Michael Barrier's The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney is by far the most straightforward telling of the Disney legend ever published, concentrating on Disney's achievements.

About 195 pages into Michael Barrier's biography of Walt Disney, The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney, there is an anecdote told by Wilfred Jackson. A seemingly insoluble technical problem had arisen during the filming of Song of the South, and an entire production crew was stymied. Walt Disney arrived on the scene, summed up the problem, and then solved it with what appeared to be minimal effort. This short tale not only describes Disney's sharp mind; it also symbolizes the direct, concise route taken by Barrier himself in this, the latest lineation of Walt Disney's life.

There have been many biographies of Disney over the years, and they all share, to some degree, a similar failing. From Richard Schickel's denigrating effort in 1968 (The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney) to Leonard Mosely's fanciful account in 1985 (Disney's World, A Biography), to Neal Gabler's recent work (Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination), biographers seem to feel that no history of Disney is complete without an analysis of the man's purported personality. This need to explain Walt Disney's unique psychology reached its grotesque nadir in 1993 with Marc Eliot's incoherent, barely credible psychoanalysis of Walt (Walt Disney). There is Walt and there are his achievements but, as Barrier reveals, only the latter is truly open to examination.

Barrier's telling of the Disney legend is by far the most straightforward ever published, concentrating on Disney's achievements and leaving conjectures about his innermost thoughts untouched. For all his fame and renown, Disney was perhaps one of the most insular figures associated with Hollywood. His friendships were few, his partnerships short-lived and his social life minimal. Concerned with perfection and control, driven by an ever-expanding universe of interests, Disney was so self-absorbed that it was difficult for him to see that other human beings simply could not think like him. Barrier highlights this point in his introduction by opening the book with Disney's egocentric and ill-fated speech to a studio on the verge of going on strike (The introduction is sagely titled "All About Me").

Walt was not one to bare his soul or share intimacies with anyone, and this is the fact that many of his biographers did not -- or refused to -- grasp. In realizing that Walt Disney left very little behind to psychoanalyze, Barrier undertakes to understand the man through his projects and his ever-expanding vision of a world that could be (with the right hand at the till) perfected into a utopia. Barrier's Disney is, in the final analysis, a protean figure whose true self can only be dimly glimpsed through the varied and crowded interstices of his works.

There is the Disney that encouraged and guided the development of startlingly new animation techniques, the Disney that learned to build scale locomotives by hand, the Disney that clawed a tortuous financial path to the realization of his first theme park, and the Disney that turned out live-action films that, though inferior to anything his studio had even animated, were tightly under his control and direction. The same Disney that planned to regulate the life of an entire city is the same one that sweated over building a miniature piece of furniture well into the night.