotic refrain fills the soundtrack.

Amongst the topics covered in these instructional shorts were health issues. The armed services worked with Disney to describe methods for maintaining dental hygiene, caring for the mentally ill and the treatment and prevention of venereal disease.95 As a result of the South American goodwill trip that Walt and his animators took, and the subsequent features, the Center for Inter-American Alliance also requested that Disney do a series of fifteen health and hygiene films for distribution in Latin American countries. Thus, certain of Disney’s government-sponsored films dealt specifically with sexuality and regulating how the body should behave and be treated. In doing so, the government was backing Disney’s naturalization of specific concepts of 34

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sexuality and the body. As one studio report put it, these films would purportedly teach “the fundamentals of social science free from religious or political influence.”96 The shorts presented this discourse as objective data, using the same “x-ray” techniques, but this time on human bodies instead of weapons and military transport.

Tuberculosis
(1945) provides a good example of supposed scientific examinations of the body. The short at one point employs “x-ray” animation when a “cutaway” of a human body shows two lungs being infected by tubercular germs. Yet, the supposed objectivity of the shot is completely undercut when this “x-ray” dissolves to a shot of two lung-shaped leaves that are being eaten by insects.
Defense Against Invasion
(1943) is even more blatant in its use of metaphor while claiming to be scientific. The “x-ray” animation in this short portrays the human body as a city having to combat the evil enemy. The heart is portrayed as a central office building, and germs are represented by black spidery creatures. The narrator (a doctor in a live-action wrap-around story) intones, “This city, or man, died because he did not have arms and ammunition.” Richard Shale points out in his description of this short that even the use of color is in variance with scientific facts. “Though it is the
white
blood cell that provides the body’s resistance to disease, the Disney artists insisted on making the corpuscle soldiers red since red is a good fighting color and blood is usually thought of as red.”97

Lisa Cartwright and Brian Goldfarb, in analyzing these films, point out that:

the films fix intently on the private bodies and domestic lives of the subjects. . . . The most personal aspects of bodily care, from eating to coughing to defecating, become the subject of a repetitive and paternalistic discourse. The pedagogical strategy used in these films is to di-dactically associate illness and poverty with particular bodily “customs,” and health and prosperity with Western scientific standards of hygiene.98

Cleanliness Brings Health
(1945) works in just this way. A paternalistic narrator introduces two households, “the careless family and the clean family.” Johnny, the child of the careless family, writhes in pain inside his family’s dilapidated house. The narrator then describes how anti-quated and unenlightened local custom causes Johnny’s entire family M I C K E Y ’ S M O N A S T E RY

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to come down with dysentery. The already ailing Johnny goes to the cornfield to defecate. “The cornfield was where everybody went,” explains the narrator. “It was the custom. But it was a very bad custom.”

The film then shows Johnny’s father as he works with his hands in the contaminated soil, eats a meal without washing the soil from his hands and subsequently suffers from dysentery. The “clean” family, on the other hand, uses an outhouse, covers its food with mosquito netting and cooks on a fire that is raised above the ground to keep it away from contamination.

These films were distributed throughout Latin America with 16

mm prints taken from village to village and projected often from a flatbed truck and generator onto a temporarily hung sheet. Although made with government backing, American companies working in Latin America, such as United Fruit, quickly found the films useful as well.

“Disney’s public health and education films were, in part, attempts to provide models for domestic life for the local workers these companies hired, to be administered as ‘teaching aids’ by managers, many of whom could not speak Spanish or Portuguese well enough to communicate with their employees.”99 Implicit in the films is the notion that hard work is needed to combat illness, that laziness breeds disease.

