The Perfect American (complete opera recorded in 2013)

The last days of the American icon Walt Disney form a powerful and poignant subject for Philip Glass's latest opera, which was filmed at its first performances in Madrid in January 2013. Phelim McDermott's spectacular production is worthy of Disney's own visual imagination and its definitive influence on American culture, while in the pit is the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, an experienced and authoritative champion of the composer's hypnotically beautiful music, which gives wings to Rudy Wurlitzer's operatic transformation of Peter Stephan Jungk's novel, using both fact and fiction to peer into Disney's troubled psyche as illness forces him to confront his mortality.

Directed by Phelim McDermott, who created the acclaimed Met/ENO Satyagraha with Julian Crouch.

Co-production between Teatro Real & English National Opera.

Based on Peter Stephan Jungk's novel, "The Perfect American" is a surreal, meditative, episodic account of the last days of Walt Disney.

Disney is portayed as "arrogant, misogynist, racist, tyrannical, mean, ultraconservative, uncultured, hypochondriac and megalomaniac". (Ruben Amon - El Mundo)

Please note that this is not a "Disney" style production.

Extra features: A cast gallery.

Running time: 120 minutes