FILM CHRONICLE
229
neutrality (these are James Agee's special quarry), or by maintaining a
skinny focus---<:oncentrating on a faithful presentation of miliet.i', per–
haps, or concentrating on making our pulses jump. Disney is not one to
play it safe. His appetite is too good. He blunders right in, and quite
loses control of his material for a while. No longer mischievously im–
provising upon a world that is unsure, he suffers instead the contortions
of one who inhabits this world. For a while, out of the instinct of self–
preservation, he keeps returning us periodically to what has the sem–
blance of solid ground. Thus when Donald hops onto the pop-up book,
the camera immediately closes in and very soon we are moving round
corners, turning down streets not visible in our first supposedly over-all
glance. When Donald flies into the pictures in the portfolio, he pene–
trates
into
even further beyonds; boundaries fall apart for him and he
moves from realm to realm without deference to the laws of physics.
But periodically the camera backs off from the pop-up book to give us
an "over-all" glance again. And periodically we are swooped out of the
portfolio to enter it anew.
Something rather similar to these departures ahd returns has become
almost a cliche in musicals. The scene will open in a theatre or night–
club. A stage will be defined for us, a visibly solid platform. The camera
will then close in on the show that is going on, and promptly transport
us into never never lands. Again we turn corners to behold new vistas.
Or perhaps the small courtyard with which we were first confronted
(in which Betty Grable is drilling some maidens) just expands and
expands and expands, the camera allowing us farther and farther views.
Or perhaps we move up on the pinball machine we have seen the charac–
ters on the stage playing, and suddenly among the pins Eleanor Powell
emerges, costumed as a pinball, to execute a dance. Always at the end
of such !lights we are returned to the members of the audience in their
theatre seats or around their nightclub tables, and they mechanically
smirk and clap as though nothing at all strange had been happening.
Disney, by having Donald periodically hop off the pop-up book,
emerge out of the portfolio, just for a moment before re-entering,
in the same way manages to deny the facts of where we've been. These
returns obey a compulsion to assure us that there is no going so far
afield here that one cannot return. But it is relevant to examine the
solid base, the home, to which Donald is returned, to inquire just where
the tangible frameworks of book and of portfolio are themselves sup–
posed to be situated. Disney 5ituates them nowhere at all. When Donald
emerges from the book or the portfolio he is given a floor to stand on,
and apparently there is a base plug available to him, for in the first section
we see him plug in the projector; but for the rest he is staged merely
against a perfectly blank background, of some solid color. The home
to which he returns is no place with a definition; it is neutral area–
nothing ·more.
