Disney’s Wagner Aesthetic: Music Drama in Pursuit of the Total Artwork

Abstract

Aside from Walt Disney’s reputation for renegade avant-gardism, ‘sentimental modernism’ and subliterary Americana, the German composer Richard Wagner’s pursuit of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) provides a coherent framework for interpreting the ‘music drama’ of the Disney studio’s Depression-era shorts of the 1930s and its feature films of the Golden Age (1937–1942). In citing Wagner and Adorno’s critique of him, the author argues that Disney follows Wagner in three key respects: (1) in his disavowal of the ‘work’ of art and corresponding objectification of Nature; (2) his espousal of technology and its ‘innovation’ as a means of attaining artistic perfection; and (3) his striving for a synaesthesia, or aesthetic unity of the senses, which would ultimately prove unsustainable given the commercial constraints of capitalist modernity.

Introduction

The German composer Richard Wagner, who died in 1883, had no inkling of the coming of the seventh art, which would eclipse in popularity the total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk) of his beloved music drama. Leaving aside Wagner’s actual music (this is no place to examine his compositions), the sublime technical virtuosity of his music drama (essentially its power to overwhelm an audience) has come to epitomize all mass art and ‘mass spectacle – which is, finally, what Wagner aims for’ (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1994: 50).

Aside from Disney’s renegade avant-gardism (Leslie, 2002), ‘sentimental modernism’ (Watts, 1997: 145) and subliterary Americana (Schickel, 1996[1968]: 346–348), Wagner’s pursuit of the Gesamtkunstwerk also provides a coherent framework for interpreting the ‘music drama’ of the Disney studio’s Depression-era shorts of the 1930s and its feature films of the Golden Age (1937–1942). In citing Wagner, and Adorno’s critique of him, this article argues that Disney animation follows Wagner in three key respects: (1) in its disavowal of the ‘work’ of art and corresponding objectification of Nature; (2) its espousal of technology and its ‘innovation’ as a means of attaining artistic perfection; and (3) its striving for a synaesthesia, or aesthetic unity of the senses, which would ultimately prove unsustainable given the commercial constraints of capitalist modernity.

Redrawing reality

The idea that Wagner abused ‘amplification’ in order to achieve a music of mind-blowing proportions was among a panoply of accusations famously launched at the composer by his former friend, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘Beauty has its drawbacks: we know that. Wherefore beauty then? Why not rather aim at size, at the sublime, the gigantic, that which moves the masses?’ (Nietzsche, 1911: 15).

The key accusation Theodor Adorno would go on to level at Wagner is in much the same vein:

In the Gesamtkunstwerk, intoxication, ecstasy, is an inescapable principle of style; a moment of reflection would suffice to shatter its illusion of ideal unity. However, the emotional thrust of the Gesamtkunstwerk is directed not just against the conciliatory genre music of Biedermeier, but also against the art forms of Wagner’s own industrial age, during which the genre elements of Biedermeier were converted into consumer articles. (Adorno, 2005[1952]: 93–94)

Despite his reputation for coarseness as a composer of music for the masses, Wagner would never cease railing against the capitalist world and its dictatorship of money. ¹ We shall presently explore the question of synaesthesia and the paradoxical pursuit of the ‘ideal unity’ of total art in the age of commodities. For the moment, however, let us simply acknowledge Wagner’s importance in having paved the way for Disney and his Hollywood dream factory.

Wagner can be credited through his music, if not with inventing then certainly with heightening, the effects of art. For Wagner, art is concerned with triggering hitherto unfelt emotions, which it achieves by overhauling the worn out human faculties. When speech becomes ‘defunct’, literature turns to poetry (Adorno, 2005[1952]: 88); when the diatonic scale hampers the full range of orchestral expression, music turns to chromaticism, a switch Wagner himself pioneered in his works, such as Tristran und Isolde, with its conspicuous collapse of tonality.

Cinema is another art form that brings forth a revolutionary remaking of the senses; although, for Adorno, the ‘revolution’ in visual perception would proceed in such a way as to perfectly adapt its viewers to the demands of industrial capitalism – to ‘reality as a reality of objects and hence basically of commodities’. As for its listeners in ‘the age of advanced industry’, Adorno declares, ‘hearing is “archaic” and has lagged behind technology’ (Adorno, 2005[1952]: 88). ‘The ear’, he continues, ‘in contrast [to the eye], is unconcentrated and passive’ (p. 89). Wagner interprets the ear’s obstinate passivity as a defect to be corrected. Music drama, with its restless rhythms, startling discord and dissonance, is Wagner’s robust response to the all too human defects of an audience that might either be drifting off or inclined toward breezy complacency.

