Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. "Oberservations of film art and Film Art." David Bordwell's Website of Cinema. 2 Dec 2008.

In this blog entry, Bordwell speaks of Disney and his animation drawing from Neal Gabler’s biography Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. He describes the ideology portrayed in Disney’s films as able to create a specific conception of American life and society. Though many intellectuals fell out of love with Disney in the 1940s, Bordwell believes that Disney’s cartoons were still artistically very strong. These cartoons are characterized by an unsurpassed dynamism and grace of his animation, his power of expressive movement of the screen and “Mickey Mousing, ”which, according to Eisenstein, is a primal, visceral unity that could move the spectator involuntarily. Disney achieved this “absolute perfection” of animation through technological methods as well as an understanding of human thought, images, ideas, feelings, etc. Bordwell add that Disney was a “control freak.” Thus he wanted to create an idealized world, obsessively pursuing the “quality” of animation, which he could control. The result was his films and, of course, Disneyland. Technology was his reality-distortion field. Disney was able to bring animation to life for many reasons: skill with line and contour, soft caricature with an enormous bounce or vibrancy, use of color, and relationships between image and sound. Bordwell concludes that the artistic imagination displayed by Disney and his staff captivated American imagination.

Bordwell explains that Disney conveyed American ideologies mainly through animation. This brilliant animation is one of the two main components of “Fantasia,” the other, obviously, being sound. The graceful, vibrant animation that Browell describes is what truly captivates the viewer. Otherwise, the childish themes and unimpressive animation would definitely detract viewer from Disney’s films. The animation in “Fantasia” thus plays an important part in its popularity. As an “experiment,” the film sought to achieve the perfection in production that Walt Disney expected. Furthermore, it seems that perfect synchronization of image and sound really accentuate the films features. Such an entrancing combination sucks the viewer into the screen entering Disney’s world of imagination. In doing so, Disney achieves a spectacular, unique power over the audience. Though quite impressive, this captivation is the source of the many critiques of “Fantasia.” Disney taints the musical pieces with his dictated ideas, leaving the viewer trapped in Walt’s idealized world. “Fantasia” binds the viewer to a set of inflexible interpretations, negating the film’s artistic possibilities.

Welles, Orson. "Citizen Kane Is Not about Louella Parsons' Boss." Friday 14 Feb, 1941: 9.

After the premier of Citizen Kane, reviews of the film and coverage of the premier were published in the journal Friday. Orson Welles was displeased with the misinterpretations the he felt had been published. This piece is Welles’ response to the initial publications. his first concern is with their portrayal of him as a pleasure-seeking man lacking adequate work ethic. He responds briefly to this that if this were the case he surely would have been fired, and that he has been doing his job for RKO. The majority of the piece is dedicated to correcting several assumptions that Friday had made about Citizen Kane. Welles had been quoted in Friday as saying that the picture was in fact about Louella Parsons’ boss, William Randolph Hearst. He calls this unfair to both Hearst and Kane. He then goes on to clarify the goal of the movie as something other than a portrayal of William Randolph Hearst. He describes Citizen Kane as a mans [Thompson] search of the significance of Kane’s final word. This search provides him with five perspectives about the man, provided by five people that knew him well. Most importantly, Welles states that “He is never judged with the objectivity of an author, and the point of the picture is not so much the solution of the problem as its presentation.”

This conclusion provided by Wells supports Carringer’s view that ‘Rosebud’ should not be viewed as an answer to a puzzle, but as the process by which we can answer a question. It applies directly to my thesis by relating ‘Rosebud’ to a MacGuffin, or a plot device used in film to motivate the characters or advances the story. The details of this device are of little or no importance separate from the plot. ‘Rosebud’ motivates Thompson to interview people who were close to Kane, and in doing so assembles the pieces necessary to paint the most accurate portrait of him. However, aside from it’s motivational force, ‘Rosebud’ does not hold much importance.

Carringer, Robert L. "Rosebud, Dead or Alive: Narrative and Symbolic Structure in Citizen." PMLA 91 (1976): 185-193. JStor. 9 Apr. 2008.

This article delves deeply into the role that Rosebud plays in the film, and challenges the significance of the sled as an important element of the story. On face value, the sled is the object that Thompson is out to find from the very beginning, and it can be interpreted at face value as a symbol of innocence lost, as could be suggested by Kane’s own quips about how “if I hadn't been very rich, I might have been a really great man.” However, this article delves far deeper and claims that there is much evidence to suggest that the sled is merely what Hitchcock came to call a MacGuffin – effectively an item of little intrinsic value to the story that allows the characters to stay motivated in their actions. The author sites as evidence the numerous changes between the original script and the final version of the film that steer the film away from focusing on Rosebud as a solution and play up the idea that, as Thompson suggests, that Rosebud is simply one piece in the very complicated portrait of Kane. Furthermore, we are reminded in this article that the character who associated the most importance to Rosebud in the first place, Thompson’s boss, is little more than a mockery of the typical Hollywood producer focused more on “angles” and “gimmicks” than he is about the truth.

Meanwhile, the author asserts that the object to which we should attach far more importance is the little snow globe in the beginning of the film. Kane was a rich man his entire life and worked ardently to craft for himself a world that suited him. He was displeased with the way that things were done, and used his power and influence to create his own world, as is found inside the snow globe, which was ultimately smashed into a number of pieces of glass, representing the different pieces of him that people saw.