1. reach its zenith/ be at its zenith 到达鼎盛时期 （nadir 最低点）
The Roman Empire reached its zenith around the year 100.
2. pigeonhole: to unfairly consider a person, activity etc as belonging to a particular type or group
pigeonhole sb/sth as sth
Patsy was pigeonholed as a Country and Western singer, but that's too simple.
3. Fantasia alone should silence nay-sayers who only see Disney as a commercial populist. 《幻想曲》这一部电影就足以让那些认为迪斯尼是一个商业民粹分子的反对者们闭嘴。
Fantasia：(1940) a US film made by Walt Disney, which consists of a number of different short cartoons, each one with its own piece of classical music.
75th Anniversary Trailer of Fantasia
4. mind-bending: mind-blowing, extremely impressive or surprising. (INFORMAL)
...a mind-blowing array of treatments...= incredible
5. sequence: A film sequence is a part of a film that shows a single set of actions.
The best sequence in the film occurs when Roth stops at a house he used to live in.
6. middlebrow: If you describe a piece of entertainment such as a book or film as middlebrow, you mean that although it may be interesting and enjoyable, it does not require much thought.
...such middlebrow fare as Poirot, Sherlock Holmes and Jeeves and Wooster.
highbrow: If you say that a book or discussion is highbrow, you mean that it is intellectual, academic, and is often difficult to understand.
He presents his own highbrow literary programme.
7. be in/at the vanguard (of sth):
in the most advanced position of development
The shop has always been in the vanguard of London fashion trends.
8. make a foray into
a short attempt at doing a particular job or activity, especially one that is very different from what you usually do
It will be my first foray into local government.
Wright is about to make his first foray into the music business.
Fantasia wasn't Walt Disney's first foray into the realm of the avant-garde.先锋派 (the avant-garde: the group of artists, writers etc who produce avant-garde books, paintings etc)
9. respond in kind
to behave to someone in the same way that they have behaved to you
They responded in kind, threatening to ban imports from Japan.
Q: why Disney is so popular all over the world?
what Walt Disney made
1. Say the name to most people and you know what will flash onto their mind’s eye: unashamedly bright hues, flying elephants, singing bears, corporate dominance, happy endings, and a helping of values that slip down as easily as ice cream.
2. Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Neil Gabler)
Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince(Marc Eliot)
3. Marceline educated Disney. It taught him how to cherish good times, as if preparing them to be the objects of a later nostalgia.
4. Crowned “second dumbest” in the class by a teacher in Kansas City, he nonetheless found favor by performing comic turns (he did a mean Chaplin) and, in Gabler’s laconic account, “decorating the margins of his textbooks with pictures and then entertaining his classmates by riffling them to make them move.”
5.From a distance, that idea seems obvious, but these folk were having to make their medium up as they went along, fuelled by the sort of rushed and sleepless inventiveness that is barely conceivable beyond American shores. They were flying blind, and they were heading for a mouse.
6.The problem with borrowing cash to make a cartoon was that, likely as not, you would hit a new wrinkle as you went along. It would be a wrinkle that neither you nor your backer had foreseen, but the challenge of ironing it out would be far too tempting to skip.
7. Again, it echoed the good cheer of Dickens: not a vapid exhortation to enjoy the easy life but the half-desperate will to soldier on even when trouble has a paw in the door.
What he gathered was a gang of wanderers, outsiders, and post-European misfits.
Walt Disney Mini Biography