Walt Disney, creator of a world

I take the risk and I assume the audacity. I will take you back to your childhood.

We are going to talk about the one who brought to the screens, all around the planet, Mickey, Snow White and her seven dwarves, Cinderella, Pinocchio, Donald and even Bambi: all figures who emerge in our memory, whatever our generation, from the depths of our first curiosities and our first emotions.

We are going to talk about Walt Disney. We are going to do it in the company of his biographer. Olivier Cottea renowned historian of cinema, a man of many talents. He followed the character with curiosity always, admiration sometimes, but without the temptation of complacency. With him we will endeavor to tear Walt Disney away from his caricatures, from the simplicity of the generally benevolent, often dazzled and possibly exasperated comments.

We will restore a Walt Disney who was the father of a specific world and whose destiny therefore arouses special curiosity: as to the springs of his prodigious success; as to the roots of his imagination; as to his energy as an entrepreneur in search of profit to be drawn, for his work and for his gains, from new inventions; as to his relations as a citizen with the United States of his time, those of Roosevelt and McCarthy, those of Lindbergh and Chaplin; as to his nostalgia and his excesses; as to the drift of his social conservatism towards reactions which sometimes make him seem sulphurous to us; as to his central role finally, sometimes decisive, in the diffusion of American popular culture all around the planet.

And naturally, seven decades after the death of our character, we will ask ourselves, along the way, after so many changes in our civilization, what in the trace of Walt Disney can be found today as obsolete and assert itself as perennial.

BROADCAST ARCHIVES

• Archive of Walt Disney at a press conference in 1953.
• Excerpt from a television report by Daniel Cazal on the occasion of the 1000th issue of Mickey’s Journal: interview de Paul Wincklerbroadcast on the 8 p.m. news on ORTF, August 12, 1971.
• Song “Mickey Mouse”original soundtrack of the first Mickey cartoons, 1929.
• Interview with Sylvain Caruso (voice of Donald in French)in a report by Laurent Valière devoted to Donald, broadcast on the show “Tous les Mickeys du monde” on France Inter, on July 26, 2008.
• Song from the Walt Disney cartoon “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” followed by the presentation of the seven dwarfs, released in 1938 in France (1937 in the United States).
• Excerpt from the cartoon “The Wonderful Adventure of Pinocchio” by Walt Disney in its French version released in 1946 (released in the United States in 1940), broadcast in “La vie du cinéma” on July 9, 1946.
• Archive of Walt Disney speaking to his employees at his Burbank studios in February 1941.
• Ending credits: Song “Whistle While You Work” performed by Adriana Caselottitaken from the soundtrack of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” from 1937.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Olivier Cotte, Walt Disney. The Man Who Dreamed of Being a ChildPerrin, 2024.
• Olivier Cotte, 100 years of animated cinemaDunod, 2015, reissued 2023.
• Pierre Conesa, Hollywood, a weapon of mass propagandaRobert Laffont, 2018.
• Olivier Cotte, Adapting a book for cinema and television – From the original work to the screenplay: novel, theater, biography, comic stripEditions Armand Colin, 2020.
• Olivier Cotte, Create movie and TV charactersEditions Armand Colin, 2022.