The artistic talents that Walt and Art displayed while young were encouraged by the women in their lives, Walt’s aunt Maggie and Art’s mother Zelda. Neither man provided financial stability, and both boys had to work to help support their families, eventually rebelling against their ineffectual fathers. Solomon Babitsky, Art’s father, was an immigrant from Eastern Europe, a Jewish scholar who had no skills that were marketable in the US. Walt’s father Elias Disney was a supporter of the socialist politician Eugene Debs, one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or The Wobblies) and was active in the populist/socialist movements that roiled American politics at the turn of that century. He draws on their early experiences with family, work, responsibility and organized labor to help explain why decades later they became first colleagues, then enemies. Friedman describes each man’s formative years amid the social background of the time: labor unrest, Eastern European immigration, and World War I. They both also had early exposure to labor organizing and social injustices. 1903) shared more than Midwestern childhoods: Chicago, a family farm in the small town of Marceline, Mo., and Kansas City for Walt Omaha, Sioux City, and then New York City for Art. He structures the narrative around the backgrounds, personalities, and career intersection of two central figures, the animator Art Babbitt and Walt Disney himself. The history of the 1941 Disney animators strike as laid out by Friedman is dramatic and filled with enough twists to make for a page-turner. As Leonard Maltin, the film expert and author of “Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons,” wrote, “I learned many things I didn’t know from this treatise, which allows the reader to make up his or her mind about the still-simmering divisions caused by the dispute.” Maltin is correct in calling this a treatise, but it is an absorbing one. Jake Friedman deserves a rousing hurrah for writing “The Disney Revolt: The Great Labor War of Animation’s Golden Age.” This is an eye-opening book full of many fascinating stories about a World War II-era Hollywood labor battle, and even readers who are familiar with the history of animation, or the growth of entertainment industry unions, will discover something new in its pages.
0 kommentar(er)
