Mark Greif writes:

As the modern-day animator and animators’ union head Tom Sito records in Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions (which contains the best account yet of the 1941 Walt Disney strike, with documentation of the union side), ‘even Walt’s fiercest critics still confess a warm spot for him. People who knew Walt Disney best dwell upon his warmth and forgive his actions more than they forgive their own or anyone else’s.’ A sometime Disney animator himself, Sito describes a lunch he had with Joe Grant, who had been drawing for Disney since Three Little Pigs in 1934, and was still at it in 2005. ‘We spent our usual hour bitching about all the problems with the cartoon business,’ Sito writes, ‘and the Disney studio in particular.’ But Disney and the studio weren’t entirely the same thing. ‘After all was said, Joe told me, “Yeah, but . . . you see, you all were working for the Disney Company, but I was working for Walt Disney, and that’s the difference.”’

(LRB 7 June 2007)

Kentucky | hardback 440 pp. |ISBN: 9780813124070