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First animated cartoons

Walt Disney

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Walt Disney , in full Walter Elias Disney , (born December 5, 1901, Chicago , Illinois , U.S.—died December 15, 1966, Los Angeles, California), American motion-picture and television producer and showman, famous as a pioneer of animated cartoon films and as the creator of such cartoon characters as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck . He also planned and built Disneyland , a huge amusement park that opened near Los Angeles in 1955, and before his death he had begun building a second such park, Walt Disney World , near Orlando , Florida. The Disney Company he founded has become one of the world’s largest entertainment conglomerates.

Walter Elias Disney was the fourth son of Elias Disney, a peripatetic carpenter, farmer, and building contractor, and his wife, Flora Call, who had been a public school teacher. When Walt was little more than an infant, the family moved to a farm near Marceline, Missouri, a typical small Midwestern town, which is said to have furnished the inspiration and model for the Main Street, U.S.A., of Disneyland. There Walt began his schooling and first showed a taste and aptitude for drawing and painting with crayons and watercolours.

His restless father soon abandoned his efforts at farming and moved the family to Kansas City , Missouri, where he bought a morning newspaper route and compelled his young sons to assist him in delivering papers. Walt later said that many of the habits and compulsions of his adult life stemmed from the disciplines and discomforts of helping his father with the paper route. In Kansas City the young Walt began to study cartooning with a correspondence school and later took classes at the Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design.

Explore the life and career of Walt Disney

In 1917 the Disneys moved back to Chicago, and Walt entered McKinley High School, where he took photographs, made drawings for the school paper, and studied cartooning on the side, for he was hopeful of eventually achieving a job as a newspaper cartoonist. His progress was interrupted by World War I , in which he participated as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in France and Germany.

Cinderella Castle at Magic Kingdom, Disney World, Orlando, Florida, Florida tourism

Returning to Kansas City in 1919, he found occasional employment as a draftsman and inker in commercial art studios, where he met Ub Iwerks , a young artist whose talents contributed greatly to Walt’s early success.

Dissatisfied with their progress, Disney and Iwerks started a small studio of their own in 1922 and acquired a secondhand movie camera with which they made one and two-minute animated advertising films for distribution to local movie theatres. They also did a series of animated cartoon sketches called Laugh-O-grams and the pilot film for a series of seven-minute fairy tales that combined both live action and animation , Alice in Cartoonland . A New York film distributor cheated the young producers, and Disney was forced to file for bankruptcy in 1923. He moved to California to pursue a career as a cinematographer, but the surprise success of the first Alice film compelled Disney and his brother Roy —a lifelong business partner—to reopen shop in Hollywood.

With Roy as business manager, Disney resumed the Alice series, persuading Iwerks to join him and assist with the drawing of the cartoons. They invented a character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit , contracted for distribution of the films at $1,500 each, and propitiously launched their small enterprise. In 1927, just before the transition to sound in motion pictures, Disney and Iwerks experimented with a new character—a cheerful, energetic, and mischievous mouse called Mickey. They had planned two shorts, called Plane Crazy and Gallopin’ Gaucho , that were to introduce Mickey Mouse when The Jazz Singer , a motion picture with the popular singer Al Jolson , brought the novelty of sound to the movies. Fully recognizing the possibilities for sound in animated-cartoon films, Disney quickly produced a third Mickey Mouse cartoon equipped with voices and music, entitled Steamboat Willie , and cast aside the other two soundless cartoon films. When it appeared in 1928, Steamboat Willie was a sensation.

The following year Disney started a new series called Silly Symphonies with a picture entitled The Skeleton Dance , in which a skeleton rises from the graveyard and does a grotesque , clattering dance set to music based on classical themes. Original and briskly syncopated, the film ensured popular acclaim for the series, but, with costs mounting because of the more complicated drawing and technical work, Disney’s operation was continually in peril.

Disney had by that time gathered a staff of creative young people, who were headed by Iwerks. Colour was introduced in the Academy Award-winning Silly Symphonies film Flowers and Trees (1932), while other animal characters came and went in films such as The Grasshopper and the Ants (1934) and The Tortoise and the Hare (1935). Roy franchised tie-in sales with the cartoons of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck—watches, dolls , shirts, and tops—and reaped more wealth for the company.

