I imagine a Hollywood ghost story, a kind of celluloid Grand Guignol with atmospheric sets and macabre lighting. It takes place in the late 1990s or early 2000s, a time that coincides with my own adventures in the screen trade (to ventriloquize William Goldman), just as I was about to begin studying urban and architectural history. The setting? A circular office deep in the inner sanctums of Robert A. M. Stern’s Disney Animation Building in Burbank. The office is nestled inside the structure’s most recognizable feature: a giant two-story blue wizard’s hat with yellow moons and stars like the one donned by Mickey Mouse in Fantasia (1940). As whimsical as this pomo set piece may be, it is the perfect setting for a séance. The lights are dim, and on a low table covered in red damask, a crystal ball glows with St. Elmo’s Fire. A spirit medium waves her hands in measured circles as a trio of middle-aged and elderly men watch with anticipation. Everything about them—the knifelike cut of peaked lapels, horsebit loafers stuffed with bunioned feet, the drape of double-breasted jackets interrupted by middle-aged paunches—just oozes executiveness. They may remind you of Griffin Mill, played to power-suited perfection by Tim Robbins in Robert Altman’s The Player (1992). Squint your eyes, however, and these men begin to look familiar in this withering light. Yes, there they are: Michael Ovitz, Michael Eisner, and Roy Disney, two former kings and their disillusioned kingmaker, all scions to The Mouse. And inside this office, our medium conjures an architect of yore, the German émigré Kem Weber, who in 1939 designed the sprawling louvered streamline moderne block on nearby Buena Vista Street, where animators once worked and which now houses Walt Disney Studios’ corporate HQ. In this Hollywood ghost story, Weber appears and with an accusatory voice befitting only the angriest of wraiths, points to the medium and bellows in a throaty, affected Brandenburgish, “You ruined my building, you asshole!”
Surely he’s got the building wrong. There were run-of-the-mill renovations, structural repairs, and screening room overhauls, the kind of stuff that is part of a building’s life span, sure, but Weber’s original block still stands. Perhaps he has mistaken the giant pile opposite the hat as a perversion of his own design? It’s possible: Aldo Rossi, the architect of the Riverside Building, lifted Weber’s terra-cotta, seafoam green, and cream palette for his austere De Chirico–inspired citadel. So is he directing his ire at Eisner? Current studio head Bob Iger? Maybe it’s Bob Stern, who, along with Michael Graves, has given the corporation’s buildings their cartoon-y architectural partis? Thing is, there’s nothing obviously awful about the Disney Animation Building. In the back, a taller, vertically striped volume arches like a giant rooster’s comb or lionfish spine. Look closer, however, and it evokes a ribbon of sepia-toned film stock with small apertures reminiscent of sprocket holes. Movies! And flanking a bend of Riverside Drive, three warehouse-looking volumes radiate outward in a way reminiscent of Hans Poelzig’s IG Farben head-quarters in Frankfurt (1930) or Mies van der Rohe’s unbuilt Reichsbank Extension for Stuttgart (1933). These are all fine.
It’s the hat.
Stern had used it before, at the entrance to the Euro Disney Preview Center. Built in 1990 in Serris, France, the roadside attraction invited drivers inside to inspect models, drawings, multimedia displays, and props dedicated to the amusement park ahead of its completion two years later. Visitors entered through a circular peristyle topped by a version of the wizard hat that Mickey wears in Fantasia in the sequence set to French composer Paul Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. There’s a bit of architectural sleight of hand, for the structure may appear as a Disneyfied version of Bramante’s Tempietto, yet the combination of conical roof and circular plan at the entrance references a tholos from Greek antiquity. It’s an apposite quote from a pagan past. This hat, modestly sized when compared with the one that would eventually appear in front of the Disney Animation Building, also calls to mind the conical headgear associated with the dark business of ancient Mithraic cults. No one would ever see it in a similar way, however. And even I would not make much of such material, all worthy of a cameo in the “noir visions” of Los Angeles from Mike Davis’s City of Quartz or a vignette in Thom Andersen’s dark jaunts through the intertwining histories of film and architecture in Los Angeles Plays Itself. These were, after all, the kinds of convergences that inspired my retreat from film into architectural history.
