Note 1: As discussed below,
nothing came out of the larger H.C. Andersen film that Disney and his staff
worked on the plans for several years. However, some shorter cartoon episodes
were produced, in which, among other things. sees the young Andersen leave
Odense and his arrival in Copenhagen, where he became a ballet student at the
Royal Theater. These episodes were included in the film "From Aesop to
Hans Christian Andersen" ("Fra Æsop til H. C. Andersen"). The
film was included in the TV series Disneyland and was shown on American TV in
1954-55. It was later also shown on Danish TV.
Director Bremerholm must be presumed to be
the Disney company's then Danish representative, but I have not yet succeeded
in establishing his identity. The seemingly animated feature,
"Tempi", which Roy Disney mentions in the interview, I have not been
able to identify either, but there is a possibility that the journalist has
misunderstood the name "Bambi" (1942) and heard it as
"Tempi". Oddly enough, Roy Disney does not mention
"Cinderella" (1950; "Askepot"), although this film came
before "Alice in Wonderland" (1951, "Alice I Eventyrland")
and "Peter Pan" (1953). This is probably because
"Cinderella" in 1946 was not yet planned, but it was this feature
cartoon that actually came to the rescue of Walt Disney Productions at the time
strained economy.
Incidentally, at the time, it was a common
perception among the press and audiences that Walt Disney himself drew his
films. This was probably largely due to Disney's own public relations
department, which had been promoting this "image" of Walt Disney
since the 1930s. Well enough, Walt Disney was his own company's prime mover and
supervisor, but he had not drawn and even made his films since his early years
in Kansas City 1919-23 and in Los Angeles from 1924 onwards. He was a skilled
cartoonist and animator, but it was not these qualities that brought him to the
top of the cartoon world. Instead, it was his visions and quality requirements
for the films he and his staff produced. The company's financial success, on
the other hand, was largely due to its brother, Roy Disney, who from the
beginning understood how to manage and finance Walt's creative dispositions.
Relating to. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck
(Anders And), the latter almost completely outperformed the former as a cartoon
hero from the end of the 1940s, and after 1953, for a long number of years, no
more cartoons were produced with Mickey. The last short cartoon with Mickey was
The Simple Things (1953; "Mickey som Lystfisker"), in which it
was actually Pluto who had the lead role, as had been the case with the six
previous short Mickey films from 1948-52.