Walt Disney: The Biography (Neal Gabler, 2006)

Hands down the best non-fiction work I've ever read - and quite possibly the best book period - Neal Gabler's officially sanctioned biography of Walt Disney is a peerless volume. Gabler had access to the Walt Disney archives and has clearly talked to hundreds of people and read masses of letters, previous biographies and interviews, and the result is an account of Disney's life that is unlikely to be equalled. 

It's taken me several months to read this book - not because it's hard going or over long (600-odd pages). I've got the first edition hardback version so it's a weighty tome and not designed for taking on trains or reading comfortably sat up in bed so I've had to lie down and savour it. Everytime I opened it up I got lost in the tales of Mickey Mouse, Snow White, Disneyland and everything else. Sometimes devouring in short bursts was the only way to keep up with all that Disney packed into his relatively short life. 

So many advances in filmmaking and beyond were done first or done best by Walt - colour shorts, feature-length animation, Fantasia, movie studios getting into TV, the Disneyland theme park, animatronics, storyboards... the list of his accomplishments is almost unending and continue to have an impact across the world. Gabler doesn't shy away from Walt's follies or faults - this isn't just a big back-slap for the animation genius. Walt is shown as a physically unhealthy, chain-smoking, peevish figure often. Gabler faces accusations of Walt's anti-semitism and racism head on and provides evidence he was guilty of neither any more than people were in the 30s, 40s, 50s. There's not a great deal about Walt's relationship with Lillian, his wife, but then that is because the movies, theme park and all were his focus for much of the time. 

The picture that Gabler paints of Disney is far from the utopian ideal that many think his company now pedals. The biography is a tale of perseverance, of success and failure and of one man's drive to always being doing something new, something different, something he enjoyed. From the early days of animation, through the second world war when the Disney Studio was commissioned by the government to produce propaganda, through to experiments in TV and the success of the theme parks, Walt Disney's life was never boring, and this biography brought everything vividly to life. A masterpiece.