Adorno’s critique of Wagner is concerned with opera, live action cinema only in passing, and animation not at all. In what follows, then, there is ample scope for combining these three art forms into something of a ‘total’ picture. My more modest proposal, however, is that Wagner’s approach to the question of music drama can be consistently applied to Disney’s animation films. In the turbulent and traumatic interwar era of industrial capitalism, animation poses a monstrous challenge to established ways of seeing and listening, one that spills over into the ‘real world’. Animation threatens a revolutionary recombination of the senses, a synaesthetic cinema, much like Wagner’s ambition to create, or reinvigorate, a theatrical spectacle not seen since the ancient Greeks; one that reunites the shattered bond between man and Nature: a total artwork. The Gesamtkunstwerk, as Wagner conceives it, rejects all hard and fast distinctions between the various modes of artistic expression as superficial distortions of the primordial unity of life (Geck, 2013: 15–16). Disney animation exploits the same ‘animistic’ mythology such that reality is ‘liberated’ by the phantasmagoric play of appearances. According to Sergei Eisenstein,

in Disney films, the capitalist world was indicted, though not through obvious branding or preaching or exposure of its crimes, but through the release of the viewer out of this world of suffering and separation into an oblivion that is not the escapism of ‘happy ends’ but the return to something essential and true. (Leslie, 2002: 229). ²

Eisenstein (1987[1945]) is a disciple of the dialectics of nature for whom the logic and syntax of cinematic composition is ‘immutably, deeply human’ (p. 4). In the polymorphous swaying lines and unresolved forms of Disney’s short films, Eisenstein detects the building blocks of all life (pp. 389–391). ³ If the forms are precarious then so too must be the capitalist edifice holding ‘reality’ together. Only by dismantling the building, from base to superstructure, might reality be redrawn.

Wagner’s influence on Eisenstein would be confirmed by the latter’s staging, in 1940, of a ‘communist’ production of Wagner’s Die Walküre in which he ‘endeavoured to blur the lines between humans, animals, and nature’ (Motazedian, 2021: 203). Let it be noted that Marx would ultimately dismiss bourgeois idealism or ‘animism’ of this sort, or the ‘German ideology’ of his youth. In Capital, objects are far from polymorphous and freely interchangeable. Order in the form of money transcends the Bacchic revelry of the surface. Money is the independent form of appearance of value, the non-plasmatic commodity – the universal equivalent – that represents all other commodities and makes them bend to its value-form (Marx, 1990[1867]: 180–181).

While ‘art for art’s sake’ was synonymous in the 19th century with the aesthete’s reaction against Victorian morality, this ‘aimless’ slogan, to cite Nietzsche (1997[1889]: 65), must not be confused with Wagner’s conception of total art. For Wagner, as for Nietzsche, the model for the latter was ancient Greece:

With the Greeks the perfect work of art, the Drama, was the abstract and epitome of all that was expressible in the Grecian nature. It was the nation itself – in intimate connection with its own history – that stood mirrored in its art-work, that communed with itself and, within the span of a few hours, feasted its eyes with its own noblest essence. All division of this enjoyment, all scattering of the forces concentred on one point, all diversion of the elements into separate channels, must needs have been as hurtful to this unique and noble Art-work as to the like-formed State itself; and thus it could only mature, but never change its nature. (Wagner, 2002[1849]: np)

Wagner was convinced that everything was for art – or his art – and that the artist who was incapable of manipulating the people and institutions around him had no hope of achieving the sought-after perfection (Newman, 1937: 22–23). Such convictions may explain how a disgraced Kapellmeister (and former communist to boot) could convince King Ludwig II of Bavaria to help fund the Bayreuth project, or Festspielhaus, the purpose-built theatre conceived by Wagner for the staging of The Ring, which finally premiered to much fanfare in 1876 (Newman, 1946: 439–441), although the fact that the venue would never live up to Wagner’s artistic ideals surely confirms the practical limitations, if not the illusion, of total art (p. 519). Disney’s own striving for perfection would take the form of an equally impossible architectural dream; namely, the Florida project, aka EPCOT. ⁴ Like Gaudi’s vision for the city of Barcelona, this ‘model’ and ‘challenge to future generations’ (p. 519) would only ever exist in the imagination. ⁵

Artwork and technology

Although not a straightforwardly Romantic artist (Adorno, 2005[1952]: 86), Wagner adheres to a central tenet of Romanticism in the sense that he seeks to disavow, through the staging of the spectacle, Nature’s status as artwork. ⁶ Disney would adopt the same technique at his Burbank studio in the representation of the labour force, both politically and artistically. The division of labour between highly-paid male artists and low-paid female inkers is decidedly gendered. Schickel (1996[1968]: 257) describes

the ink and paint department, a large one full of politically and economically unconscious ladies, who were only too willing to take tea with Mr Disney and listen to his dire predictions of what would happen if the Cartoonists Guild should gain a foothold in his newly created paradise.

In terms of visual representation, the house-cleaning scene in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) renders the work carried out by Snow White and the forest animals not as work as such, but as Nature bestowing gifts upon ‘mankind’; that is, making up for male lethargy. As for the diamond-mining dwarfs whose pickaxes fail to make so much as a dent on the mine, their ‘work’ is as naturally harmonious as children gathering autumn chestnuts. This is labouring as doing (praxis) not making (poiesis), where nothing is produced by man, and virtue is its own reward.

Disney’s multiplane camera must be mentioned here, that unwieldy contraption (much like the Technicolor cameras in this respect), and its paradoxical concern with ‘realism’ (deep focus, visual immersion in the scene, ‘parallax scrolling’). That the real subject of Snow White is Nature itself, denuded of its social character (the Golden Age feature films are largely pastorals) owes everything it seems to the studio’s cutting edge technology, which in Disney’s mind is the necessary means for achieving true artistic perfection, correcting human fallibility and doing justice to Nature.