Leave it to a cadre of émigré intellectuals to sour the mood.
No, even for me, the wizard hat will forever be associated with Fantasia’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sequence. Mickey is the titular apprentice. He watches a robed Sorcerer conjure a smoky demon from a cauldron and turn it into a diaphanous Technicolor butterfly. Once he retires for the evening, Mickey is left alone to clean up. He sees the Sorcerer’s blue hat and decides he wants a piece of this action. And once he dons it, he becomes a moony, starry Mephistopheles and casts a spell on a broom, bringing it to life so it can help with the cleaning. The metaphor is a bit too on the nose even for Disney—lifeless materials are animated for the sake of droll drudgery. But the broom, as it turns out, is a little too good and, in helping Mickey with his cleaning, threatens to flood the Sorcerer’s castle by bringing bucket after bucket of water from outside. Mickey’s only recourse is to kill the very thing he animated. He takes a hatchet to it and reduces it to a pile of splinters. Each piece comes to life as a new broom with small buckets, and just before this army of sweepers threatens to overrun the castle, right when Mickey and the brooms are about to be sucked into a whirlpool, the Sorcerer appears and makes everything anew again. Sheepish and hangdog, Mickey gives the hat back.
Fantasia was an ambitious project, a chance to bring classical music to the masses. In addition to “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” there were also vignettes set to more popular favorites such as Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker suite and Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony. Yet the shorts accompanying Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring belied something darker, almost demonic. Especially with the latter, it was as if Disney were trying to spring some difficult avant-gardism on unsuspecting audiences.
Leave it to a cadre of émigré intellectuals to sour the mood. Theodor Adorno nearly went apoplectic when learning that Stravinsky’s Rite—a piece he detested—was about to be animated to public acclaim. Thomas Mann saw some of the original animation cells for The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in preproduction and schooled the studio heads as to that piece of music’s origins in Goethe’s Faust. Then there was Sergei Eisenstein, who arrived in Hollywood in 1930 and became fast friends with Walt Disney. Eisenstein celebrated Disney’s animations as ecstatic abstractions and called the color animated shorts a “marvelous lullaby for the suffering and the deprived” that “blaze with colour.” Surprising words given the labor situation at Disney, which came to a dramatic and decisive climax in 1941 once Art Babbitt, one of Disney’s most celebrated animators, resigned to join the Screen Cartoonists Guild, earning the enmity of Uncle Walt himself. A string of box office bombs, including Pinocchio (1940) and Fantasia, led the studio to decease pay or furlough many in the stable of animators. Disney welcomed the exodus, which rid his company of “the chip-on-the-shoulder boys and the world-owes-me-a-living lads.” That Eisenstein, a Bolshevik Jew, was fascinated with Disney seems strange or misplaced, especially given the studio’s less-than-savory relations with labor and its alliance with the openly anti-Semitic Motion Picture Alliance.
So, the hat. The hat that results in a phalanx of animated laborers—or animators—being crushed and drowned in the maws of cruel leadership and incompetent management. The hat with magical abilities that are only illusory, whose ultimate purpose is to remind workers entering the Disney Animation Building that the only true power here is wielded by the person who wears that goofy hat—which is not the animators, not the inheritors of Babbitt’s agitprop, but Roy Disney himself. It’s no coincidence, then, that the circular office in this ghost story was once Disney’s personal office, a space renowned for its discomfort, for its ability to induce queasiness. The Temple to the Mouse. So, yeah, Weber has the right to be a little upset. His original building was modeled after a factory, a well-lit, ventilated, salubrious environment where artists could work under the best conditions possible. Take a wrecking ball to its replacement, the Disney Animation Building; obliterate it in the name of those employees who refused to make contributions to politicians who questioned Biden’s victory. Pulverize it the name of those who called Ron DeSantis’s bluff to defund Disney capital projects as part of his swampland authoritarianism. Dance to its ruins, hips shaking like Steamboat Willie at the helm as Disney’s earliest animations, now plying the waters of the Rubicon into the public domain. The science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, smarting from his own experiences working as a writer for Walt Disney Studios, wryly remarked, “At Disney, nobody fucks with the Mouse.” The Disney Animation Building fucked around. And it will find out.