The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney by Michael Barrier
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Book Reviews of The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney
Book Review: A Different Walt Disney
Summary: 5 Stars
Read the book that was banned by the Disney Legal Department -- banned even though every aspect of the book is proven factual and truthful. What is it that the Disney Corporation doesn't want you to know about Walt Disney? The Animated Man -- a different Walt Disney.Book Review: Excellent choice
Summary: 5 Stars
Have not read the entire book yet, but it is very interesting and a great written book. Anyone interested in learning about the life of Disney, this is a great book.Book Review: fair and balanced
Summary: 4 Stars
In preparation for a recent trip to WDW, I wanted to read a biography the man himself. I spent a good hour looking around on amazon at different bios and what sold me on this one was that it was the most recently published bio and it seemed to be written from a more scholarly standpoint by someone who had done significant research. Also, the page count told me that it was not the standard 200 page fluff bio.
Having read the book leading up to my trip (finishing it sitting by the pool at my resort in Disney), I really felt like I had a better understanding of what went into making a place like Disney. The visionary nature of this guy was clearly explained.
If you prefer longer, more in depth bios, this is the one for you. If you are looking for a shorter, more populist treatment, buy something else.
My one complaint would be that when the author starts explaining the process Walt used for the creation and release of each film, he seems to go into extreme detail that goes beyond what is needed in bio of a man and would fit better in a history of the company. But, I tended to just skip over 3-10 pages when I realized he was geeking out on that. The author's other book is on something about animation history or something, and this probably gave him a larger than normal interest in film history.
All in all, I loved reading this book especially leading up to and during a trip to Disney World.
Book Review: To much guessing
Summary: 2 Stars
This book is full of a lot of opinions
As someone who has had access to the Disney Vaults and have done much research on Walt E. Disney myself, I have found that a lot of Michael Barrier's research seems to be his opinion. It is fine to have your own opinion or how you interrupt memo's from meetings that happened that long ago; it seems to me that he relies strictly on those memo's that he quotes but then later he just fills in his own opinion and in several cases is very short of just (for lack of a better word) bashing Walt Disney. This book is titled "The Animated Man A LIFE OF WALT DISNEY."
Once again I have had time in the Disney Vault with the Archives but if I would have had as much time there in the Archives, I would have never came to the same conclusions as Michael. We are talk about a Man who was by far way ahead of his time and revolutionized not just cartoons but live action movies like we see today. In this book I have found a lot of inaccuracies because I have seen some of these memo's (no I can not release my source at Disney so don't ask.)
The memo's that he list within the first 150 pages are all focused on getting more work production, we see that in our everyday lives at our own jobs. He doesn't spend a lot of time going over the Oswald series or really explaining how Mickey Mouse came into existence, maybe one paragraph. I am sorry but Mickey Mouse is what brought the Disney Brothers back into the business and gave Walt the confidence to go ahead and make a full length cartoon feature called Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Michael spends too much time on the negative, saying Walt was not that involved that much in the film, I have seen more memo's and photos of Walt being heavily involved in the film to the point of acting out every scene. He does not spend enough time on all the positive that Walt did.
I would only recommend this book if you want to read opinions of one person compared to what is truly in the Archives granted many will never get the opportunity to see them but speaking from someone who has I know that all the time he was in the vault he must have only been searching out negative comments or he just read them that way. Yes some of the memos have language that would not be suitable for younger audiences but if you read past them you will see that Walt was trying to motivate his animators and get them to push themselves to what they would be able to do. Again this is seen even today in our own jobs. I really wish I would have been able to meet Walt himself but I am a little to young for that. With that being said again I would only recommend this book if you only want opinions and not true facts.
The more I have read this book the more I am on the fence about Michael Barrier at times it seems I can see where he is coming from with his opinions and at others I have to disagree, for the simple fact this book is suppose to be about Walter Disney and it seems more or less about other people and how they saw Walt. I guess if it was called The Animated Man a life around Walt Disney instead of The Animated Man a life of Walt Disney it would be easier for me not to be this harsh on this book but I have to be harsh about my criticism just because it is not just about Walt it's about everything else.
Book Review: Poorly written narrative that at times is more about animators than Disney himself
Summary: 2 Stars
After much research on the reviews on this website on which Disney biography to read, I was led to believe this was the best written of the 3 major works on Disney's life. At the end, I did not enjoy this work at all and found myself wishing I had chosen either Thomas' or Gabler's book instead.
It is apparent throughout this book Barrier had a substantial amount of material on Disney left over from his earlier work on the history of Hollywood animation and often lets stories about the Disney animators themselves runaway for pages at a time. There were points where I started to question if the appropriate title for this book was "Walt Disney Animators."
The initial narrative of this book is choppy at best as Barrier spends the first quarter of this book quoting various sources to establish Disney pre-Snow White, then in the next sentence fast forwarding as much as 40 years to a different quote that refutes what was just previously said. It's like you are watching a documentary of multiple interviews being slices together of two people arguing the same point from different eras. This is very hard to follow and flows nothing like a good biography should, as shown in the excellent work on another cartoon mogul, Charles Shultz, done by David Michaelis.
Barrier also side tracks the book with multiple personal critiques of both animated and life action features where he becomes more critic than biographer. A horrendous example was a very shallow effort at summarizing what the movie Mary Poppins meant to the studio. The author is states the movie is essentially a "shallow fantasy" although it succeeded in the launching of Julie Andrews as a major star and won multiple Academy Awards. Barrier has no sense that the movie was kept true to story by the author, P.L Travers, and he is more concerned about the casting of Van Dyke than acknowledging the strong musical score. He critiques the lack of strong central story "lurking as a failure" when ignoring this same premise when reviewing positively the feature Alice in Wonderland.
At times, Barrier hits his stride when writing about Disney's work as overall mastermind behind the creation of Snow White, DisneyLand and his own personal miniature train hobby. However, these moments are rare and you spend a majority of the time skipping around to various points of view and personal opinions of the author. You also get a very two dimensional history of Disney as the author cannot look at some of the other aspects that made Disney's feature films great, such as there overall musical score.
Overall, this is unfortunately one of the worst written biographies I've read and will now have to pick up another one to obtain a better perspective on Disney.
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