Thoughts from the Walt Disney Museum

If you have interest in animation and find yourself in San Francisco, the Walt Disney Museum is worth a visit. I went there multiple times during my 13 years in the Bay and always left with a little more wonder and appreciation for Disney’s accomplishments.

Like most who’ve left their mark on history, Disney was a complicated figure. His legacy has its blemishes, but for someone born in 1901 who longer has the luxury of changing his mind, he passes scrutiny in my book.

In my visits to the museum, a few things have really stuck with me:

#1

The technological breakthrough of The Old Mill, the 1937 Silly Symphonies cartoon that (by way of the multiplane camera) introduced a realistic sense of depth to animation. It was the Luxo Jr. of its time and it still holds up today.

#2

Walt’s comments on his early years in Kansas, working a paper route with his dad (Elias) and brother (Roy):

“I’d go along in the morning, and here’d be kids’ toys out on these big porches, you know, and everything. It’d be four in the morning. I’d put my paper bag down and go up and play with these electric trains or wind-up trains… but gee, I always left them in good shape. I’d always carefully put them back on the track in the same place, so they wouldn’t know I’d played with them. Then I’d have to run like the dickens to catch up.… To this day I have dream that I’ve missed some customers on my route. I wake up and think, gosh, I’ve got to hurry and get back, my dad will be waiting up at that corner.”

There’s something hauntingly sad and beautiful about this. Looking back on Walt’s work ethic and lifelong love of trains, I think this is an important part of understanding who he was.

#3

Walt on arriving in Hollywood in the 1920s and feeling he’d arrived too late:

“Now when I got to Hollywood I was discouraged with animation, I didn’t think I’d ever do another animated thing. I said, I think I’m getting in it too late. Felix the Cat was going then, other things, and I just said, it’s too late. I should have been in the business six years before.”

I remember reading about tech entrepreneurs who made their way to Silicon Valley in the late 90s and thought they’d missed everything. I suspect that this feeling of urgency and anxiety over timing—seizing their moment, catching their wave—is a common feeling among entreprenuers.

#4

Most of all, I’m struck by how Disney balanced commercial and creative achievement:

“We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.”

Critics often panned his popular renditions of childhood classics—and perhaps fairly so—but Walt brought an undeniable level of artistry and wonder to popular entertainment, a contribution that in my view far outweighs his shortcomings.