Essay Instructions: This paper must support the following as best it can. This is a research paper that must have an Intro 3 arguments and supported pro's and con's for each arugument with a conclusion ties back to the thesis statement. THus there must also be a thesis statement and the paper must support it.
My initial intro should be as close to this as possible with any modifications you deem necessary without changing the who direction of paper.
I am attempting to focus on Disneys social, ecomomic, educational and how it affects the American cultural and children. I would like my arguments to focus on how some see Disney the man and or the parks, and animations as the best thing since sliced bread, while others see him as a self serving manic. whose cartoons, movies, parks etc. have negative effects on children, i'd like to show how some of his products are considered sexist, in poor taste and even racist. I'd like to talk about in one argument how Disney effects boys and girls differently. And if there is a religious element based in something that's just not good. The real issue I have to stress is that this is a POSITON PAPER. WITH ARGUMENTS SUPPORTING BOTH SIDES.
I have to use your information to supplement a paper that was recently done by your group that looks more like a bookreport/essay than a research paper. I will forward if it will help you intergrate sections and make a real research paper out of it. Any thing that you can use from this this writing would be greatly appreciated since I've already submitted it as my first draft, and have received comments back from the instructor that is is not a research paper, it reads more like the History of Disney paraphared from snipets of articles read.
Walt & Mickey:
How the Man and the Mouse Changed the World
When a small singing and dancing mouse appeared on the scene in 1928, it was more than just the birth of an animated mouse, but something much greater. That same little mouse changed the world in many different ways over the course of 83 years. Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse among an entire legacy of cartoon characters who would go on to impact the entire American culture ??" not just the children it was geared for. Walt Disney has used animation and imagination to bring joy and fulfill the dreams of many individuals. Anyone old enough to speak about Disney will talk about Mickey Mouse and the places where dreams come true. Disney was possessed with the astounding ability to give children a greater sense of imagination. His theme park, Disneyland, is a place unlike anywhere not only in the United States but in the world. Walt Disney has shaped children’s lives and opened their minds to worlds that seem inconceivable. For these reasons, Walt Disney changed the world and paved the way for future animators and companies.
Who was Walt Disney and why did he create Mickey Mouse? What was the inspiration? Many whom have worked with Walt Disney especially those towards the beginning of his career have stated that Walt Disney was Mickey Mouse and Mickey Mouse was Walt Disney; the pair’s personalities were inextricably linked, especially in the first years of Mickey’s enormous popularity (Thomas 8). However, the passage of time brought many changes in how the public saw both Disney and his mouse. In the very beginning, Mickey was quite fearless, always craving an adventure; however, the older Mickey became nearly “sedate, a rather amused spectator of the comedic antics of newer members of cast” (8). Like Walt Disney, Mickey Mouse is seen mainly as an iconic symbol of how the world used to be and how it is today, though both characters ??" one real and one fictitious ??" had the gift of making children smile. Their legacies will never be forgotten, but while Mickey remained a mouse and an American symbol, Disney went on to become one of the most celebrated filmmakers of all time, creating short films and feature-length animated films that bring inexpressible joy to children of all ages all over the world. His efforts didn’t just affect American children, but they affected children everywhere.
How Mickey Mouse actually came to be is something that has always been of great interest; it is the subject of many tales. Walt Disney is probably to blame for this. He made up several stories related to the birth of his famous rodent. One version states that Disney was taken with a pet mouse that used to play around his drawing board when he lived in Kansas City (Thomas 88). One day as the mouse posed on the drawing board, he decided to sketch him. Another story claims that he dreamed up the mouse character on a train traveling with his wife but called him Mortimer Mouse. His wife objected to this name. She didn’t like Mortimer and suggested that Disney call him Mickey instead (88). The most likely story and the one that gets the credit for the creation of Mickey Mouse is that he was an inspiration between Disney ??" the voice and personality of Mickey, and Ub Iwerks, the illustrator who gave Mickey his form and his movement (88). This would be an important collaboration as it was this serendipitous relationship that would create one of the world’s most loved characters.
It was a long road to the iconic stature that both Disney and Mickey have today. In the beginning, Mickey Mouse was simply just a reworked version of one of Disney’s other cartoon creations ??" Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. One of Disney’s distributors actually stole Oswald as a character and Disney was forced to come up with a new character. He was not one to ever quit and so he simply refashioned Oswald, shortening his ears, rounding out the figure a bit, and making the character, in general, more friendly and loveable (Watts 30). These round ears, face and body would come to by symbolic. Mickey was the epitome of goodness; the mouse that everyone wanted to take home. It was these qualities that people everywhere ??" especially during the Great Depression in America ??" wanted to believe in, another testament to Disney’s importance.
