Why did Tolkien dislike Disney?

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

Dandy/Beano are examples of types of wildly popular cartoon/comic available in the UK. His children may have been too old by then (though his grandchildren will probably have picked them up later, along with the fantastic Eagle Comic), but there were plenty of other options that were popular. I can't remember the title but my dad, born in the 30s, collected a popular cartoon series at the time, he snipped them out of the Sunday paper and pasted them in a book so he could read them all at once.

I do not doubt that there were many comic strips before The Dandy and The Beano. Rupert the Bear dates to 1920. And there were doubtless some spin-off books based on such characters. The population of Canada is smaller than that of Britain and the UK, but even here there were books telling the adventures of Maggie Muggins (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggie_Muggins ), written by author Mary Grannan (http://w3.stu.ca/stu/sites/nble/g/grannan_mary.html ), though the series only aired, so far as I know, on CBC radio and later on CBC Television in Canada.

Sticking one’s favourite strips into a scrap book was also something I did as a child.

There is also a long standing tradition of book illustration in the UK with a lot of highly lauded artists around in the late 19th and early 20th C that Tolkien will have been well aware of. Disney had a lot of competition in a country used to Kate Greenaway, Alfred Bestall, John Tenniel, Beatrix Potter, Randolph Caldecott, etc.

Disney had competition if you must use that word in the US as well: Howard Pyle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Pyle ), Andrew Wyeth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wyeth ), Wanda Gág (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanda_G%C3%A1g ), W. W. Denslow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wallace_Denslow ), Kurt Wiese (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Wiese ), and so forth.

But nothing in American illustration that I am aware of fits with Tolkien’s fear of American children’s illustration being influenced by Disney, unless he had seen books incorporating Disney art and other art derived from American animated cartoons.

Further research shows that Whitman’s Giant Midget Books® line based on their North American Big Little books was founded in 1940, and so they also were likely not seen by Tolkien in 1937 or before. The customs of those days was that a U.S. publisher often partnered with a U.K. firm to publish the same book, as happened with The Hobbit. I find that some early Whitman books starring Mickey Mouse are also listed on the web as being published by Collins in London. See https://www.google.ca/search?q=%22Mi...use%22+collins for some of these books on some of the pages listed.

As far as I can find almost all animated shorts in the early days of film animation were produced in the U.S., and none at all in Britain. So this would have created a demand in Britain for books based on the animated films seen, which Collins was able to fulfill thanks to Whitman. I do not know whether the Mickey Mouse daily strip was published in any British newspaper.