Walt Disney

Overview (5), mini bio (1).

Walter Elias Disney was born on December 5, 1901 in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Flora Disney (née Call) and Elias Disney , a Canadian-born farmer and businessperson. He had Irish, German, and English ancestry. Walt moved with his parents to Kansas City at age seven, where he spent the majority of his childhood. At age 16, during World War I, he faked his age to join the American Red Cross. He soon returned home, where he won a scholarship to the Kansas City Art Institute. There, he met a fellow animator, Ub Iwerks . The two soon set up their own company. In the early 1920s, they made a series of animated shorts for the Newman theater chain, entitled "Newman's Laugh-O-Grams". Their company soon went bankrupt, however. The two then went to Hollywood in 1923. They started work on a new series, about a live-action little girl who journeys to a world of animated characters. Entitled the "Alice Comedies", they were distributed by M.J. Winkler (Margaret). Walt was backed up financially only by Winkler and his older brother Roy O. Disney , who remained his business partner for the rest of his life. Hundreds of "Alice Comedies" were produced between 1923 and 1927, before they lost popularity. Walt then started work on a series around a new animated character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. This series was successful, but in 1928, Walt discovered that M.J. Winkler and her husband, Charles Mintz , had stolen the rights to the character away from him. They had also stolen all his animators, except for Ub Iwerks . While taking the train home, Walt started doodling on a piece of paper. The result of these doodles was a mouse named Mickey. With only Walt and Ub to animate, and Walt's wife Lillian Disney (Lilly) and Roy's wife Edna Disney to ink in the animation cells, three Mickey Mouse cartoons were quickly produced. The first two didn't sell, so Walt added synchronized sound to the last one, Steamboat Willie (1928), and it was immediately picked up. With Walt as the voice of Mickey, it premiered to great success. Many more cartoons followed. Walt was now in the big time, but he didn't stop creating new ideas. In 1929, he created the 'Silly Symphonies', a cartoon series that didn't have a continuous character. They were another success. One of them, Flowers and Trees (1932), was the first cartoon to be produced in color and the first cartoon to win an Oscar; another, Three Little Pigs (1933), was so popular it was often billed above the feature films it accompanied. The Silly Symphonies stopped coming out in 1939, but Mickey and friends, (including Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto, and plenty more), were still going strong and still very popular. In 1934, Walt started work on another new idea: a cartoon that ran the length of a feature film. Everyone in Hollywood was calling it "Disney's Folly", but Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) was anything but, winning critical raves, the adoration of the public, and one big and seven little special Oscars for Walt. Now Walt listed animated features among his ever-growing list of accomplishments. While continuing to produce cartoon shorts, he also started producing more of the animated features. Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi (1942) were all successes; not even a flop like Fantasia (1940) and a studio animators' strike in 1941 could stop Disney now. In the mid 1940s, he began producing "packaged features", essentially a group of shorts put together to run feature length, but by 1950 he was back with animated features that stuck to one story, with Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), and Peter Pan (1953). In 1950, he also started producing live-action films, with Treasure Island (1950). These began taking on greater importance throughout the 50s and 60s, but Walt continued to produce animated features, including Lady and the Tramp (1955), Sleeping Beauty (1959), and One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961). In 1955 he opened a theme park in southern California: Disneyland. It was a place where children and their parents could take rides, just explore, and meet the familiar animated characters, all in a clean, safe environment. It was another great success. Walt also became one of the first producers of films to venture into television, with his series The Magical World of Disney (1954) which he began in 1954 to promote his theme park. He also produced The Mickey Mouse Club (1955) and Zorro (1957). To top it all off, Walt came out with the lavish musical fantasy Mary Poppins (1964), which mixed live-action with animation. It is considered by many to be his magnum opus. Even after that, Walt continued to forge onward, with plans to build a new theme park and an experimental prototype city in Florida. He did not live to see the culmination of those plans, however; in 1966, he developed lung cancer brought on by his lifelong chain-smoking. He died of a heart attack following cancer surgery on December 15, 1966 at age 65. But not even his death, it seemed, could stop him. Roy carried on plans to build the Florida theme park, and it premiered in 1971 under the name Walt Disney World. His company continues to flourish, still producing animated and live-action films and overseeing the still-growing empire started by one man: Walt Disney, who will never be forgotten.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Tommy Peter

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Biography of Walt Disney, Animator and Film Producer

Love of drawing, laugh-o-gram films, mickey mouse, sound and color, feature-length cartoons, union strikes, world war ii, more movies, plans for disneyland, disneyland opens, plans for walt disney world, florida.