After Disney and Iwerks brought Mickey to life, the two had to think up some short films and quickly. Disney came up with the idea of basing a short film on Charles Lindbergh’s recent transatlantic flight and so the two then made a short film called Plane Crazy, following up shortly thereafter with another cartoon called The Gallopin’ Gaucho (Watts 30). However, Mickey Mouse didn’t catch on among distributors as simply illustrated short films, and so Disney decided to utilize the latest innovations in live-action films; he added sound to the first Mickey Mouse shorts (Greene & Greene 19). Disney’s idea was certainly daring idea and one that would change animation film history. The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson had premiered in 1927 and Disney decided to make a film starring Mickey that would be synchronized to sound. Steamboat Willie was made as a silent film, but then its action was later syncopated to songs “Steamboat Bill” and “Turkey in the Straw,” as marks on the film cued the music, sound effects, and scant dialogue (Watts 30). Before taking the film to New York to find information about sound technology, he stopped in Kansas City and had a musician friend of his quickly compose a formal score for the cartoon which was timed according to the marks on the film (Watts 30). Steamboat Willie premiered at New York’s Colony Theatre and it was an instant hit (Watts 30). Mickey Mouse was soon an international success (Greene & Greene 19). It was this film and Disney’s innovation in animation and sound that would catapult Disney into brilliance.
In 1933, after great success with Mickey Mouse, Disney made one of the most famous short films of all time ??" The Three Little Pigs (Selden 45). This short film had sound and color and the song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” became the number one popular hit song in the United States (45). There was much symbolism in this film as it came out at the front of the Great Depression. Despite the fact that very few people had money to be spending on movies, people saw The Three Little Pigs (56). It was good that people got to see this movie during that time as it gave many people hope and the belief that they could persevere. Many people thought of the wolf as the bad times and if three little pigs could keep a wolf away from their home, then surely regular Americans could keep hunger and poverty away as well (45). The Three Little Pigs went on to win an Academy Award for best cartoon of the year (45). Disney’s movies were becoming much more than children’s entertainment; they reverberated within a nation in struggle.
During the Great Depression, many theatres started doing the “double features” (Selden 56), which meant that after renting two movies to show to people, there was not much money left over for short cartoons. This worried Disney because there was no longer such demand for his little films (Krasniewicz 87). He had to think of something to do and the first thing that came to his mind was to make a animated feature-length film. As a boy in Kansas City, he had been inspired by a silent film version of Snow White and so this seemed like the perfect movie to make as it had everything that audiences wanted in movies ??" tragedy, romance, and humor as well, thanks to the seven dwarfs (56). With Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disney once again outdid himself. He listened to up-and-coming singers to find the perfect voice for Snow White, finally settling on an 18-year old trained opera singer name Adriana Caselotti. He also used professional comedians as the voices for the seven dwarfs. He utilized a special camera called a multiplane to make Snow White look 3-dimensional and more real to life than in the short cartoons (Seldon 57). This camera was enormous, taking up nearly the entire room. In trying out this camera for Snow White, Disney made a film called The Old Mill, just to make sure that the camera did what he wanted it to do. The film was so good that it ended up winning and Oscar on its own (57). Once again, Disney had ventured into areas of cinematic innovation that would keep him at the top of his game.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs opened at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall in New York on December 7, 1937 to packed audiences. It ran for five weeks in New York and then ran in Paris for 31 weeks (Seldon 59). The film had taken four years to make and it earned 8 million dollars in revenues. This seems like a lot more money when one considers that ticket prices were 25 cents for children back then (59). Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs also received and Academy Award.
Another one of Disney’s loveable and wacky characters is Donald Duck who exploded onto the scene in his 1934 debut in Silly Symphony’s, The Wise Little Hen (Thomas 129). While Mickey was physically changing around this time, Donald was the height of a duck and he looked, for the most part, like a duck. At the very beginning, Mickey Mouse was able to do just about anything. He was drawn using a series of different sized circles and he moved with what animators referred to as the “rubberhose technique” (151) ??" action that has little relation to human or animal movement. Cartoons were becoming more sophisticated and Mickey also was becoming more sophisticated. A man named Freddy Moore was the first to apply a technique called “squash-and-stretch” to Mickey, which made him much more human-like and overall more appealing (151). Mickey’s face would have more definition and this gave him more character, in general. “For the first time, Mickey had a cheek when his teeth went together” (151), which was a very big deal. Before this, animated characters lacked human quality, which distanced the audience from them. Disney’s idea to change Mickey to be more relatable to humans was another factor that changed animation.