For the Romantics, Nature is a work of art whose workers are something of an embarrassment to it. The industrial relations of the factory must be warded off lest they intrude upon the carefree artistic life. ‘When the Brotherhood of Man has cast this care [i.e. subsistence labour] for ever from it’, we find Wagner declaring in 1848, and

as the Greeks upon their slaves, has lain it on machines – the artificial slaves of free creative man, whom he has served till now as the Fetish-votary serves the idol his own hands have made – then will man’s whole enfranchised energy proclaim itself as naught but pure artistic impulse (Wagner, 2002[1849]: np).

‘Artificial slaves’ – or ‘advanced robotics’, in modern parlance – will enable the leisurely pursuit of art. Let the artists of the future direct life; let them be its ‘imagineers’. Wagner objectifies Nature in such a way that denies the objectification, as if Nature were that sublime Thing beyond the artist’s control. In the case of Greek slaves, the denial was achieved by ensuring that they remained unrecognized as people, seen but not heard. In the case of robots, it is about making sure the ‘workings’ stay hidden, the better to leave the magic to do its work.

One is reminded of the Audio-Animatronic Abraham Lincoln at the New York World’s Fair of 1964, which Disney would transfer the following year to the Disneyland theme park. The WED Enterprises press release, which describes Audio-Animatronics as ‘the grand combination of all the arts’ – ‘the three-dimensional realism [sic] of fine sculpture, the vitality of a great painting, the drama and personal rapport of the theater’ (Schickel, 1996[1968]: 330) – may not be exactly what Wagner had in mind for his ‘artwork of the future’. Nonetheless it does express a serious ambition on Disney’s part to achieve something far grander and of far greater cultural significance than simply ‘making pictures’. The impulse toward pushing the boundaries of art beyond the merely performative and inventing a national popular mythology in the process is a decidedly Wagnerian phenomenon which can be traced back to the ‘historical sequence punctuated by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the Commune, where the worldwide unleashing of nations and classes was announced – and prefigured’ (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1994: xv).

If technology is meant to enable the leisurely pursuit of art, thereby concealing the labour invested in Nature’s objectification (perfectly achieved at Disneyland), then, arguably, the artistic purpose as such of ‘artworks’ ranging from Siegfried to Parsifal, Snow White to Abraham Lincoln, begins to fall apart. Why admire the historical Lincoln when the magic of technology erases the distinction between robot and the real? In keeping with Wagner’s Romantic utopia, where artists are to be relieved of the burden of art work, in Disneyland all one need do is imagine. Yet what is the social purpose of such utopias, one may wonder, beyond merely providing people with something to do? Baudrillard (1994: 12) observes of Disneyland that it ‘exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland’. However, this is not a serious attempt to understand its purpose. Moreover, the observation is outdated. After President Trump (or in anticipation of his Second Coming) how could one possibly hide that Disneyland is the ‘real’ America?

There is nothing strictly modernist or futuristic about the artwork of the future. Our dreams (or nightmares) of advanced robotics go back at least to the ancient Greeks (Devecka, 2013) ⁷ and, as far as space travel is concerned, from the moment humans stood upright and inclined their heads toward the stars. Contrary to science fiction writer Ray Bradbury’s (1965) grandiloquent eulogy, Disneyland fails to ‘liberate men [sic] to their better selves’. At Disneyland, Bradbury proclaims, ‘the wild brute is gently corralled, not wised and squashed, not put upon and harassed, not tromped on by real-estate operators, nor exhausted by smog and traffic’ (np).

The Romantic’s pastoral fantasies will contrive to cover up, among other things, Disney’s brutish industrial relations strategy. Disney’s reaction to the 1941 animators strike was to enlist the help of Chicago labour racketeer Willie Bioff and anti-union agitator Gunther Lessing (Watts, 1997: 275, 290). Bradbury’s fantasy of ‘men’ ‘not put upon and harassed’ sits awkwardly with Uncle Walt’s public testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, when on 24 October 1947 we find him venting his anti-communist spleen by naming and shaming some of his former employees: Herbert Sorrell, David Hilberman, William Pomerance and Maurice Howard (Leslie, 2002: 216–218).

True to the Romantic’s carefree mimesis (the vocation of the leisured artist), the labour dispute supplied some of the raw material for Dumbo (1941). The scene in which the clowns celebrate their big-top triumph was rumoured to be the strike breakers’ caricature of strike leaders (Leslie, 2002: 207; Schickel, 1996[1968]: 266). Animated entirely in silhouette, the scene can be read as a piece of ‘totalitarian art’, one that closes the borders between reality and fantasy to better pursue politics by other means. Having decided to milk Dumbo’s talent for all it’s worth, the clowns rush off screen singing, ‘Let’s hit the Big Boss for a raise’.

Disney’s animosity towards Art Babbitt, a leading animator and advocate of unionization at the studio, is emblematic not so much of the politicization of art. Instead, the animosity betrays what Philippe Lacou-Labarthe (1994: 17) in his Wagner study describes as the ‘aestheticization of politics’. In the reckoning of the totalitarian artist, all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players, which may be a perfectly utopian ideal until one finds oneself locked out of the theatre. Disney fired Babbitt ‘more than once’ (Kinney, 1988: 139) while Chicago mobster Willie Bioff allegedly offered Babbitt ‘a $50-a-week raise to “go camping any time you please and stay as long as you like”’ (Watts, 1997: 283). If art imitates life, then totalitarian art imitates art imitating life. The scene in which the clowns vow to extract money from the ‘Big Boss’ might then be viewed as a caricature of Disney’s relationship with Babbitt; or, the strike breakers’ caricature of Disney’s caricature of the strike leaders.

