Walt Disney and the creation of emotional environments: interpreting Walt Disney's oeuvre from the Disney studios to Disneyland, CalArts, and the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT)

Abstract

Walt Disney is arguably the most influential figure in the twentieth-century affair with animation. Although he is known for his innovations in personality animation and the full-length animation film, he is no less famous as the creator of the first theme park, Disneyland. Less well-known are his forays into the creation of educational institutions and urban landscapes. This paper argues that the notion of ‘emotional environments’, culled from contemporary research in the growing field of the history of emotions, might prove the most effective tool for interpreting the overall character of Disney's work or oeuvre. The paper argues that thanks to the influence on him of the Hollywood studio environment that had come into operation in California in the 1920s, Disney's animation experiments were intimately linked with his increasing efforts to fashion an emotional environment that would transfer the emotions associated with animation and motion pictures to three-dimensional realities, providing both children and adults with important confirmations of psychological reassurance associated with such critical states of self-fulfillment as happiness. To support this reading, the paper introduces the relevance of an influential body of organization and firm analysis that has developed the related concepts of experience economy, immersive environment, and art firm.

Keywords:

• Walt Disney
• Disneyland
• Hollywood studio
• emotional environment
• experience economy
• art firm
• happiness

Acknowledgements

This version is a revision of a paper presented at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development Workshop ‘Emotional Styles – Communities and Spaces’ in Berlin on 23 July 2010. My thanks to the workshop participants for their very helpful comments and stimulation. I am also thankful for comments from Richard Benefield, Founding Executive Director of the Walt Disney Memorial Museum, San Francisco. Above all, I am grateful to Benno Gammerl for his incisive editing and suggestions for an improved product.

Notes

 1. See Plamper (2010) for a judicious set of interviews with leading contributors William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein and Peter Stearns, and the varied terms of art that are now in play in this subfield.

 2. This paper is concerned with the historical figure Walter Elias Disney rather than the brand ‘Disney’, the latter referring to the expanding enterprises spawned by his more business-oriented brother Roy (see Thomas 1998).

 3. As educator when contemplating his radical school of the arts in the future California Institute of the Arts, Disney, perhaps half-seriously, saw himself teaching as a ‘storyman’. John Hench emphasizes Disney's ‘innate talent for storytelling and his understanding of human nature’ (Hench 2008, 138).

 4. See ‘The Artful Firm’ in Chytry (2009, 125–220). The term is borrowed from Pierre Guillet de Monthoux's concept of the ‘art firm’ (Guillet de Monthoux 2004) and Rob Austin and Lee Devin's concept of ‘artful making’ (Austin and Devin 2003).

 5. Contributors include Rob Austin and Lee Devin; John Dobson; Pierre Guillet de Monthoux; Joseph Pine and James Gilmore; Virginia Postrel; Bernd Schmitt, David Rogers and Karen Vrotsos; and Antonio Strati. See also the important new scholarly journal issued by The Aesthetic Project through the University of Essex: Aesthesis: International Journal of Art and Aesthetics in Management and Organizational Life (2007–2010), and the related collection by Vickers and King (forthcoming).

 6. ‘Aesthetic firm’ is a term coined by John Dobson (1999) to contrast with the conventional ‘technical firm’ of vertical integration as well as with the ‘moral firm’, which simply aspires to add an ethical edge to the technical firm.

 7. As Aida Hozic notes with regard to the Hollywood studio, ‘competitors around the world recognized the studio – the physical plant – as the key to American superiority’ (Hozic 2001, 58). See also Scott (2005).

 8. McWilliams (1973, 217), particularly citing the example of Redlands, California.

 9. For the Point Loma ‘templed’ or ‘white city’ in San Diego, see Greenwalt (1978, 47). For the Krotona colony in Hollywood see Ross (2004, Appendix, 1–22) and more generally Ross (1989).

10. Future observers of the California scene such as British author Aldous Huxley invariably remarked on the general resemblance between Southern California and a grand motion picture set (McWilliams 1973, 344).

11. Alistair Cooke, cited by Gabler (2006, 76–7, also 77–8); Allan (1999, 15); Lutz (1998).

12. Colonel William Selig had already recognized that by working entirely inside the studio, filmmakers were not simply protected from rain and inclement climatic conditions, but were allowed to reproduce reality in any way they saw fit (Hozic 2001, 57).

13. Weber was actually a mere designer who had done sets at Paramount (Gabler 2006, 322).

14. Disney never showed interest in any institutional religious affiliation.

15. Herbert Marcuse singled out this definition as one of Freud's ‘most advanced formulations’ (Marcuse 1961, 186). If we recall as well the French writer Stendhal's definition of ‘beauty’ as ‘the promise of happiness’ (la promesse du bonheur) – a definition greatly admired by Friedrich Nietzsche – one might telescope the two definitions accordingly: beauty as ‘the promise of the subsequent fulfillment of a prehistoric wish’.

16. Perhaps one explanation for the exploitation of such realms in the later Disney theme parks. See also Whitley (2008).