Walt Disney (born Walter Elias Disney; December 5, 1901–December 15, 1966) was a cartoonist and entrepreneur who developed a multibillion-dollar family entertainment empire. Disney was the renowned creator of Mickey Mouse, the first sound cartoon, the first Technicolor cartoon, and the first feature-length cartoon. In addition to winning 22 Academy Awards in his lifetime, Disney also created the first major theme park: Disneyland in Anaheim, California.

Fast Facts: Walt Disney

Walt Disney was born the fourth son of Elias Disney and Flora Disney (née Call) in Chicago, Illinois, on December 5, 1901. By 1903, Elias, a handyman and carpenter, had grown weary of crime in Chicago; thus, he moved his family to a 45-acre farm he purchased in Marceline, Missouri. Elias was a stern man who administered “corrective” beatings to his five children; Flora soothed the children with nightly readings of fairy tales.

After the two eldest sons grew up and left home, Walt Disney and his older brother Roy worked on the farm with their father. In his free time, Disney made up games and sketched the farm animals. In 1909, Elias sold the farm and purchased an established newspaper route in Kansas City, where he moved his remaining family.

It was in Kansas City that Disney developed a love for an amusement park called Electric Park, which featured 100,000 electric lights illuminating a roller coaster, a dime museum, penny arcade, swimming pool, and a colorful fountain light show.

Rising at 3:30 a.m. seven days a week, 8-year-old Walt Disney and brother Roy delivered the newspapers, taking quick naps in alleyways before heading to Benton Grammar School. In school, Disney excelled in reading; his favorite authors were Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.

In art class, Disney surprised his teacher with original sketches of flowers with human hands and faces. After stepping on a nail on his newspaper route, Disney had to spend two weeks in bed recuperating. He spent his time reading and drawing newspaper-style cartoons.

Elias sold the newspaper route in 1917 and bought a partnership in the O-Zell Jelly factory in Chicago, moving Flora and Walt with him (Roy had enlisted in the U.S. Navy). Sixteen-year-old Walt Disney attended McKinley High School, where he became the school newspaper’s junior art editor. To pay for evening art classes at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, he washed jars in his father’s jelly factory.

Wanting to join Roy, who was fighting in World War I, Disney tried to join the Army but at age 16 he was too young. Undeterred, he joined the Red Cross’ Ambulance Corps, which took him to France and Germany.

After spending 10 months in Europe, Disney returned to the U.S. In October 1919, he got a job as a commercial artist at the Pressman-Rubin Studio in Kansas City. Disney met and became friends with fellow artist Ub Iwerks at the studio.

When Disney and Iwerks were laid off in January 1920, they formed Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists. Due to a lack of clients, however, the duo only survived for about a month. After getting jobs at the Kansas City Film Ad Company as cartoonists, Disney and Iwerks began making commercials for movie theaters.

Disney borrowed a camera from the studio and began experimenting with stop-action animation in his garage. He shot footage of his animal drawings using different techniques until the pictures actually “moved” in fast and slow motion. His cartoons (which he called Laugh-O-Grams) eventually became superior to the ones he was working on at the studio; he even figured out a way to merge live action with animation. Disney suggested to his boss that they make cartoons, but his boss flatly turned down the idea, content with making commercials.

In 1922, Disney quit the Kansas City Film Ad Company and opened a studio in Kansas City called Laugh-O-Gram Films. He hired a few employees, including Iwerks, and sold a series of fairy tale cartoons to Pictorial Films in Tennessee.

Disney and his staff began work on six cartoons, each one a seven-minute fairy tale that combined live action and animation. Unfortunately, Pictorial Films went bankrupt in July 1923; as a result, so did Laugh-O-Gram Films.