Clearly the disavowal of the ‘work’ of art and corresponding objectification of Nature risks its fair share of social and political chaos. Wagner was no stranger to it, as Newman (1937) reveals in his account of the composer’s ‘dithyrambic’ involvement in the Dresden uprising of 1849, where, alongside his music director Carl August Röckel and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, Wagner took a leading role (pp. 73–123). Yet the tendency to vulgarize social and political chaos – ‘class struggle’ – as the betrayal of a Nature naturally bound to the Common Good, will take root both in Wagner and Disney as an ideological conviction.

For the Romantic, politics are merely a technical instrument which, if properly employed, will enable art, its utopian community and, by extension, the nation. Wagner was no less utopian–conservative than Disney in this respect, as he makes clear in his article of 16 June 1848, ‘What relation do republican endeavours bear to the Kingship?’ (Newman, 1937: 24–25). Living together in a state of mutual harmony is Wagner’s saccharine response to his own question. Disney, less inclined to write manifestos, could still never be accused of lacking patriotism or engaging in ‘un-American activities’. The studio’s Golden Age will come to symbolize a national popular mythology, one drawing on imagined folk traditions – ‘the cult of the past and of the individual’ (Adorno, 2005[1952]: 118) – and suffused with Hollywood kitsch.

Castles in the sky

The design for Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty Castle was lifted from the Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria. Commissioned in 1869 by Wagner’s patron King Ludwig II, the castle was kitsch even by the standards of its day, ‘a seemingly inaccessible quasi-mediaeval stronghold, perched on a dizzy height of rock, adorned with numberless emblems drawn from the sagas of Wagner operas’ (Newman, 1946: 312). Disney visited Neuschwanstein on a sightseeing tour in 1935, and in 1955 his replica was unveiled at the Anaheim theme park.

Having become so conspicuously identified with the plastic mythology of its Golden Age, the tendency today is to gloss over Disney’s pioneering work of the politically turbulent 1930s. However, in Hollywood Flatlands, Esther Leslie (2002) sets about challenging Disney’s reputation for fake castles. In a compelling alternative history that places the avant-garde Disney centre stage, we find Walter Benjamin siding with Mickey Mouse against the Nazis in ‘a rejection of the “civilized” bourgeois subject’ (p. 81). ‘The destructive character’, Leslie explains,

sees nothing permanent, and, in always forcing a way through, reduces what exists to rubble . . . Like fairy-tales and unlike the likes of Maeterlinck or Mary Wigman, Mickey Mouse presents important, vital experiences without misty symbolism, and without melodramatic pretension. (p. 82)

‘When he was a revolutionary’, Leslie continues, citing Adorno, ‘Wagner had wanted to compose an opera based on a Grimm fairy-tale’ (p. 118). However, revolutionary ideals would eventually fall by the wayside. As Adorno himself explains,

In sacrificing the fairy-tale to what has existed from time immemorial, Wagner’s work allows itself to be appropriated by bourgeois ideology. Myth becomes mythologizing; the power of what simply exists becomes its own legitimation. The links connecting bourgeois ideology to myth can be seen at their clearest in Lohengrin where the establishment of a sacrosanct sphere inviolable by any profane tampering coincides directly with the transfiguration of bourgeois arrangements. (Adorno, 2005[1952]: 116)

On one side, then, stands Disney’s protean-proletarian Mickey Mouse, exposing superficiality and impermanence and wreaking havoc everywhere; while, on the other side is the bourgeois–conformist Mouse, defender of the American way of life, ‘a sacrosanct sphere inviolable by any profane tampering’.

Mickey’s embourgeoisement coincides with technological advances at the Disney studio, namely its multiplane camera; from the flatness of line drawing we ‘advance’ to Renaissance perspective and painterly naturalism. Once the ‘inaccuracies’ of morphology and perspective are ironed out, Mickey’s chaos-mongering character will give way to an ensemble cast whose task is to serve the plot. Where in the early black and white shorts slapstick reigned, by the late 1930s Disney’s social conservatism would get the upper hand (Leslie, 2002: 200). The plasmatic anarchy of the early Mickey has disappeared by the time of Snow White, and in Dumbo too, despite the incorrigible clowning, a cravenly servile attitude to hierarchy is established.

The contrast with Snow White’s melodrama is obvious, although in the Mickey shorts the childish barbarian mouse will not give up so easily. In The Band Concert (1935) (his first foray into Technicolor), Mickey plays a Wagnerian conductor who beats the town-devouring tornado into submission. Disney revived the character in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice segment of Fantasia, and his preference for a Wagnerian conductor of music drama – as opposed to grand opera – is surely a knowing self-portrait. Disney is the eternal artist pampering his inner child. Never will he succumb to the sarcasm and anarchy of Tex Avery, for whom both artist and his art are inherently ridiculous. Although confirming Adorno’s characterization of Wagner as a composer ‘not really master of his own compositional handiwork’ (Geck, 2013: 115), Magical Maestro (1952) is a cartoon utterly different in tone to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. In Avery’s film, Mysto, a snubbed magician, takes revenge on celebrated opera singer, the Great Poochini, by substituting his magic wand for the conductor’s baton, which he uses to jinx the singer’s performance with a string of humiliations: rabbits, flowers, absurd costume changes. While both films certainly highlight the maestro’s ‘hankering after empty, superficial effects designed to dazzle his audience’ (Geck, 2013: 115), only in Disney’s film will art itself remain beyond reproach and in the hands of a true maestro.

