Regular readers of this blog will note that I have never hidden my admiration for the work of Jack Kinney. Though Kinney had worked on some of the Disney feature films (including directing the Pink Elephants scene from Dumbo (1941)) and continued working after leaving Disney (he directed the Mr. Magoo feature 1001 Arbian Nights (1959)), he is often seen to his best advantage in the cartoon shorts he directed for the Disney studio. He was the closest thing the Disney studio had to a Tex Avery and his cartoons (often starring Goofy or Donald Duck) are marked by their wild and wacky sense of humor. This wild sense of humor is often felt throughout this book as he looks back on his days at Disney with the type of satiric humor one might expect from a creator of such funny cartoons. Though his humor here is often cruder and more foulmouthed than anything he could have gotten away with in a Disney cartoon, there is no doubt that this book was written by the same man who created these classic funny cartoons. To make this book even more fun, Kinney has filled it with his own illustrations, often very funny little cartoons featuring caricatures of all those he worked with at Disney.
Yet even with how funny this book is, it is not the humor that makes this book indispensable for fans of Disney and classic animation. What makes it so special is the peek it provides into what it was really like to work at the Disney studio during its golden age. There have been many great books that give us historical or critical insight into Disney films, but there are very few that give us an in-depth peek into the people who made them. Reading this book, I felt like I was there along with them. Besides just Kinney we get a personal glimpse at quite a few other Disney artists including Roy Williams, Mike Balukas, Earl Hurd, Ted Sears, Harry Reeves and many more. We often learn about them through humorous antidotes many of which are quite funny, but it is the great inside look into the people who made these films and the environment they made them in that make these essential to Disney fans. The look at Walt Disney himself is also fascinating to read. Most accounts of Walt either paint him as some sort of saint or a devil. Kinney here shows him as neither, acknowledging him as both a genius and a flawed induvial. He tells of how he was often a hard task master and how difficult he could be to work for, while also acknowledging the importance he had to making the Disney films as great as they were. He also provides a fair and even-handed look at what it was like working for Disney. He does not paint it as an idyllic place but as a place that helped make the films he worked on as something he could be incredibly proud of. It is obvious that these films could have been made in any other environment.
This book also includes a great and well written introduction by film historian and critic Leonard Maltin, which echoes how grateful us Disney fans are for this book existing.
This is essential reading for every Disney fan.
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