Next, Disney decided he would try his luck at working in a Hollywood studio as a director and joined his brother Roy in Los Angeles, where Roy was recovering from tuberculosis.

Having no luck getting a job at any of the studios, Disney sent a letter to Margaret J. Winkler, a New York cartoon distributor, to see if she had any interest in distributing his Laugh-O-Grams. After Winkler viewed the cartoons, she and Disney signed a contract.

On October 16, 1923, Disney and Roy rented a room at the back of a real estate office in Hollywood. Roy took on the role of accountant and cameraman of the live action; a little girl was hired to act in the cartoons; two women were hired to ink and paint the celluloid, and Disney wrote the stories and drew and filmed the animation.

By February 1924, Disney had hired his first animator, Rollin Hamilton, and moved into a small storefront with a window bearing the sign “Disney Bros. Studio.” Disney’s "Alice in Cartoonland" reached theaters in June 1924.

In early 1925, Disney moved his growing staff to a one-story, stucco building and renamed his business “Walt Disney Studio.” Disney hired Lillian Bounds, an ink artist, and began dating her. On July 13, 1925, the couple married in her hometown of Spalding, Idaho. Disney was 24; Lillian was 26.

Meanwhile, Margaret Winkler also married, and her new husband, Charles Mintz, took over her cartoon distribution business. In 1927, Mintz asked Disney to rival the popular “Felix the Cat” series. Mintz suggested the name “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit” and Disney created the character and made the series.

In 1928, when costs became increasingly high, Disney and Lillian took a train trip to New York to renegotiate the contract for the popular Oswald series. Mintz countered with even less money than he was currently paying, informing Disney that he owned the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and that he had lured most of Disney’s animators to come work for him.

Shocked, shaken, and saddened, Disney boarded the train for the long ride back. In a depressed state, he sketched a character and named him Mortimer Mouse. Lillian suggested the name Mickey Mouse instead.

Back in Los Angeles, Disney copyrighted Mickey Mouse and, along with Iwerks, created new cartoons with Mickey Mouse as the star. Without a distributor, though, Disney could not sell the silent Mickey Mouse cartoons.

In 1928, sound became the latest in film technology. Disney pursued several New York film companies to record his cartoons with this new novelty. He struck a deal with Pat Powers of Cinephone. Disney provided the voice of Mickey Mouse and Powers added sound effects and music.

Powers became the distributor of the cartoons and on November 18, 1928, "Steamboat Willie" opened at the Colon Theater in New York. It was Disney’s (and the world’s) first cartoon with sound. "Steamboat Willie" received rave reviews and audiences everywhere adored Mickey Mouse.

In 1929, Disney began making “Silly Symphonies,” a series of cartoons that included dancing skeletons, the Three Little Pigs, and characters other than Mickey Mouse, including Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto.

In 1931, a new film-coloring technique known as Technicolor became the latest in film technology. Until then, everything had been filmed in black and white. To hold off the competition, Disney paid to hold the rights to Technicolor for two years. He filmed a Silly Symphony titled "Flowers and Trees" in Technicolor, showing colorful nature with human faces, and the film won the Academy Award for Best Cartoon of 1932.

On December 18, 1933, Lillian gave birth to Diane Marie Disney, and on December 21, 1936, Lillian and Walt Disney adopted Sharon Mae Disney.

Disney decided to add dramatic storytelling to his cartoons, but making a feature-length cartoon had everyone (including Roy and Lillian) saying it would never work; they believed audiences just wouldn’t sit that long through a dramatic cartoon.

Despite the naysayers, Disney, ever the experimenter, went to work on the feature-length fairy tale "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." Production of the cartoon cost $1.4 million (a massive sum in 1937) and was soon dubbed “Disney’s Folly.”

When it premiered in theaters on December 21, 1937, though, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" was a box office sensation. Despite the Great Depression, it earned $416 million.

A notable achievement in cinema, the movie won Disney an Honorary Academy Award. The citation read, "For 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,' recognized as a significant screen innovation which has charmed millions and pioneered a great new entertainment field."

