Inversion principle

Inversion Principle
The man who becomes an institution has to pay the price as surely as Walt Disney had. His genius is shadowed to a blur by the corporate image of Disney Inc., This fact cannot be lost on the visitors to the recent Paris Exhibition. Disney has made it to the Grand Palais, a museum of arts high and fine, as a 20th-century "genius" and the show illuminates how deeply Disney drew from European artists, fables, settings, and imagination.
Disney produced "an imaginary world somewhere between Europe and America," says curator Bruno Girveau.
Some 14 of Disney's 17 major films, including "Cinderella," "Pinocchio," "Snow White," and "Fantasia" "originate in European libraries," exhibit text suggests.
Americans may be unaware that Disney - unable to enlist in World War I because he was only 16 - joined the Red Cross and was sent overseas, arriving after the armistice. He spent a year in France soaking up the culture. He and his wife, Lillian, returned in 1935, and brought back some 350 books of illustrations - romantic castles, royal ceremonies, woodland sprites, evil witches, anthropomorphized animals.
Indeed, the farmlands and forests of America, or the newly sprawling suburbs of Los Angeles, aren't the main source of the Disney magic. Rather, working in Burbank with dozens of refugees and vagabond artists from Europe, many of them Jewish, the Disney bunch borrowed from masters like Honoré Daumier and Bruegel, imitated Gustav Dore's illustrations of "Dante's Inferno," consulted landscapes by Philippe Rousseau for the "Jungle Book," snatched ideas from 1920s films like F.W. Mernau's "Faust" and Chaplin's "Modern Times," and revised "Pinocchio" from the Italian writer Carlo Collodi. They copy, embellish, and alter from every possible source - producing a highly cross-pollinated vision in "living color."
Disney or ‘Uncle Willie’ to his fans was an ordinary guy who somehow got diverted from a career as a milkman in Kansas City, Mo. (Indeed, a teacher there once pronounced him "second dumbest" in the class.) But Disney was no slouch. He corresponded with Charlie Chaplin, socialized with Spencer Tracy, and knew Sergei Eisenstein, the Russian film director. They were all Disney fans.
The Grand Palais assesses Disney as a "modest artist." But his genius lay elsewhere. He brought to life a new art form. In exploting the mother lode of his creative touch to the full, boxoffice hits one after the other he became an institution, a victim of his own corporate image.
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