17. Disney's most sophisticated venture in animation would be Fantasia (1940) (originally called The Concert Feature), meant ‘as an entirely new kind of theatrical experience’ to transform Disney's choices of classical composition into audience experiences of pure form and sound, even to the extent of introducing a new sound technology called Fantasound to envelop the audience. For Disney, abstract art was ‘what you feel when you see something. It's an impression you get, it's the shape an observed incident takes in your own mind’ (cited in Miller 1957, 243; see also Allan 1999, 104; Gabler 2006, 309).

18. As Disney wryly put it, ‘My wife used to accuse me of running a Communist outfit, well, all that is over now’ (cited in Gabler 2006, 377).

19. See an early site plan in Marling (1997, 39). My thanks to Richard Benefield for this reference.

20. Disney's intuition was excellent: as Charles Phoenix notes, ‘If ever there was a perfect time and place to create an entirely new concept of family entertainment, it was Southern California in the 1950s’ (Phoenix 2001, 149).

21. The first space to be experienced was an idealized Town Square (railroad station, city hall, opera house, bank, and firehouse (Dunlop 1996, 29)). The original model for Disney's vision of Main Street was undoubtedly his boyhood hometown of Marceline, Missouri. Disney also admired Thornton Wilder's version of Main Street in the latter's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Our Town (1938) (Hench 2008, 10). Interestingly, although located in New Hampshire, Wilder's fictional town may have reflected his upbringing in the carefully designed neighborhood of Elmwood in the Californian university city of Berkeley (Harrison 1983, 19–22 and 30–6).

22. At the same time, in ‘The Disneyland Story’, a 1954 60-minute infomercial on the new TV series Disneyland and the future Anaheim Disneyland, Disney described Disneyland as a place not only of ‘happiness’ but also of ‘knowledge’.

23. Hench can only think of the artist Salvador Dali as someone who could match Disney's optimism (besides, of course, Disney's own creation Mickey Mouse!) (Hench 2008, 138).

24. For details, see Hench (2008, 56–7).

25. For his part, Hench takes the position (similar to that taken by German poet Friedrich Schiller in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794–1795)) that ‘play may precede human culture. I believe it is vital to our survival as human beings’.

26. California Institute of the Arts (2005–2009) provides a film version of the grand plans for CalArts as conceived by Disney. The original site in Los Angeles proved too ambitious and CalArt was later developed north of Los Angeles in the community of Valencia. After Walt's death in 1966, his brother Roy persisted in pushing the project, although the late 1960s and early 1970s were a difficult period of clashes between his and the students’ personal ethics (see Thomas 1998, 321–6).

27. As Gabler notes, this was ‘the only real appeal to him’ of constructing a Disney World in Florida (Gabler 2006, 608). This perspective might be contrasted to the subsequent proliferation of Disneylands throughout the world by the multi-media conglomerate developed after Disney's death in 1966 by his brother Roy.

28. One of the explicitly stated primary goals of EPCOT (Mannheim 2002, 6). See also the useful EPCOT Chronology (Mannheim 2002, 185–9). See also Mumford (1961).

29. On Mickey Mouse and the Circle, see Hench (2008, 87).

30. See Figure 1.1. in Mannheim (2002, 4).

31. Compared to Howard's Garden City of 32,000 inhabitants, although sometimes the figure projected for EPCOT rose to 60,000 or even 100,000 by 1980 (Gabler 2006, 609). These figures might be compared to those for the ideal polis of some 50,000 as suggested by Aristotle, and also around 50,000 by Plato (based on some 5,000 ‘citizens’).

32. Ironically, although EPCOT was never built, it was the idea of EPCOT that finally won over the Florida legislature to provide for a special district, allowing for the erection of Walt Disney World (see Thomas 1998, 306–8).

33. These concerns are raised in Mannheim (2002, 9, 113, and 123). The more recent construction of the residency Celebration in Florida does not match the EPCOT community concept.

34. Following Mannheim (2002, xviii).

35. Pine and Gilmore (1999, 2 [emphasis added] and 3). See also Postrel (2003); Schmitt and Simonson (1997); Vickers and King (forthcoming).

36. As John Hench notes, the Disney theme parks were meant to be as real as a story film through connecting visitors’ experience ‘to their own emotions and memories’ (Hench 2008, 124).

37. The best account remains Austin and Devin (2003).

38. For the color and music components, see especially Hench (2008).

39. As John Hench makes clear, Disney's Castle ‘was inspired by the royal castle of Neuschwanstein in Bavaria’. And as he adds, it ‘set a pattern’ for all the other Magic Kingdoms in the Disney parks (Hench 2008, 53). See also Smith (2007).

40. Details are in Chytry (1989, 274–317); also Guillet de Monthoux (2004, 110–21).

41. See the recent study by Gopnik (2009).

42. Hench (2008) is particularly useful in detailing the manner in which the film experience is imbedded in the Disneyland experience.

43. My thanks to Richard Benefield for this reference.

44. See Gopnik (2009) for more empirical details.

45. See the judicious account in Watts (1997, 442–5); also Brode (2004).

46. Paul Goldberger, in Dunlop (1996, 26).

47. Indeed, for this author the topic forms part of a larger project to formulate and clarify a faculty of thought called ‘cytherics’, defined in two prior works as the ‘sighting and siting of aphrodisian – that is, aesthetic-erotic – environments’ (see Chytry 2005; 2009).