What the Surrealists admired in commodity culture was its tendency to confuse the natural with the artificial, the animate with the in-animate - as in Walter Benjamin's notorious concept of the 'sex-appeal of the inorganic'. A futher corollary of this view - the shock value of kitsch - has been the potential for regarding kitsch as somehow morbid or anxiety-inducing; Mike Kelley proposed such a reading in his curatorial project on 'The Uncanny'. This paper will address Disney's cartoon films of the 1930s both in their immediate historical context (specifically in relation to the Surrealists' flirtation with commodity culture) and from the vantage-point of a contemporary epoch informed by post-modern convulsions of taste. The willfully eccentric proposition - Disney as anti-aesthetic- will provide the basis to interrogate the sublime dimension of a morbidly sentimental commodity form.

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