Disney’s Depression-era shorts are deconstructions of the ego, or reminders to the smart alec that no individual is bigger than the masses, and that social problems are shared problems, or else they are not problems at all. Along with The Band Concert, Moving Day (1936) makes no particular concession to character. Visually there is no garish scenery and the colour palette is muted, like the melancholy character of the piano. In the former, Donald Duck plays an ice-cream seller who wanders on for a spot of musical mischief before the entire orchestra is whisked away by a storm; whereas, in Moving Day, Goofy takes on the disobedient piano and Donald is outwitted by a sink plunger, before a gas explosion blows their house to smithereens and they escape under a hail of debris without paying the rent. Note how the animism persists here, the social relation between ‘men’, in Marx’s famous phrase, assuming ‘the phantasmagoric form of a relation between things’. With Mickey’s attempt at compromise having failed miserably, our heroes resort to the only language the capitalist understands: chaos.

Are we to acknowledge then that Disney’s 1930s transition from short subjects to feature films marks a break with modernism and a turn to melodrama? The flat answer is no, and for the simple reason that Disney’s animated shorts were melodramatic from the beginning of the sound era. ⁸ The Silly Symphonies are melodramas – literally musical acts or dances ⁹ – and Steamboat Willie (1928), apart from its novelty as one of the first synchronized sound cartoons, was propelled by the success of The Jazz Singer (1927), a silent film set to music (Gabler, 2006: 142; Schickel, 1996[1968]: 124; Watts, 1997: 54). What unites Disney and Wagner in their respective strivings to achieve the artwork of the future – no less the music of the future – is that neither of them is producing conventional musicals. Both are producing music dramas. Moreover, since ‘music drama’ is a constant of the Disney studio’s output from the late 1920s to the Golden Age, the suggestion that Disney renounced subversive character (ethos) in favour of conservative plot (mythos) is to ascribe a leading role to character where none exists.

Sound and music drama

In the Wagner lexicon, ‘music drama’ or Drama is strenuously opposed to Italian opera’s formalized staging of musical scenes. Wagner envisions operatic music as immediately dramatic, rather than a vehicle for the drama. The tragedies of ancient Greece provide Wagner with his prototype for a revolutionary reimagining of opera as total artwork – one combining poetry, music, spectacle and performance – capable of recalibrating all the senses; and, in the Germany of Wagner’s day, of reviving an authentic national culture. In music drama, character is but one among the totality of dramatic elements striving for ‘musical’ harmony. One could liken the arrangement to what Althusser (2005[1965]: 255) refers to as a ‘decentred structure in dominance’. With Disney, music, instead of being the cause of humour, is an effect of the ‘humours’, which is to say of all the fibrous tensions comprising the whole. There is a musicality, especially to the Disney shorts – ‘beasts living in jazz rhythm’, to paraphrase Leslie (2002: 81) – which far outstrips any concern for musical ‘numbers’. Indeed, the rigid conventions of the musical interlude (characters performing songs to musical accompaniment) is absent from the Disney repertoire, at least in the Depression-era short films (unlike in the Fleischer shorts of the 1930s, say). Gradually, however, sentimental melodrama begins to stymie the promise of a unified sensorial experience by ‘overwhelming the listener with a passion and excitement that does not even pause for breath’ (Adorno, 2005[1952]: 101). In the feature films, the musical dynamics of the songs switch gear, relegating the drama to minor importance.

To cite one of countless examples, the ‘I’ve Got No Strings’ number from Pinocchio (1940), in which the titular character learns that alienation is the price one pays for having an ego, is so sonically and visually accomplished as to render the music superfluous to the action. Here the slapstick is slick and inoffensive. What is at stake is a purely didactic routine, an exercise in communicating the plot in the least jarring and most economical manner possible, courtesy of a three-minute pop song. This is not to say that the audience will be inclined to exit the cinema after three minutes. On the contrary, they will gladly put up with any ‘complication’ of plot in anticipation of the next three-minute number, which metonymically represents (or reprises) the entire film in microcosm.

One of several innovations Wagner introduces in his music drama and which has been commented on ever since is that of the leitmotiv. For Adorno (2005[1952]: 36) this ‘degeneration’ of the musical work ‘leads directly to cinema music where the sole function of the leitmotiv is to announce heroes or situations so as to help the audience to orientate itself more easily’. The ‘decadence’ is obvious in the music of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released as the first soundtrack recording in 1937–1938, and whose hits include ‘Whistle While You Work’, ‘Heigh-Ho’ and ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’. The fact that such motivs break the totality, decentring the structure of the spectacle, so to speak, ‘is not without its revolutionary implications’, admits Adorno (2005[1952]: 38) . Disney, like Wagner, atomizes the spectacle, animating everyday life not with popular songs (the music of the hit parade), but through abstractions or motivs of the music drama. Art imitates life, which then reflects back on art, thus confronting the conventions of easy listening. ‘Broken down into the smallest units’, writes Adorno, ‘the totality is supposed to become controllable, and it must submit to the will of the subject who has liberated himself [sic] from all pre-existing forms’ (p. 39).

