I suppose that the best thing which could be said about the film is that it's harmless, but it suffers from a lot of problems both as a movie and a biography. I've never been a fan of narration in a film- it rarely works- and this movie has a lot of it, done by the actor playing Walt. He explains things which are perfectly obvious, as though the audience wasn't capable of figuring out what was going on by themselves. It's very annoying. Also, for a movie about the man who made The Happiest Place On Earth so-called, the film is curiously grim and depressing, an unrelenting run of failure from the beginning until almost the final scene, when Walt experiences a success, finally. It would be one thing if this was true to life, but the film also plays fast and loose with the facts, making incidents much worse than they actually were. For example, it's true that Disney's first company, Laugh-O-Gram, went bankrupt, but in Walt, they have him end up homeless, eating out of a garbage can in an alley. This never happened. Neither did the scene where some of his animators walk out and go to another company because he couldn't pay them. In reality, they all fulfilled their contracts. It seems a weird choice to not only dwell on Disney's failures, but embellish them, and spend very little time on his successes. In the end, the movie was dull, depressing, and inaccurate.
Last night we watched Walt Before Mickey, the 2015 independent biographical film about the early life and career of Walt Disney. It's based on the Timothy Susanin book Walt Before Mickey: Disney's Early Years, 1919-1928. I'm always up for a good biography so was interested to see a movie about Walt before the behemoth that the Disney Company became, but unfortunately it's not good, or particularly biographical either, apparently.
I suppose that the best thing which could be said about the film is that it's harmless, but it suffers from a lot of problems both as a movie and a biography. I've never been a fan of narration in a film- it rarely works- and this movie has a lot of it, done by the actor playing Walt. He explains things which are perfectly obvious, as though the audience wasn't capable of figuring out what was going on by themselves. It's very annoying. Also, for a movie about the man who made The Happiest Place On Earth so-called, the film is curiously grim and depressing, an unrelenting run of failure from the beginning until almost the final scene, when Walt experiences a success, finally. It would be one thing if this was true to life, but the film also plays fast and loose with the facts, making incidents much worse than they actually were. For example, it's true that Disney's first company, Laugh-O-Gram, went bankrupt, but in Walt, they have him end up homeless, eating out of a garbage can in an alley. This never happened. Neither did the scene where some of his animators walk out and go to another company because he couldn't pay them. In reality, they all fulfilled their contracts. It seems a weird choice to not only dwell on Disney's failures, but embellish them, and spend very little time on his successes. In the end, the movie was dull, depressing, and inaccurate.
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