Teacher Disney

Walt Disney has turned teacher. FORTUNE last week reported that educational and propaganda films for the Government now constitute more than three-fourths of the Disney output. Carried away by what it had seen of Walt's new films, FORTUNE exclaimed:

"It already seems possible that this modest, farm-bred young man who never finished high school will be remembered best as one of the great teachers of all time."

Disney himself makes no such claims. All he is trying to do is tell a clear, simple story, lightened by touches of amusement. Already produced or in the Disney works are films on such diverse subjects as teaching flush riveting to workers, Basic English (TIME, June 15), anti-tank gunnery, prostitution, food, Nazi ideology, malaria, good neighbors. He is making some 20 instruction films for the Navy; for the Army he has turned out a series of films on airplane identification, is preparing another on the Nazi invasion of Poland. For fun and good neighborliness he is turning out twelve on Latin America (one of them: El Gaucho Goofy) to be commercially distributed.

What prompted this prolific pedagogy was the phenomenal success of his famed Donald Duck film on income-tax paying. The New Spirit, whose $80,000 cost Congress refused to pay. This film, made for the Treasury Department, played to 26,000,000 people, 37% of whom. Gallup-polled, said it animated their willingness to pay taxes. Since then he has tried filming such abstract subjects as Emotion v. Reason. High-domed Reason is personified as an automobile driver. Emotion is a caveman chained to the back seat. When they meet a pretty girl, Emotion yells "Hey, Babe," overrules Driver Reason's caution. Again Reason yields when Emotion suggests a little drink; they wind up in jail. But as regards babies and the U.S. flag, Emotion and Reason get along fine together.

Says FORTUNE: "In one respect Walt Disney is a man of almost godlike power, for there is literally no limit to the things he can create on the screen. He can set forth anything from a world in evolution to the whirling of electrons invisible to the human eye. He can produce a mosquito big enough to tower over a village. . . . He can get inside a complex machine, slow down its action, explain its operation to apprentices with a clarity impossible in any other medium."

Teacher Disney has not yet been welcomed as a colleague by professional pedagogues. Three years ago one of his greatest admirers, Harvard's Professor Robert D. Feild (author of The Art of Walt Disney), was dropped by Harvard's conservative art department because of too much enthusiasm for modern art, particularly Disney's. But Disney is by all odds the most successful cinema educator to date. Says FORTUNE: "Previous educational movies, with such rare exceptions as the MARCH OF TIME and Pare Lorentz films, have been dull as dishwater and often embarrassingly coy in the bargain. Disney's are not only enlightening but exciting."

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