The Cartoon That Walt Disney Hated The Most (And How To Watch It)

If you ever have the good fortune to come across an animation super-buff in the wild (or perhaps you might see it as bad fortune), it's important to keep a few things in mind. Never refer to animation as a genre to these people; animation, of course, is a medium for storytelling that can encompass any genre. (This, in spite of the fact that far too often, studios make animation fall into a very typical formula or set of tropes.) But another one to keep in mind is that if you refer to Walt Disney as a director of animation, you might just get the stink eye. Now, it is technically true that Walt Disney, the impresario who oversaw the first full-length animated feature film, was a hugely impactful figure in the history of English-language cinema, and one of the most influential across the entire world. But for the most part, Disney is most aptly considered a producer. You may well have heard that Disney holds the record for winning the most Academy Awards, with a whopping 22 victories before his passing in 1966. (Fun fact: Disney is also the record-holder for the most Oscar nominations, with 59.) While that statistic is both mind-blowing and accurate, he won those Oscars as a producer of animated shorts and features, as well as documentaries made in the 1950s.

Again, it is true that Disney did direct some animated shorts, but that was not his primary focus. In fact, the very last time that Disney directed a short film, he wound up absolutely loathing it. That short film is called "The Golden Touch," and as misguided as it may have been, is a fascinating thing to watch, and that's the thing — if you want to watch it, right now, you absolutely can, so you can see what his issues with his own work were.

For the uninitiated, let's clear something up: prior to the release of the 1937 animated film "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," Walt Disney was a more frequent director of the short animated pieces released by his fledgling studio. A large chunk of those shorts were grouped as Silly Symphonies, meant to imply that the shorts would be musically driven while telling a brief story. And as was the case with many of the feature films released by Disney in their earliest days, many of the Silly Symphonies were inspired by or directly adapting fairy tales. 

It's easy to envision some of the examples among the features, from "Snow White" to "Cinderella" to "Sleeping Beauty," but the same was true for the Silly Symphonies, such as "The Golden Touch." If the name doesn't say it clearly enough, this 1935 short was inspired by the tale of King Midas, the man with the golden touch. As in the old-fashioned story, this time around, Midas realizes that when he has the power to turn anything into gold, it means that he can't do much in the way of taking care of himself, instead forgoing his powers by giving away everything he owns to the clever elf (named Goldie, naturally) so he no longer has the golden touch.

Now, they sometimes say that each of us can be our own worst critic, so you may assume that Disney being so against "The Golden Child" after it was made and released in 1935 is just a situation where an artist is too hard on himself. The good news is that you can see for yourself on Disney+ what the end result was; although the streaming service has arguably not done nearly enough in including as many older pieces of animation as possible for animation fans and amateur historians alike, "The Golden Touch" is one of the few you can stream right now. That's the good news. The bad news is that ... Disney may have been right about its poor quality.

When Disney demanded to direct "The Golden Touch," it was because he wanted to push himself even as the studio was embarking on the ambitious effort of making the first English-language full-length animated feature. (And, it should be noted, Disney had not directed a short by himself for a few years.) After the fact, though, as documented in the biography "The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney," the man in question was not thrilled with the end result. In a letter at the time, he wrote that "I know the picture is not good, but it is impossible to make any radical changes in it at this time." This kind of reaction is fairly logical, especially when you consider "The Golden Touch" nearly 90 years after its initial release. Sometimes, no matter how much hard work an artist puts into something like this, it can't be fixed (and at the time of the short's release, Disney was not a studio behemoth, but a mom-and-pop-style company struggling to get by, so they couldn't afford redoing things like this Silly Symphony).

"The Golden Touch" is the kind of thing that should have worked for Disney, in part because the studio, even prior to the release of "Snow White," trafficked in making material inspired by familiar stories and myths, the type of content that was in the public domain and wouldn't cost extra to license or own. The story of King Midas is one that most kids are familiar with from a young age, too. Conceptually, this short made sense, but in execution, it's flat and uninspired. It may seem a bit of a bummer that this was the last true thing that Walt Disney ever directed, but when he made the full shift into being a producer of films and shorts, it wound up working out pretty well for everyone involved. But you may disagree; although Disney can't push back now, you can at least see what he was talking about 90 years ago when he felt he'd flopped with his final directorial effort.