However, this ‘analogue to the methods of the impressionist painters’, Adorno continues, Wagner fails to pursue to its ‘logical conclusion’. In Disney, too, there is a strong tendency to recoil from the full social implications of technical innovation in the sphere of art; the more ‘advanced’ the technology, the more old habits of viewing and listening die hard. Certainly there will be no attempt by Disney to reconceptualize the two in the manner worthy of a new art form. Coca-Cola might be a taste sensation, but it still has to be served in glass bottles.

Richard Schickel states the obvious when noting that

it is possible that The Mouse would have had a life no longer than many of its competitors if a technological revolution had not intervened and presented Disney with an opportunity that was particularly suited to his gifts and interests and that he seized with an alacrity shared by few in Hollywood. (Schickel (1996[1968]: 124)

What Schickel fails to note however is how the ‘technological revolution’ of sound might have fared without the Mouse’s involvement. It is one thing to assume that, had the technology ‘not intervened and presented Disney with an opportunity’, Mickey Mouse would not have appeared six years later in an animated cartoon with Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin. But it is quite another to suggest that no other mouse, duck or anthropomorphized animal would have managed the trick either. The only ‘revolution’ at stake with the introduction of sound, aside from the upgrade of movie theatres – in 1926 Vitaphone sound effects technology ‘could cost upwards of $25,000 per screen’ (Flom, 1997: 50) – was the one that threw a spanner in the works of the Hollywood star system. By 1931, Charlie Chaplin, whose fortunes as a movie star were paradoxically undermined by sound, was ‘insisting’ that screenings of City Lights (1931) be supported by the Mickey Mouse short The Birthday Party (1931) (Korkis, 2016).

Did sound bring about a revolution in the social and economic relations of production on the back of the Chaplin–Mouse fraternity? City Lights, a Depression-era film, would earn $4.25 million worldwide in the first year of its release (Variety, 1932: 62). Chaplin, meanwhile, who 20 years later would be exiled from the US and ‘formally charged with being a member of the Communist Party’ (Flom, 1997: 224), and no doubt fearing his imminent demise, demanded 50 percent of the film’s gross (p. 73). ¹⁰

City Lights stands as a valiant attempt by its director to resist synchronization. The production of sound and dialogue films was hardly a straightforward matter of adding the ‘missing’ sound. It was not a question of technology. On the contrary, as far as Chaplin was concerned, it was about questioning the abstraction, the atomization, that ‘sound’ had begun to impose on cinema. In City Lights, Chaplin’s resistance is somewhat futile given that he and his studio, United Artists, were swimming against the current of an industry-wide conversion, which prior to the Depression had managed to generate a 50 per cent increase in box office receipts (Flom, 1997: 51). Instead, Chaplin would have to make do with lampooning the evident hypocrisy of progress. This he achieves in the film’s opening scene by rendering the mayor and fellow dignitaries incomprehensible with cartoon voices. Following their ludicrous-sounding speeches, the monument to Peace and Prosperity is unveiled to reveal the Tramp asleep in the arms of Prosperity.

How far this relatively mild subversion of the new talking picture medium might have gone we can only speculate on. Given the infrequent release of Chaplin product (a mere two films in the 1930s) it is difficult to see how any attempt at creating an alternative cinema could have succeeded, given that fellow mime artists Harold Lyold and Buster Keaton had both transitioned to talkies prior to the release of City Lights in 1931. As for Disney, the director of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs would prove less inclined to upset emerging ‘innovations’ and more to beat the establishment at its own game. Snow White’s Hollywood premiere, held at the Carthay Circle Theatre in December 1937, where Marlene Dietrich, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Judy Garland, Shirley Temple and co. paraded in front of ‘replicas from the first feature cartoon’, bears out the strategy (RKO-Pathe News, 1937).

Of the premiere, Gabler (2006: 332) writes that ‘Everyone in the theater seemed to be crying and dabbing at his or her eyes.’ The Disney biographer’s hagiography extends to an account of the Fantasia premiere as well, held at the same venue three years later, and the general state of hysteria and hyperbole. By this point in Disney’s career, distinguishing between the legend and what actually happened is futile. As Cecil B DeMille would remark of the premiere: ‘There is nothing in our earthly imaginings which can equal, let alone surpass, what Disney has accomplished’ (p. 428). Subsequently there was no longer any point in watching a Disney film: cinemagoers could simply hand over their money at the box office and go home, safe in the knowledge that the film was beyond the ken of mere mortals. Such eulogies imply that Disney was, in fact, producing a synaesthetic cinema, albeit one involving a revaluation of all the senses yet to be recognized as such. An artwork of the future indeed.

