Disneyland on the Mountain
A decade after Disneyland opened, and with the swamps being drained for Disney World, Old Uncle Walt hiked up an incline in California’s Mineral King valley to announce his next plan. Accompanied by California Gov. Edmund Brown, Walt Disney declared his intention to turn the valley into a family-friendly resort. It would become one of his few abject failures.
The thwarted project is the subject of Disneyland on the Mountain by journalists Greg Glasgow and Kathryn Mayer. The book will remind film buffs of Disney’s enormous role in shaping perceptions of the natural world. His animation raised generations of children on idyllic visions of nature and animals, a subterranean stream feeding the ecological movement that surfaced in the ‘60s. The irony is that Disney’s dream for Mineral King valley was defeated by the movement he helped inspire.
Disney grew up on a Missouri farm and filled his early cartoons with cows, horses, goats and chickens before inventing Mickey Mouse. “Walt understood the power of animals to evoke emotion and provoke a response from audiences,” the authors write. They check off the wealth of animal characters in such groundbreaking animated features as Snow White and Fantasia. “Disney animators already knew how demanding Walt could be” before work began on Bambi. Disney employed painter-sculptor Rico Lebrun to teach his animators the fundamentals of animal anatomy to make the creatures’ motion more realistic, and Tyrus Wong to paint impressionistic backdrops reminiscent of Song dynasty art.
From 1948-1963, Disney produced documentaries on animals, winning eight Oscars for the series. Those films were not entirely without controversy. The Vanishing Prairie (1954) was banned in New York for showing a buffalo giving birth. His documentaries tended to endow the animals with human characteristics, perhaps to the detriment of truth. There was one notorious gaffe that became fixed in folklore. The cinematographers of White Wilderness (1958) staged a memorable scene showing lemmings racing off an icy cliff. Lemmings in the real world are not suicidal.
Active for years in the National Wildlife Federation, Disney was surprised by the negative response to his Mineral King resort He even promised to minimize the project’s human footprint but to no avail. The campaign against him came from the grassroots, led by Jean Koch and her husband, who owned a cabin in the valley. It was David hurling stones at Goliath, but the Sierra Club became interested and challenged the resort scheme in court. The battle dragged on for years. Disney’s loss influenced the direction of environmental law and yet, his plan became a model for developing “family-friendly” resorts in other regions.
Disneyland on the Mountain: Walt, the Environmentalists, and the Ski Resort that Never Was is published by Rowland & Littlefield.