Though Mickey was becoming more sophisticated in the mid-to-late-1930s, in pliability and figure, there were problems. Though he was much cuter than before, he now lacked the “primitive vitality” of the earlier cartoons (Thomas 151). Because Mickey was so shy, he was seen as a rather hidden character; he was never the instigator of any shenanigans. The shenanigans were always enacted by Mickey’s crew ??" the broader characters around Mickey, who became stars in their own right and got their own series because of their popularity ??" Donald Duck and Pluto in 1937 and Goofy in 1939 (151). While Donald was duck-size, as mentioned, Pluto and Goofy were the size of regular dogs, but animators and people writing stories for Mickey were confounded by what to do with a four-foot mouse (152).
In 1938, Disney had the idea to put Mickey in film version of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice as the apprentice whose misuse of power causes major disaster (Thomas 152). The story is an old fairy tale that had been interpreted as a poem by Goethe and a concert piece by French composer Paul Dukas (152) and the film version would have the entire action set to music, which would make it so Mickey didn’t have to speak. Disney considered that one of the reasons that Mickey couldn’t play a variety of roles was because of his falsetto speaking voice (152). While this voice limited his roles, it was that very voice that made children all over the world fall in love with him.
During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Disney had other films that would go on to become childhood legends. Pinocchio and Bambi were different sorts of animated films in that, first of all, Pinocchio had mainly human characters while Bambi was rather grim and sometimes even bloody (Barrier 138). Because of these reasons, Pinocchio and Bambi didn’t do that well at the box office, but it still would not change the fact that they have remained classic children’s films throughout history. They are watched in hundreds of languages all around the world. Disney’s name is synonymous with magic.
Disney’s idea for a theme park came out of the joy that he had taking his two daughters to kiddie parks (Greene 104). He said that he would take them out every Saturday and Sunday and that they remained the happiest days of all his life (104). Initially, Disney thought of an amusement park on land that adjoins his studio lot and even had some designers draw it out; however, he soon realized that the piece of land he was considering wasn’t big enough for what he wanted to create (104). To get more ideas, he started visiting many different theme parks and looking at their layouts (Hench 23). He wanted to discover what worked and what didn’t. One of his favorite places was Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen and this is where many of his ideas for Disneyland came from. It was an adult park as much as it was a kid’s park. Disney’s magical land would be recreated one day in Paris.
A big chunk of the money for Disneyland came from ABC and in return Disney had to promise to do a TV show for them. The program was called “Disneyland” and it showed the four different “lands” of the park, so when Disneyland finally opened, nearly every person in America with a television knew about Disneyland and what you could do there. Many even knew their way around the park without having even been there yet (Greene 107). This was another way in which Disney displayed both his business and creative side. This show made his theme park a success before it was even open.
Construction of Disneyland took approximately one year to complete and Disney called it “a work of love,” saying that he “didn’t go into Disneyland with the idea of making money” (Greene 108), which is probably the main reason that it was such an astounding hit and why it is still called ??" even today ??" the happiest place on earth. There, one can travel Small Town U.S.A. how Disney himself remembers his own childhood, to Europe, the New World, the American West, Mexico, the Middle East ??" or into space (Veness 2), and of course there is the world that is created in the imagination of Walt Disney himself.
“When Walt built Disneyland, he was striving to make people feel better about themselves...he had discovered what people were looking for ??" the feeling of being alive and in love with life” (Gabler 535). Some would say that there is a very spiritual element to Disneyland, which would no doubt be because of the love that Disney put into the theme park. But Disney did not just put love into Disneyland. That was simply a culmination of his life’s work. From the beginning of his career when he first envisioned a loveable little mouse named Mickey to later when he thought up the wacky characters of Goofy, Donald and Pluto, and later when he used new techniques in film to give people fairy tales that would make them laugh and cry, Disney was a person who wanted to make people happy.
People have said that Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney were the same personality (Gitlin 33), which isn’t a crazy notion. Both man and mouse were filled with an enormous sense of love for others, for making people happy, for making people laugh, and for giving people a better quality of life ??" through the Great Depression and through times of war. They are both iconic figures in American culture. They are representative of wholesomeness and creativity, good times and innovation. To see pictures of Walt Disney at his drawing board, a happy Mickey waving back, is to see true providence. While Mickey may have been lacking roles later in his mouse career, his main role in life was to bring joy into the heart of his creator, which would go on to motivate him to bring even more joy to those around him. This came about because of Mickey and without Disney as the medium, the world would be a very different place.
The aove is the first paper I received, from the beginning this writer did not follow my request, but I'm left to make the most of it. It you can salvage anything please do so, And please ensure that I do get the same writer. Although willing to do a rewrite, I could never get him/her to follow request. He/she had in their mind what they want to write and each rewrite came back looking like the original paper that did not meet my criteria.