Fantasia had sound (as opposed to music) as its main selling point. One can doubt that by retrofitting theatres with Fantasound, the early forerunner of surround sound, Disney meant to improve the quality of the musical experience. Reviews of the film suggest a glaring absence of taste; the fact that Disney’s interpretation of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, for example, was widely considered ‘offensive’ (Gabler, 2006: 427). The bad taste is also evident in Disney’s dealings with Igor Stravinsky, with the massacre of The Rite of Spring best summed up by the composer himself:

The instrumentation had been improved by such stunts as having the horns play their glissandi an octave higher in the ‘Danse de la terre.’ The order of the pieces had been shuffled, too, and the most difficult of them eliminated – though this did not save the musical performance, which was execrable. I will say nothing about the visual compliment, as I do not wish to criticize an unresisting imbecility . . . (Schickel, 1996[1968]: 246)

As Adorno puts it in discussing Wagner, ‘Music can only be bodied forth in the present as a result of the most intense effort of memory and anticipation.’ He continues: ‘This effort is the task of authentic thematic work, something evaded in Wagner’s case by the trick of using extra-musical mnemonics in the form of motivs charged with allegorical meanings’ (Adorno, 2005[1952]: 88).

Where art calls for unity and harmony through and in spite of difference, in Wagner’s music drama such unity and harmony cannot hold. The obstinacy of hearing under advanced capitalism, the fact that the ear will not conform, that the audience just will not pay attention, leads Wagner to wage war on the senses with ‘ecstatic passages’ and ‘intoxication’ (Adorno, 2005[1952]: 89). Such ‘technological hostility to consciousness’ is particularly evident in Fantasia, where any potential for ambiguity is eliminated. Instead of synthesizing difference, all ‘musical’ interpretation tends to be visually signposted, as in the animation chosen for Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, where the notes are made to ‘resemble’ or ‘reflect’ the images presented on screen (or vice versa). Where music drama calls for harmony between disparate elements, Disney gives us mere allegory. The animation ‘shows’ what the music, apparently, is trying to say. Hence the maelstrom of natural evolution depicted by The Rite of Spring, with bursts of clarinet for bursting volcanoes and crashing cymbals for crashing waves. Such literalism, or mimetic ‘duplication of what the music depicts, the coordination of music and staging’, is a defining feature of the naturalism of Wagner’s early works (Geck, 2013: 87).

Of course, the apparent maelstrom in Fantasia is only a maelstrom from the point of view of trying to represent 4.3 billion years of evolution in a 20-minute segment. But then this cinematic short-hand, where sound becomes inseparable from its visual meaning, and where polysemy cannot be tolerated under any circumstances, is precisely what is being aimed at here. The subject of Disney’s film turns out not to be natural history at all, but the artist’s heavy-handed interpretation of it. To paraphrase Adorno paraphrasing Nietzsche, in Fantasia we witness the birth of animation through the spirit of music (Adorno, 2005[1952]: 96).

With animation, along with cinema more generally, sound is alienated from the totality of musical expression and made to serve quite separate ends. Perhaps animation’s structure in dominance is not music or ‘song and dance’ (melos) as such, but plot (mythos), where the (silly) symphonic nature of the art is no longer rhythmic, but narrative. Melodramatic soap opera provides the obvious example of this fragmentation, or commodification of the senses, effectively telling the audience how to feel or what to think (and when) with sentimental music, to the point where, today, to watch television without music, be it factual or fictional, is to risk ‘losing the plot’. In a recent study of the cartoon output of Hanna-Barbera, Sullivan (2021) labels the studio’s sound effects library as ‘iconic’ (p. 23). In television cartoons such as The Flintstones (1960–1966) and Scooby Doo, Where Are You! (1969–1970), in which animation is limited by budgetary and scheduling constraints, ‘trajectory mimesis’ describes ‘a kinetic resonance between sound and image over a representational one’ (Sullivan, 2021: 29).

It is a measure of cinema’s alienation of the dramatic arts that sound effects can count as the metonymic equivalent of a studio’s entire creative output; a bit part equal to the whole. Today, thanks to Hanna-Barbera and its successors, any action whatever, any thought or gesture by a character, rather than being intended as a subject for musical interpretation, will stand as a distinct narrative unit, ‘ready-made’ to fill in a creative hole. Yet any suggestion that sound effects mark the transition from a more authentically musical age of animated cartoons may be wide of the mark. Disney was pioneering the commodification of the sound of music long before the television era. We might even see him as a pioneer of ‘home cinema’ in the sense that, with Snow White, he hits upon the novel idea of allowing his audience to take at least part of the film home. In the pre-history of video recorders, Disney could at least offer cinemagoers the movie soundtrack. It was the tip of what was to become a gargantuan merchandizing iceberg (Watts, 1997: 198–199). ¹¹

Wagner was no different to Disney in his cynical exploitation of music publishing (Geck, 2013: 82, 114). ¹² The sole difference being that, in Wagner’s case, where such lucrative licensing deals provided much needed funds to finance his increasingly lavish stage productions (206–208), in Disney’s case theatrical film revenue would by the time of his death in 1966 no longer account for the corporation’s main business activity, having declined from 77 to a mere 45 percent (Schickel, 1996[1968]: 29). Nonetheless this novelty of an artist (or impresario in Disney’s case) who could weave his creations into the fabric of everyday life, or bend the American Dream to his way of seeing and hearing, epitomizes Wagner’s ultimate aesthetic goal, namely his ‘desire to create a universal myth’ (Geck, 2013: 197).

