One of the subtle difficulties, if also one of the secret attractions, of writing a book about Disney – whether the person or the company – is that one can expect two distinct audiences and, with some luck, more potential readers. One is the academic audience, tied to fields like cultural studies, film and media, or what we (without much hint of pretension) term Disney studies. The other is all of those fans who readily embrace and celebrate most of what is Disney: the films, theme parks, television programs, stores, and products of every sort that have made the company the top media and entertainment brand in the world. The former audience is, appropriately, a rather skeptical lot who have found in the “worlds” or “kingdoms” of Disney a wealth of test cases for considering the various forces that popular culture so easily and often invisibly wields on us, while the latter is often more skeptical of the former, and is far more interested in Disney history, the workings of the many theme parks, and any plans for new Disney entertainment developments. Addressing – much less satisfying – both of those audiences at the same time is a daunting, perhaps impossible, task, but one that Christ Pallant's book, Demystifying Disney, takes on.

Given that varied readership and its effort to deal with both, the results here are somewhat mixed. In fact, the book's title is a bit misleading. It seems to suggest that there is a deep mystery to the Disney feature-film canon, particularly its animated-feature production – or rather a series of mysteries, mystifications, or misperceptions that have gone unaddressed. Among those that the author points to are the belief that Walt Disney was the “father of animation” (14), that he was the first of the early animators who “sought to add sound to animation” (19), and that it was a “Disney studio employee” who first invented a multiplane camera (28). While these claims and many others have indeed cropped up in popular literature, coffee-table books, and various commercial efforts targeted to the general fan, a great number of serious and well-researched books have, in much detail, dealt with those hagiographic remarks. Richard Schickel's The Disney Version (1968) had already done much work in this vein (or overdone it, as many critics have suggested), and Donald Crofton, in his seminal book on early animation, Before Mickey (a work not cited in Demystifying Disney) also noted such issues before proceeding, in 1982, to correct a few more popular misperceptions. Since then others have followed this same, rather well-trodden, path. The result is that Pallant's initial “point” seems a bit pointless, and what he terms his “revisionist approach” (13) to the Disney feature canon will not seem very revisionist for those familiar with Disney scholarship, although the historical highlighting that this approach involves, particularly over the book's first three chapters that address “classic” Disney, seems like it may have been aimed less at that scholarly audience than at the popular readership noted above.

Where Demystifying Disney finds a surer path, though, is when it leaves behind that initial stance and turns its attention to some of the too-often-neglected later Disney efforts, starting with its discussion of Destino, the studio's collaboration with Salvador Dalí (a six-minute short that, despite the book's announced focus on “Disney feature animation,” receives full-chapter treatment); proceeding through some of the post-Walt Disney projects, such as The Rescuers (1977) and The Fox and the Hound (1981); continuing with a more detailed treatment of the “Disney renaissance” films produced under Michael Eisner's regime, works like The Little Mermaid (1989) and Beauty and the Beast (1991); and culminating with an examination of recent Disney and digital Disney/Pixar films, including Chicken Little (2005) and WALL-E (2008). Here the author seems less concerned with finding his place in the maze of preexisting Disney criticism or balancing his address to different audiences, and more with what he does best, offering detailed analyses of some films that, for various reasons, have been relatively overlooked or treated primarily as case lessons in cultural studies. These discussions he profitably links to the studio's efforts to stake out new directions in a changing and highly competitive (multi)media environment.

The discussion of Destino, a six-minute short begun in 1946 but only finished in 2003, long after the deaths of its original collaborators, is certainly one of the volume's highlights – not because this work's background is not well known (or in need of “demystification”), but because Pallant painstakingly outlines Dalí's special brand of surrealism, his “paranoiac-critical method,” and uses it trace out how much of Dalí's original conception lingers in the finished product which was nominated for an Academy Award. His explanation of how the film, both in original story discussions and in the later finished version, drew upon a strategy of “morphing,” a fusing of disparate images that forces viewers “to adopt an active viewing position” (67), is especially effective, particularly for the way in which it links this abortive project with Walt Disney's own ambitions – already obvious with the creation of Fantasia (1940) – to link his studio's animation to the world of high art.

While the book's subsequent account of Disney's synergistic practices, particularly during the Michael Eisner years, largely retreads the work of Janet Wasko (see especially her Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy (2001)), the discussion of several films from that “Disney renaissance” era and after is noteworthy and fills an important gap. While such high-grossing and critically praised works as Beauty and the Beast (1991) and The Lion King (1994) have drawn much commentary for their efforts at revisioning the traditional Disney “princess” and for introducing a more global perspective into the studio's narratives, these cultural considerations have tended to obscure the technical changes that were already fundamentally altering Disney animation. As he discusses the introduction of the CAPS (Computer Animation Production System) software, produced with the aid of Pixar, Pallant effectively shows how the latest developments in digital media influenced the look – and the possibilities – of what was still largely hand-drawn animation. And with his treatment of what he terms “Neo-Disney” features from the early 2000s, especially films like The Emperor's New Groove (2000), Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), and Treasure Planet (2002), he traces out the development of a radically different style that marks these late, and far less successful, films. It is here especially, as he tries to tie Disney's more recent developments to earlier ambitious experiments in style and format, that Pallant manages to deepen his focus, more directly address a scholarly audience, and offer a more significant contribution to Disney studies.