Just watched the last quarter of a special about the life of Walt Disney, and it stirred up all my feels.

As with a lot of people, Disney got me young and has never entirely let go. I might be happy with Uncle Walt’s legacy or I might be made with it, but I will always, always, always love it.

It’s like family that way. Uncle Walt was an honorary member of millions of families in his life. Mine was one of them, mostly through me. Long after his death, Disney owns a deep, warm spot in my soul, and has provided me with such an extraordinary source of spiritual nourishment and inner flourishing that I can’t imagine who I would be without it.

Before I ever saw a Disney movie, I listened to Disney albums and tried to imagine the whole movie from just the songs. I would look at those wonderfully rich and colorful scenes from the movies in the “storybook” part of the album, and listen to the songs, and on some deep level, I knew that they were “right”. That they represented how things should be.

I still carry those ideals within me. Not the superficial stuff that people attack Walt over. The deep values of courage, compassion, cohesion, and community that runs through every Disney movie.

Those albums represent my first era of Disney. I don’t think that I really understood that Disney was a person back then. My little mind could not connect all this wonder and magic with a person.

It would have been like pointing at a sunset and saying “Your uncle painted that. ”

My second era of Disney came in the 1980’s, when two things happened. One, the VCR and the video store came along, and suddenly I could watch a lot of Disney movies I had never seen before. My appreciation for Disney grew with each one.

And then The Lion King happened, and everything changed.

It is very hard to put into words how much that movie means to me. The person who left that movie was not the same person who had walked into it. To this day, so many years later, I grapple with its enormity. There is just something about The Lion King which speaks to me on such a deep level that to explain it almost seems obscene.

All I can say is, that movie is a part of me, and a very good part it is.

And that’s why I get all mushy when I think of Disney. I owe their animated features so much, especially The Lion King, Jungle Book, and Robin Hood.

I think that they mean so much to me, in part at least, because I was such a lonely child, and that sort of thing doesn’t go away with age. I was 21 when Lion King came out, and still, it spoke to me. There is such warmth and goodness in Disney’s movies that they are, in a sense, like the religion I never had.

In that world, people cared deeply about one another.

I find it unfortunate how the name of Disney became associated with all the false optimism and phony sentiment of the 50’s. It was probably a necessary step in the evolution of the American consciousness, but to me, Disney was never about being phony because he never claimed his works were anything but fantasy.

Disney filled his movies with optimism and wholesomeness. They were meant to be escapes from reality as well as a way to teach children important lessons about growing up and about dealing with things. To call them false because they don’t depict reality is asinine. I understand that the fantasy filled Fifties had to give way to reality eventually, and that Disney made a convenient scapegoat for people to blame for the Fifties’ inability to face reality, but Disney never lied to anyone.

He depicted how things should be, not how they were.

In a way, Disney movies were the most potent form of contact I had with what I think of as a normal family. I love my family, but we are not the warmest of people. And I have gone on and on about how I felt unwanted growing up, and how there just did not seem to be a lot of love around.

And so, without ever intending it, a notion of how family is supposed to be formed in my mind, made from one half Disney movies (and other animated features, most notably the Secret of NIMH) and one half all the sitcoms I watched growing up.

Sure, most of them were not the traditional family comedy, with Mom and Dad and kids, but they all depicted people who had their differences but who cared about each other anyhow.

My family was, for the most part, not very close. We all did our own thing. Even when we were together, my father’s volatile temper kept us from truly relaxing.

Maybe none of us ever stood a chance at “normal”. I don’t know.

One of the things that occurred to me while watching the bio was that if I had been a kid in the Fifties or possibly even in the Sixties, I would have probably become a sort of Disney conservative. The Disney product of the time would have given me some chance at feeling like I was a part of something bigger than myself and I might well have become the sort of person who thought that the system works for everybody if they are just willing to work hard and make sacrifices.

Because the thing is, in many ways, Disney was quite progressive for his era. He would be considered racist and intolerant by modern standards, of course, and extremely sexist, but his was more of a Ned Flanders than a Dick Cheney conservatism, and I truly believe that his heart was always in the right place, even when his politics were not.

Well, I could write for hours and still not cover it all. That will be more than sufficient for tonight.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.