Disney Psalter

My childhood, without apology, was succumbed to the pleasures of Saturday mornings in front of the T.V. watching Disney’s Goofy and Donald Duck dance across the screen. In reference to my past I can honestly ask: Where would we be without Mickey, and further where would we be without Walt? I believe even the excessively welcoming mouse or the pessimistic duck would attest to the validity of modern cartoon animists, as well as their order and structure. The flip book technique that provides these characters with movement has come a long way from the hectic compilations of the Early Medieval illuminated manuscripts.



The Utrecht Psalter was created between 820 and 835 during the Carolingian age and Charlemagne’s great revival of learning. Illuminated manuscripts as well as Psalters (collection of psalms) helped to convey New Testament and Old Testament stories to a largely illiterate laity. Here the artist depicts Psalm 44 (or Psalm 43 of the Vulgate text of the Carolingian era) and the plight of the repressed Israelites in pen and ink. The psalmist's intention was to make the Psalter appear ancient, as well as evoke earlier artworks with swift movement of the pen. The artist, however, would have benefited much from a view of modern comic book organization of text and images, as the three columns of Latin capital letters and subsequent depictions of the text lay in a hodgepodge of space, inseparable to the discerning eye.

The literal interpretations of the text—where the psalm says, “We are counted as sheep for slaughter” the artist drew slain sheep fallen to the ground in front of a walled city—however, provide for a simple picture that an illiterate laity could understand. In some ways the structure also gets the point across: the very chaotic nature of the battle against evil as God (or here the haloed Christ) merely overlooks the slaughter below. The chaotic structure testifies as well to the vivid movement of the scene, in correspondence with the sketchy upheaval of the earth, strained bodies, hunched shoulders, and heads thrust forward in action. Yet I cant help but imagine the Utrecht Psalter more effective as one of Walt’s Mickey Mouse cartoons.