Disney's failings as a person are well documented but yeah, his early films still stand up as art. Eisenstein was supposedly obsessed with him and really wanted them to collaborate on something. It never happened but he claimed Disney was a massive influence on Ivan the Terrible.
Disney actually collaborated with Dali on a film but it was pulled before it was finished.
The
Toccata and Fugue sequence in Fantasia came out of a collaboration with the German experimental animator Oskar Fischinger
Besides maybe Chaplin, Disney was probably the Hollywood filmmaker most respected by members of the avant-garde. Apart from anything else, they admired his
ability to make experimental techniques and a surrealist vision so accessible to a mass audience.