Mr. Leon Schlesinger, Mr. Max Fleischer et al., make most of the animated cartoons produced in the U.S. Of the man who makes the rest and the best, Mr. Schlesinger recently observed: “We’re businessmen. Walt Disney‘s an artist. With us, the idea with shorts is to hit ’em and run. With us, Disney is more of a Rembrandt." Even artists say that Walter Elias Disney is an artist. Some go farther, say that he is a great one. Certainly his works are better known and more widely appreciated than those of any other artist in history. Three weeks ago, his Mickey Mouse created a minor government crisis in Yugoslavia. Last year, as “Miki-san." he was Japan's patron saint. In Russia the works of Disney are appreciated as “social satire." depicting the “capitalist world under the masks of mice and pigs.” The late George V, it is said, would not go to a cinema performance unless it included a Disney film. But Disney, the Artist, is nothing like as widely known as Mickey, the Mouse-or any of Mickey's score of charming fellow players in the Disney zoological stock company. In fact, when some art historian of the future sets out to chronicle the rise of the animated cartoon, the quest for original drawings by the man most responsible for it will be about as difficult as it is now to locate additional authentic Rembrandts. […] Source: Filmic Light - Snow White Archive
