Burlington Standard

For someone who claims she has never been a major Disney fan, even as a child, Sarah Nilsen sure knows a lot about Walt Disney and the company he created nearly 100 years ago. In fact, Nilsen, a UVM associate professor of Film and Television Studies, has such deep knowledge of this global phenomenon that she has become a go-to expert for documentaries about Disney, including the recent film Mickey: The Story of a Mouse.

Released worldwide in November of 2022, on the iconic cartoon rodent’s 94th birthday, the documentary follows Mickey Mouse’s storied history from his first appearance in Steamboat Willie in 1928 to the present. Interspersed throughout the film are interview snippets from experts, including Nilsen, commenting on how Mickey Mouse’s changing persona has reflected the changing nature of American society through the years.

This wasn’t Nilsen’s first stint as a commentator, as she had previously been involved in the Disney documentary Behind the Magic: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (2015); a documentary about Walt Disney himself for PBS’s American Experience series (2017); and a Walt Disney-focused episode of the documentary series Autopsy: The Last Hours of… (2020). She also recently appeared as a guest expert on a segment of the NPR show 1A about the 100th anniversary of Disney.

For the Mickey Mouse film, Nilsen was brought to New York for a couple of jam-packed days that included a five-hour interview. “You go in and they just start shooting you questions,” she says. “Fortunately, I teach the material regularly enough that a lot of it is fresh in my mind, but it’s not like I have all that information at my fingertips. Preparing for it was like cramming for my Ph.D. exams.”

Nilsen’s long-time interest in Disney actually began while doing research for her Ph.D. dissertation, which focused on films produced for U.S. government exhibitions at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958. “I discovered that Disney showed a film there called The USA in Circarama"  she says, “and it was a very popular exhibit.” It soon became clear to Nilsen that there were large gaps in the public’s understanding of the entertainment company. “The scholarship typically focuses on the more mainstream films,” she says, “but the studio is also doing all this other work that really has not been as well researched.”

Her curiosity piqued, Nilsen began looking at Disney’s more obscure work and was particularly intrigued by a series of nature documentaries produced in the 1950s and 60s called Disney’s True-Life Adventures. Walt Disney himself, she discovered, cared deeply about animals and conservation. “Disney has played an important role in terms of the modern conservation movement with these documentaries,” Nilsen says. “These films were foundational for environmentalists as ways to think about wildlife in America and American conservation.”

Convinced of the overlooked significance of Disney in film history, she soon brought her professional passion into the classroom. Now, more than 20 years down the road, Nilsen has taught some version of a Disney history class regularly, and she says watching students’ reactions to Disney over time has helped clarify, for her, the effect of popular culture on their social relationships.

In the class, Nilsen often asks her students to write an autobiographical piece about their childhood experiences to encourage them to think about just how much Disney is or was part of their lives. “I get a lot of girls who dressed in princess outfits when they were young,” she says. “A lot of boys played Disney video games.” Other students bring up stuffed animals, watching the movies on TV or in the theater, or growing up with the Disney Channel. She has learned over time that just about all students are aware of Disney, whether or not it was a significant part of their childhood, and the exercise sheds light on their varied experiences, which tend to mark how they fit socially within mainstream American society. “It’s been a great way to access where students’ own identities are being formed in terms of media,” she says.

Nilsen, who teaches courses on race, class, and gender in the media, is working to clarify some of the more complicated aspects of Disney’s history via a few academic works-in-progress. These include a book about Disney’s relationships with non-human animals and an essay about the crows in Disney’s Dumbo that will be included in a collection she’s co-editing with UVM senior lecturer Sarah Turner, called Critical Race Theory and the American Media. Her current passion project, which she’s been working on for the past few years, is The Lurking Camera: A History of Walt Disney’s True-Life Adventures, a book about the history, production, and reception of Disney’s nature films. She has also co-authored with Lynn Parrish Sutton a children’s book about Walt Disney’s childhood, Walt’s Whistle Stop, as well as a collection of poems based on a book written by one of the Adventures filmmakers, Arctic Emeralds: Unearthing the Poetry in Lois Crisler’s Arctic Wild ; both are in review for publication.

“I always start my classes with helping students recognize how central, in terms of a corporation, Disney is within their lives,” Nilsen says. After all, this American media company very quickly became a global industry, branching out to Europe, then Asia, then around the world. It has since spurred economic growth in many local economies via its theme parks and resorts and has impacted the global economy through both revenue and charitable giving.

The highest-grossing animated films in the U.S. continue to be Disney films. “Walt Disney animation is still unbelievably powerful,” Nilsen says. “The fundamentals of drawn animation were established by Disney, and Disney animation style got picked up by all the other studios.” Nilsen says she spends a fair amount of time in her Disney class studying how animation has developed as a technology—and how it has permeated our society.

According to Nilsen, academics often downplay the importance of Disney, but its impact on society, the economy, and the entertainment industry can’t be overestimated. The Walt Disney Studios has been in existence for almost a century, and today Disney is the largest media corporation in the world, with revenue in the billions of dollars. Nilsen and her fellow Disney scholars plan to continue to study and share their understanding of the massive influence of this global marvel—one that all started with a single mouse.

Original source can be found here.