After the success of "Snow White," Disney constructed his state-of-the-art Burbank Studio, deemed a worker’s paradise for a staff of about 1,000 workers. The studio, with animation buildings, sound stages, and recording rooms, produced "Pinocchio" (1940), "Fantasia" (1940), "Dumbo" (1941), and "Bambi" (1942).

Unfortunately, these feature-length cartoons lost money worldwide due to the start of World War II. Along with the cost of the new studio, Disney found himself in debt. He offered 600,000 shares of common stock, sold at five dollars apiece. The stock offerings sold out quickly and erased the debt.

Between 1940 and 1941, movie studios began unionizing; it wasn’t long before Disney’s workers wanted to unionize as well. While his workers demanded better pay and working conditions, Disney believed that his company had been infiltrated by communists.

After numerous and heated meetings, strikes, and lengthy negotiations, Disney finally became unionized. However, the whole process left Disney feeling disillusioned and discouraged.

With the union question finally settled, Disney was able to turn his attention back to his cartoons; this time for the U.S. government. The United States had joined World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and it was sending millions of young men overseas to fight.

The U.S. government wanted Disney to produce training films using his popular characters ; Disney obliged, creating more than 400,000 feet of film (about 68 hours).

After the war, Disney returned to his own agenda and made "Song of the South" (1946), a movie that was 30 percent animation and 70 percent live action. "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah" was named the best movie song of 1946 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, while James Baskett, who played the character of Uncle Remus in the movie, won an Oscar.

In 1947, Disney decided to make a documentary about Alaskan seals titled "Seal Island" (1948). It won an Academy Award for best two-reel documentary. Disney then assigned his top talent to make "Cinderella" (1950), "Alice in Wonderland" (1951), and "Peter Pan" (1953).

After building a train to ride his two daughters around his new home in Holmby Hills, California, Disney began formulating a dream in 1948 to build Mickey Mouse Amusement Park across the street from his studio. He visited fairs, carnivals, and parks around the world to study the choreography of people and attractions.

Disney borrowed on his life insurance policy and created WED Enterprises to organize his amusement park idea, which he was now referring to as Disneyland. Disney and Herb Ryman drew out the plans for the park in one weekend. The plan included an entrance gate to "Main Street" that would lead to Cinderella’s Castle and off to different lands of interest, including Frontier Land, Fantasy Land, Tomorrow Land, and Adventure Land.

The park would be clean and innovative, a place where parents and children could have fun together on rides and attractions; they would be entertained by Disney characters in the “happiest place on earth.”

Roy visited New York to seek a contract with a television network. Roy and Leonard Goldman reached an agreement where ABC would give Disney a $500,000 investment in Disneyland in exchange for a weekly Disney television series.

ABC became a 35 percent owner of Disneyland and guaranteed loans up to $4.5 million. In July 1953, Disney commissioned the Stanford Research Institute to find a location for his (and the world’s) first major theme park. Anaheim, California, was selected since it could easily be reached by freeway from Los Angeles.

Previous movie profits were not enough to cover the cost of building Disneyland, which took about a year to build at a cost of $17 million. Roy made numerous visits to the Bank of America's headquarters to secure more funding.

On July 13, 1955, Disney sent out 6,000 exclusive guest invitations, including to Hollywood movie stars, to enjoy the opening of Disneyland. ABC sent cameramen to film the opening. However, many tickets were counterfeited and 28,000 people showed up.

Rides broke down, food stands ran out of food, a heat wave caused freshly poured asphalt to capture shoes, and a gas leak caused temporary closings in a few themed areas.

Despite the newspapers referring to this cartoon-ish day as "Black Sunday," guests from all over the world loved it and the park became a major success. Ninety days later, the one-millionth guest passed through the park's turnstile.

In 1964, Disney’s "Mary Poppins" premiered; the film was nominated for 13 Academy Awards. With this success, Disney sent Roy and a few other Disney executives to Florida in 1965 to purchase land for another theme park.

In October 1966, Disney gave a press conference to describe his plans for building an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) in Florida. The new park would be five times the size of Disneyland, and it would include shopping, entertainment venues, and hotels.

