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Inspired by weekend outings with his two daughters to the carousel at Griffith Park in Los Angeles, Walt Disney had dreamed for a decade or more of building a setting where families could spend time together. He began construction of Disneyland in 1954, a time when amusement park attendance had generally declined across the country. Disney had reinvented animation in the 1920s, and brought to Americans the idea of wish-fulfillment through fantasy in his best films, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Bambi, and Dumbo. But by the end of World War II, Disney’s reputation as an artistic interpreter of childhood joy and innocence was in decline. Intellectuals complained that he infantilized American culture. He was still reeling from the aftereffects of a 1941 cartoonists’ strike that had left his studio fragmented. Lacking the intimate, creative camaraderie that had so energized him in the early years, he felt disengaged and restless, and he was looking for a new project. […]