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Fact Box Level: 6.292 Tokens: 358 Types: 204 TTR: 0.57 |
Disney and His Cartoon World
In an interesting book called The Disney Version, Richard Schickel finds it worth noting that Mickey was a clean mouse, right from the start. Perhaps this is one reason why people who dislike real mice often love Mickey. Schickel is impressed by the fact that Disney's first successful creation was a mouse, traditionally viewed as an inhabitant of unclean places and, in his natural state, often an unclean creature himself. Disney gave audiences a clean mouse, just as he gave them a cleaned-up world in all his later creations. "There's enough ugliness and cynicism in the world without me adding to it." He was fond of saying.
Mickey was followed by Donald Duck, Pluto, the dog, and the Three Little Pigs in short films that brought laughter to children and adults around the world. According to Disney, these newer animal characters were created because there were certain things Mickey could not do. People wrote angry letters to Disney if Mickey did something wrong. So Pluto was invented to do stupid things, and Donald accompanied him to complain about Pluto's stupidity. Disney's version of The Three Little Pigs was based on an old story long enjoyed by children.
The first full-length Disney film was Snow White. Walt had always liked the story, which has delighted many generations of children. But cartoons are expensive to make, and a long cartoon film had never been made before. The cost of making Snow White was particularly high, since three years were needed to produce it. Disney was not sure people would like it, and the uncertainty worried him. If the picture were not a success, he would lose everything. Fortunately, however, people loved the show. For years both children and adults went around singing songs about the seven dwarfs who helped the lovely heroine, Snow White.
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