First the bad news: Uncle Walt is not in deep freeze somewhere in Tomorrowland. Neal Gabler, the spoilsport biographer, delivers the news in “Walt Disney” (Knopf, 851 pages, $35) that he was, in fact, cremated and his ashes interred “in a remote corner of the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California, not far from his studio.”

Well, at least his spirit hovers near the epicenter of the American imagination. It was Disney’s genius to create and stabilize, as it were, the geography of the American imagination. Whereas Huckleberry Finn had to light for that ever-retreating “territory,” Disney brought it home to us — first in films and then on the television screens in our homes. No wonder President Kennedy realized the concept of a “New Frontier” was bankable.

Disney would appear on his television programs as the avuncular host who brought home the coonskin caps and made the tales of Davy Crockett a weekly adventure story. And “The Mickey Mouse Club”! Who can forget the afternoon thrill of watching the fetching Annette Funicello wearing the same mouse ears we had donned?

Disney re-created the concept of family entertainment in a new medium, carrying on what Dickens had done for serialized novels. Children no longer simply read books like “Peter Pan” and dreamed of fantasy worlds. Disney had located Shangri-la, and parents could schedule trips there to meet Mickey and his minions. Disney understood that Americans craved the touch and feel of the characters that had entered their imaginations.

So of course we could expect Disney to preserve himself in good cryogenic order, as Mr. Gabler observes:

The endurance of the rumor, however outlandish, testified to not only the identification of Disney with futuristic technology late in his life but to a public unwillingness to let go of him, even to the point of mythologizing him as an immortal who could not be felled by natural forces.

But the opposite also seems true: Disney did not want to let go of us. One Disneyland was not enough. He was in the business of branding the world with a powerful mix of nostalgia for the past and Epcot dreams of the future and confecting the literal space where fantasy met reality.

I say literal because in “Fantasia” Mickey Mouse mounted the “(real) podium and shook hands with the (real) conductor Leopold Stokowski.” Mr. Gabler is quoting the art critic Robert Hughes, who credits Disney with inventing pop art. Perhaps, but what is most striking in Mr. Hughes’s description is that the word “real” appears in parentheses. Stokowski is real, but he is also the product of Disney’s imagination. And the conductor is just as honored to meet Mickey as any child would be. This is an astonishing moment in the history of art in which photography and animation converge.

It is not surprising, then, that Disney presented himself as a young boy who was always drawing, and drawing other family members into his imaginative world. What made his fantasies real was his ability to create an audience for himself. Mr. Gabler, who has had more access to the Disney archive than any other biographer, is good at sifting through myths to find the facts of Disney’s life. But the biographer is also seduced, it seems to me, by Disney’s desire to backdate, so to speak, every element of his life to suit the contours of Disneyland.

Here is a case in point: Disney’s recollection of his Midwestern boyhood, spent partly in the small Missouri town of Marceline:

But however much it may have looked the archetype of hidebound agrarian America, Marceline was not especially conservative — with its large workforce, it was a hotbed of support for the Democratic populist William Jennings Bryan — and it prided itself on its progressivism, which allowed young Walt to receive his cultural education there and led him to comment once that “more things of importance happened to me in Marceline than have happened since — or are likely, in the future.” In Marceline Walt saw his first circus and attended his first Chautauqua, a traveling tent show that prominently featured the leading orators of the day. In Marceline he broke his piggy bank to get money to watch Maude Adams play Peter Pan in a touring company, inspiring him to reprise the role in a school production. “No actor ever identified himself with the part he was playing more than I,” he said, recalling how the hoist and tackle that brother Roy used to enable Walt to fly gave way and sent Walt “right into the faces of the surprised audience.” In Marceline he was awaiting the parade for Buffalo Bill’s visiting Wild West Show when Buffalo Bill himself stopped his buggy and invited Walt to join him. “I was mighty impressed,” Walt later wrote. And in Marceline, after school one day, Walt coaxed his sister Ruth to see their first motion picture — a life of Christ, as Ruth remembered it. She also remembered her parents’ scolding when the children returned home after dark, “in spite of Walt’s telling me it was all right to go.”

What a marvelous passage: Walt in a nutshell. Such passages are essential in a long biography that aims to be definitive. They help support the wealth of detail that might otherwise deter the desultory reader.

But what about that meeting with Buffalo Bill? I checked Mr. Gabler’s sources, and he has only Disney’s word for it. Of course, Disney wanted us to believe that he had reached out and touched a great mythic figure. It was part of Disney’s destiny that Buffalo Bill should acknowledge him, part of our destiny that Disney should meet greatness, and part of the biographer’s fervent wish that his subject’s story have this kind of portentousness. Perhaps it is all true, or perhaps Disney just watched Buffalo Bill pass by and made up the rest — rather like I’ve always done, turning a JFK visit to Detroit when I was 12 into a scene where he stretched his hand across the rope line and shook mine, when, alas, the truth is I got no nearer than the third row of admirers standing outside the Book Cadillac Hotel.

Like that other Walt, Disney was the poet of possibilities. He would never imagine, as e.e. cummings did, that “Buffalo Bill’s defunct,” referring in the same poem to “Mister Death.” Dreams do not die in Disneyland. And to see how they live on, I recommend that you read Neal Gabler’s buoyant biography.

crollyson@nysun.com