How Walt Disney served up dreams of food
Disney film 'Lady And The Tramp'. The two lead characters share a bowl of spaghetti and find they are eating the same strand.
They both swallow and it becomes a kiss.
It is typical of Disney’s genius to see romance in something as simple as spaghetti. The studio, which celebrates its centenary this month, has always been about finding magic in everyday things.
Other animators show bizarre and fantastic images, but Disney, in its path-breaking first feature Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs, made a musical scene out of washing dishes, as the forest animals help Snow White clean up the dwarfs’ cottage.
Walt Disney’s personal history taught him the importance of food. His father failed at orange farming — though this exposed Walt to Florida, where he would create Disney World — and then in 1917, bought into a Chicago-based setup to make an “oriental fruit beverage”.
When this also failed, the company shifted to making canned jams, and young Walt worked in the factory while taking night classes at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts.
When Disney started making animated films, food naturally featured in them, but for functional reasons. Food was used to create atmosphere (the feast in Beauty And The Beast) or as a lure (the poisoned apple in Snow White) or as a joke (a collapsing cake in Sleeping Beauty), or just as an excuse for action scenes (many cartoon food fights and the frenzied fish-cooking chef in The Little Mermaid).
Food is rarely featured for being good unto itself — that would have to wait for Pixar’s Ratatouille (though it was distributed by Disney).
Disney’s food scenes had an impact, as is shown by the tragic story of Alan Turing. The pioneering genius of computer science adored Snow White, and when persecution