Hence, the shorts induce the local population to work for the American-owned companies presenting the films, conveniently avoiding the point that “U.S. development [itself] was primarily responsible for placing the health of communities in crisis.”100

The success of such educational shorts, and the boom of 16 mm that resulted from government-sponsored war documentaries, caused the Disney studio to institute the Educational and Industrial Film Division—a sideline to its higher profile theatrical features. In 1945–1951, the studio produced a series of educational films backed by corporate sponsors to be rented to American schools. In addition to revising the South American hygiene shorts for use in the United States, these films also covered such topics as how to bathe an infant, how to prevent catching a cold and the dangers of driving too fast. Possibly the best remembered of these films is the one Disney made for International Cellucotton in 1946,
The Story of Menstruation.
The work by Janice Delaney and others on the cultural history of menstruation describes this short subject, which was shown in schools to pubescent girls well into the 1960s:

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In the Disney world, the menstrual flow is not blood red but snow white. The vaginal drawings look more like a cross section of a kitchen sink than the inside and outside of a woman’s body. There are no hymen, no clitoris, no labia; all focus is on the little nest and its potentially lush lining. Although Disney and Kimberly-Clark advise exercise during the period, the exercising cartoon girls (who look like Disney’s Cinderella) are drawn without feet; bicycles magically propel themselves down the street without any muscular or mental direction from the cyclist. The film ends happily ever after, with a shot of a lipsticked bride followed immediately by a shot of a lipsticked mother and baby.101

Cloaked with the same declaration of objectivity and scientific knowledge,
The Story of Menstruation
represents white middle-class American heterosexual domesticity as the natural outcome of this biological change in the female body. Just as the South American shorts “used”

science to help American industry get more labor from native workers,
The Story of Menstruation
uses a seminar on female bodily functions to encourage young women to consume the hygiene products manufactured by the film’s sponsor, International Cellucotton.

The description of the short also points out an ironic change in animation style in this series of educational shorts. Vaginal drawings that look “like the cross section of a kitchen sink” and women bicycling without any feet exemplify the move towards a more “limited” animation. Due to the rushed schedules of wartime, and the small margin of anticipated profit from these films in postwar years, the studio quickly adapted a style antithetical to the “illusion of life” philosophy of its theatrical animation. This style used fewer drawings, and the drawings themselves often used less detail. Human figures became more like stick figures and their motions were often limited to the most effective poses necessary to get the desired point across. Ironically, the more overtly pedantic these shorts became, the more abstract the representations of the human body became. As can be seen in
The Story of Menstruation,
such abstraction actually “bleaches” the more “unsavory”

parts of the lesson, such as making the menstrual flow white instead of red. By making menstruation abstract in the extreme, the use of limited animation eradicates details that might make young women question the benefits of International Cellucotton’s goods, much less the benefits and normalcy of suburban motherhood.

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Although production of these shorts would not officially continue past 1951, Disney’s expansion in TV during the 1950s created a market for a number of similar educational programs, such as the
I’m No Fool
series starring Jiminy Cricket. Karl Cohen, in researching Walt Disney’s FBI file, discovered a proposal for another educational short subject to be made in conjunction with the Bureau in the early 1960s:

In the course of a conversation between Disney and an FBI agent, discussion drifted to a recent kidnap, rape and murder of a child.

Disney was then told of the FBI’s educational program to warn children about being approached by strangers. The memo observes that Disney stated he “. . . thought this was a very fine program, and then began to express himself along lines that he felt that a nonprofit film of a type made by Disney utilizing some of the animal characters which he had made famous could be very effective in the education of children of tender years against child molesters.” He called in some of his staff and asked them to initiate research for the project and the possibility of their doing up to three films on the subject in order to reach various age groups. Disney made no commitment to the project and told the agent it would require funding from outside the studio. He did plan to meet again with the agent to discuss ideas his researchers developed.102

There does not seem to be any evidence that any of the three films were actually produced, but the conversation depicted in the memo displays the overt and conscious role that Walt and the studio took on after the 1940s as educators of America’s children on social and sexual issues.

UNCLE WALT: CONSOLIDATING THE

CORPORATE IMAGE (1950–1966)

Although the 1940s were a time of explicit pedagogy within much of the studio’s work, the company soon discovered that such blatant representations of sexuality and the body would not be economically profitable outside of a wartime situation. In the first few years after the war, the studio attempted to move farther along the educational path that had helped keep it economically solvent. Yet, by 1950, Walt and the rest of the company had discovered that American postwar 38