Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler.

A writer reviewing Make Mine Music in June 1946 asked a question that was becoming typical in an era when Walt Disney was no longer getting a free pass with the critics. Imagine, he wrote, that you're visiting a friend whom you know has great professional skill, an infectious laugh, and a kindness toward animals. But when the friend opens his door you see his walls are covered with paintings of white doves, lacy valentines, and tinsel stars -- and the furniture, while functional, seems to be there primarily to cover the rug. "You would not therefore cease to love the man," the critic wrote, "to laugh at his jokes or to admire his skill; but you would have to admit with regret that his taste is deplorable."

The name Walt Disney has been so tenaciously linked to American kitsch for so long it's important for animation-conscious readers to immerse themselves in a time when the name Disney tracked very avant-garde indeed. That time was 1937, when his studio released the unprecedented animated feature Snow White. As far as Walt was concerned, he'd never top it. There was no greater expression of Walt's hand controlling every aspect of a story from formation to execution. He would make no greater leap from what people previously had thought could be done in animation to what he proved could henceforth be done. In the decades that followed, though, his critical cache plummeted -- partly because he no longer felt the need to prove himself, but also because the novelty of the animated feature had worn off and audiences were looking past form to scrutinize the content.

The diminishing vanguard of Disney's innovation -- and his audience's realization that he basically had cornball sentiment in his soul -- prompted an era of Disney de-mythologizing that peaked in Richard Schickel's acidic book The Disney Version in 1968. But to get a subjective view of Disney's life from inside Walt's personal space, through a survey of his accomplishments and what they meant to him, you should also make a point of reading Neal Gabler's Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination: an essential biography not just of Disney, the man, but of Disney Studios, the machine.

Gabler's tome -- 633 pages, plus 200-odd more of indices and appendices -- is a comprehensive life story of one of the 20th century's best-known and most influential men. For Walt Disney, who was in the truest sense of the word a genius of storytelling, his life was his art was his business. Gabler explores, probably better than any Disney biographer to date, the multitude of behind-the-scenes business decisions that informed all of Disney's artistic prerogatives -- and vice versa.

Where Schickel's book was an attempt to survey art and artist in order to suss out Disney's total aesthetic agenda, Gabler has settled on promulgating just a few overriding precepts that governed Walt's state of mind. His book is less about theory than the bricks and mortar of Walt's business life, and the edifice he covers is massive. Gabler had unfettered access to the Disney archives, and from the tons of correspondence, interviews, and ephemera, he's threaded all the important formative moments in a long artistic career. He offers a pretty convincing thesis that, from his childhood in Marceline to his last decisions on EPCOT, Walt Disney was driven by a need to create a world that he could control. Making the world adapt to his vision of it drove his aspirations for making animation; and when he had conquered that, his amusement park; and when he had conquered that, his never-finished planned city of the future.

What makes Walt Disney so richly illuminating is the obvious in-depth background Gabler has regarding how the entertainment industry has worked over the last 100 years, and that knowledge helps put Disney's many media adventures into a much-needed historical context.