<i>Animating the Victorians: Disney’s Literary History</i> by Patrick C. Fleming

Patrick C. Fleming’s Animating the Victorians: Disney’s Literary History traces connections between the Walt Disney Company and Victorian literature and culture. Fleming’s approach is two-pronged. On the one hand, he views Disney’s corporate history and creative production through the lens of Victorian literary and cultural studies, exploring the influence of Victorian texts, ideologies, and technologies on Walt Disney, the Walt Disney Company, and many of the company’s films. At the same time, Fleming also analyzes the ways in which Disney’s adaptations engage with and help shape the reception history of Victorian texts such as Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen.While previous studies of Disney and Disney productions have understandably tended to focus on the company’s American origins, Animating the Victorians examines the British—and in the case of Andersen, Danish—texts and cultural ideologies that helped shape the Walt Disney Company and its films. The first chapter, “Disney and the Victorian Tradition,” thus argues that the rise of the Walt Disney Company in the twentieth century relied on “institutions, protections, and technologies” that were first established in nineteenth-century Britain (4). These included the development of children’s literature and popular entertainment industries, the rise of international copyright laws, and the invention of early sound recording and visual image projection technologies. The material in the sections on “The Golden Age of Children’s Literature,” “Copyright Law, the Victorian Business Ethos, and New Technologies,” “Victorian Theater and Disney’s Films,” and “Victorian Public Entertainments and Disney’s Theme Parks” will likely be familiar to Victorian scholars, but the chapter is easy to follow as it is well-researched and clearly written. The final section on “Dickens, Disney, Oliver, and Company” stands out for its analysis of Disney’s approach to adapting Oliver Twist. Fleming freely admits that Oliver & Company (1988) is not an especially notable film in itself; however, his use of material from the Walt Disney Archives to trace the development of its script is notable and convincingly positions this film within a history of stage and screen adaptations that began in Dickens’s lifetime.Fleming’s second and third chapters look at the various ways in which Disney adapted and interpreted Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. Chapter 2, “Alice from Gag to Franchise,” focuses on Disney’s adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books from the early 1920s to 2010. Fleming situates these adaptations within the context of Disney’s corporate history and of film history more generally. His discussion of Disney’s 1923 short film Alice’s Wonderland, for instance, examines the ways in which Disney used the episodic narrative structure of theAlice books as a springboard to create the gags and condensed narratives that defined early Hollywood animated shorts. This chapter makes ample use of material from the Walt Disney Archives—a notable strength of Animating the Victorians, since access to these archives has often been restricted. Much of chapter 2 examines reports on the Alice books and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan that were compiled in the 1930s by Disney employees Al Perkins and Dorothy Blank as background research for the feature-length animated films the studio would eventually release in the early 1950s. Fleming argues that these reports are by no means simplistic and often address issues that appear in scholarly studies of adaptation, such as the pitfalls of remaining overly faithful to the written text and the challenges that the episodic structure of Carroll’s novel would pose when being adapted into a full-length narrative feature film as opposed to a short gag. Perkins and Blank analyzed Carroll’s and Barrie’s novels, read reviews of existing stage and screen adaptations, read author biographies, and consulted at least one notable early scholarly text on children’s literature, F. J. Harvey Darton’s Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life. Fleming’s approach builds on the work of scholars such as Nicholas Sammond in arguing that Disney’s creative process and products should be taken seriously, as popular media forms that were grounded in knowledge of wider cultural trends.Chapter 3, “Animating Hans Christian Andersen,” shifts focus slightly to examine the ways in which Disney adaptations of Andersen’s tales from the 1930s to the 2010s reflect and reinforce changing understandings of Andersen’s life and work. This chapter does not rely as heavily on material from the Disney archives as chapter 2 does; instead, it analyzes Disney films in conjunction with trends in biographical research on and popular conceptions of Andersen. Thus, Fleming interprets the 1939 animated short The Ugly Duckling as presenting a version of the tale that reinforces a rags-to-riches narrative in which the social outcast’s true identity is revealed and rewarded, in line with contemporary understandings of Andersen’s tale and life story. By the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, however, biographical interest in Andersen had shifted toward examinations of his commentaries on social class and his non-heteronormative sexuality. Fleming reads the animated feature films The Little Mermaid (1989) and Frozen (2013) in light of this cultural shift, examining the camp and queer undertones below the surface of the heterosexual marriage plot in The Little Mermaid and the rejection of a marriage plot in Frozen. These readings in themselves will be fairly familiar to scholars of Disney films, but the ways Fleming contextualizes them alongside changing interpretations of Andersen’s life are quite valuable.“Princesses and Pirates,” the fourth chapter of Animating the Victorians, examines some of the possible Victorian antecedents for the depictions of gender and sexuality in Disney’s princess and pirate branding. Fleming acknowledges that Disney’s binary association of girls with princesses and boys with pirates may appear as regressive as the Victorian ideology of separate spheres for men and women, but argues that the gender performances of princess and pirate have always been somewhat fluid, for both the Victorians and Disney. He sets analyses of Disney princesses such as Snow White and Moana next to discussions of Queen Victoria’s daughters and Tennyson’s 1847 poem The Princess, reading the princess identity as a gender performance. Similarly, he traces the changing portrayals and performances of pirate masculinity from Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates through the pirates of Robert Louis Stevenson, J. M. Barrie, Gilbert and Sullivan, Disney’s 1950 Treasure Island and 1953 Peter Pan, and finally into the twenty-first century with Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Fleming’s analysis in this fourth chapter emphasizes the flexibility of Disney’s princess- and pirate-coded gendered branding and the ways in which that gendered branding can shift as cultural norms do. The book’s conclusion examines the ways in which Cory Doctorow’s 2003 novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Bansky’s 2015 art installation Dismaland recontextualize and rework notions of Disney’s influence. Ultimately, Fleming argues that Disney texts, like Victorian ones, are not “a hegemony to be spurned but . . . a tradition with which to actively engage” (153).Because Fleming’s book is aimed at general audiences who are interested in the history of the Walt Disney Corporation as well as scholars, he places the bulk of his critical contextualization in an appendix rather than in the introduction, so that nonscholars may skip this section as they please. Scholarly readers may well want to consult this appendix as they read the introduction, since it adds depth to the juxtapositions and comparisons that feature in chapters 1 and 4. (Indeed, scholarly audiences might find even this appendix tantalizingly brief.) In the appendix, Fleming situates his book alongside studies that examine the ways Victorian texts and contexts are reimagined and reinterpreted in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as the works of Sonya Sawyer Fritz, Sara K. Day, Laura Helen Marks, and Sharon Aronofsky Weltman. His analyses of Disney’s films build on the adaptation theory of scholars such as Linda Hutcheon and Simone Murray to view these adaptations as highly intertextual components of global media franchises, while the inclusion of Andersen gestures toward transnational Victorian studies.Fleming deliberately places Disney alongside F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot in his opening pages: this is a book that pushes back against strict divisions between Victorians and moderns, literature and film, or scholars and Disney princesses, tracing Victorian influences—and Disney’s influences—freely across temporal, geographical, and media boundaries. Its use of archival material is notable; Animating the Victorians should be quite valuable to those studying Disney’s creative and corporate history. This book should also be of interest to scholars studying film adaptations of Victorian texts and the ways in which the Victorians have been reimagined and incorporated into American popular culture.

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