Conclusion: Unhappy endings?

Disney animation of the Depression-era and subsequent Golden Age expanded the horizons of cinematic art. However, given Disney’s Wagner aesthetic, according to which art and life cohere in primordial unity, art’s expanded horizons would become inseparable from those of reality. For the Wagnerian the total artwork is without limits, the ‘limits’ of art being the limits of the world. One crucial aspect of the Wagner aesthetic which would appear to run completely counter to Disney and to everything he stood for is the idea that romance is an irredeemably tragic characteristic of the human condition. Where Wagner’s music drama is suffused with Schopenhaurian pessimism and the idea that ‘meaningful love is impossible in a meaningless world’ (Geck, 2013: 30), in Disney’s the blind optimism of the American Way of Life prevails, which in the wider socio-economic context of the 1940s is utterly deluded (note simply that Disney’s Golden Age has World War II and the Holocaust for its social backdrop). ¹³ Yet one wonders whether Disney ultimately succumbs, despite himself, to the same variety of tragic pessimism. He endured, in 1940–1941, at the Golden Age’s apex, the humiliating shocks of financial restructuring at his studio and the animators strike, both of which combined to pose serious obstacles to the kind of art he was trying to achieve.

What was Disney’s response to this complex of setbacks, and how did it come to influence the Disney aesthetic and the studio’s creative output in the years that followed? This question lies somewhat beyond the scope of this article, in which I have set out to argue that the Wagner aesthetic, as much if not more than any variety of modernism or avant-garde experimentalism, defines the Disney aesthetic for much of the 1930s and early 1940s. Wagner is certainly a modernist in the sense that he embraces technology, without which the artwork of the future and its recalibration of all the senses would be inconceivable. Disney too will never tire of ‘innovating’ at his studio. But at the same time the modernist Disney is also seduced by the Romanticism that Wagner professes in the passages of Art and Revolution, and therefore by the reification, or objectification, of Nature. As I have argued, from Snow White to Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi, both worldviews – forward and backward-looking, futurist and pastoral – according to which the work invested in the art spectacle is strongly disavowed, are combined.

‘In theory and in the ideology of his works’, writes Adorno (2005[1952]: 96-97), ‘[Wagner] rejected the division of labour in terms that recall National Socialist phrases about the subordination of private interests to the public good.’ Disney’s approach to industrial relations and the on-screen depiction of natural hierarchy, in which ‘clowns’ harass the boss for a raise and animals know their place, is broadly consistent. The Big Boss’s signal ‘innovation’ in settling the 1941 animators strike was to reduce his workforce from 1200 to 694 (Gabler, 2006: 460). Meanwhile Disney’s artistic innovations were no less heavy-handed. His massacre of The Rite of Spring (Disney threatened to use the music anyway if its composer objected; see Schickel, 1996[1968]: 246) is but one example of a glaring insensitivity to the marriage of music and animation, and certainly of an unwillingness to explore the revolutionary potentials of the new medium. Disney’s signature style will proceed to overwhelm his feature films, in which what passes for drama (the atomized motivs of a princess, fawn, elephant, puppet redeemed) is trumped by yet more ‘innovation’ (the multiplane camera, Fantasound) to the detriment of animation’s ‘melody’ and originality in its striving to become the artwork of the future.

Based on this account, it is hard to believe that Disney was half as optimistic as his happy endings suggest. How could star-spangled optimism prevail on the strength of an aesthetic so glaringly beset by disharmony and discord? The short answer is it could not; which explains why, by 1942, Disney had flung his studio headlong into wartime propaganda. Financially naive and artistically questionable, The New Spirit (1942), in which an oddly obsequious Donald Duck exhorts the audience to help the war effort by paying their taxes on time, represents an apparent nihilist turn. Ironically, despite being commissioned by the US Treasury, Disney’s patriotic gesture was not reciprocated by Congress, which refused to pay the short film’s $80,000 budget in full (Schickel, 1996[1968]: 271; Watts, 1997: 298). As Watts (1997: 302) notes, ‘Having been traumatized by the strike of 1941, Disney generally experienced the next four years as another series of shocks to his worldview.’

Two additional features of a nihilist turn deserve brief mention. First, note Disney’s foresight in recognizing that the artwork of the future no longer depended on the art of animation but on the medium of its distribution. In 1954, Disney signed a deal with ABC to produce a primetime TV series, Walt Disney’s Disneyland and in 1961 the series, renamed Wonderful World of Color, moved to NBC, whose parent company RCA manufactured colour television sets (Watts, 1997: 476). Second, mention must be made of the project that would transform Disney from animation maestro into a far more ‘totalizing’ aesthetic. Tormented in his search for perfection by theatrical constraints beyond his control, Wagner would take the logical next step and build his own theatre: the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. Tormented in his search for perfection, as much by soured industrial relations as artistic ones, Disney would take the logical next step and build his own theme park: Disneyland at Anaheim. Henceforth there was no more time to waste on music drama, whose merry melodies make life bearable through the suffering and pain human beings are destined to endure. Drama as such, along with the suffering artist, had by now been rendered superfluous to capitalist realism. As Disney would drily admit in 1963: ‘I worry about my pictures, but if anything goes wrong in the [Disneyland] park, I just tear it down and put it right’ (Schickel, 1996[1968]: 323).