The new Disney World development would not be completed, however, until five years after Disney’s death. The new Magic Kingdom (which included Main Street USA; Cinderella's Castle leading to Adventureland, Frontierland, Fantasyland, and Tomorrowland) opened on October 1, 1971, along with Disney's Contemporary Resort, Disney's Polynesian Resort, and Disney's Fort Wilderness Resort & Campground. EPCOT, Walt Disney’s second theme park vision, which featured a future world of innovation and a showcase of other countries, opened in 1982.

In 1966, doctors informed Disney that he had lung cancer. After having a lung removed and several chemotherapy sessions, Disney collapsed in his home and was admitted to St. Joseph’s Hospital on December 15, 1966. He died at 9:35 a.m. from an acute circulatory collapse and was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

Disney left behind one of the largest media empires in the world. Since his death, the Walt Disney Company has only grown; today, it employs more than 200,000 people and generates billions in revenue each year. For his artistic achievements, Disney amassed 22 Oscars and numerous other honors. In 1960, he was given two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (one for his film and one for his television work).

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Biography Online

Walt Disney Biography

Early Life – Walt Disney

Walt Disney was born on 5 December 1901, in Chicago. His parents were of German/English and Irish descent. As a child, the Disney family moved between Marceline in Missouri, Kansas City and back to Chicago. The young Walt Disney developed an interest in art and took lessons at the Kansas City Institute and later Chicago Art Institute. He became the cartoonist for the school magazine.

When America joined the First World War, Walt dropped out of school and tried to enlist in the army. He was rejected for being underage, but he was later able to join in the Red Cross and in late 1918 was sent to France to drive an ambulance.

In 1919, he moved back to Kansas City where he got a series of jobs, before finding employment in his area of greatest interest – the film industry. It was working for the Kansas City Film Ad company that he gained the opportunity to begin working in the relatively new field of animation. Walt used his talent as a cartoonist to start his first work.

The success of his early cartoons enabled him to set up his own studio called Laugh-O-Gram. However, the popularity of his cartoons was not matched by his ability to run a profitable business. With high labour costs, the firm went bankrupt. After his first failure, he decided to move to Hollywood, California which was home to the growing film industry in America. This ability to overcome adversity was a standard feature of Disney’s career.

“All the adversity I’ve had in my life, all my troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me… You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.”

– The Story of Walt Disney (1957)

With his brother, Roy, Walt set up another company and sought to find a distributor for his new film – Alice Comedies – based on the adventures of Alice in Wonderland.

Mickey Mouse

In 1927, the Disney studio was involved in the successful production of ‘Oswald the Lucky Rabbit’, distributed by Universal Pictures. However, with Universal Pictures controlling the rights to ‘Oswald the Lucky Rabbit’, Walt was not able to profit from this success. He rejected an offer from Universal and went back to working on his own.

The Mickey Mouse cartoons with soundtracks became very popular and cemented the growing reputation and strength of Disney Productions. The skill of Walt Disney was to give his cartoons believable real-life characteristics. They were skillfully depicted and captured the imagination of the audience through his pioneering use of uplifting stories and moral characteristics.

In 1932, he received his first Academy Award for the Best Short Subject: Cartoons for the three coloured ‘Flowers and Trees’ He also won a special Academy Award for Mickey Mouse.

In 1933, he developed his most successful cartoon of all time ‘The Three Little Pigs’ (1933) with the famous song ‘Whose Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf.”

In 1924, Walt Disney began his most ambitious project to date. He wished to make a full length animated feature film of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ Many expected it to be a commercial failure. But, using new techniques of filming, the production was met with glowing reviews. It took nearly three years to film – coming out in 1937 after Disney had run out of money. But, the movie’s strong critical reception, made it the most successful film of 1938, earning $8 million on its first release. The film had very high production values but also captured the essence of a fairy tale on film for the first time. Walt Disney would later write that he never produced films for the critic, but the general public. Replying to criticism that his productions were somewhat corny, he replied:

“All right. I’m corny. But I think there’s just about a-hundred-and-forty-million people in this country that are just as corny as I am.” – Walt Disney

Disney always had a great ability to know what the public loved to see.

After the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the studio produced several other successful animations, such as ‘Pinocchio’, ‘Peter Pan’, ‘Bambi’ and ‘The Wind in the Willows’. After America’s entry into the Second World War in 1941, this ‘golden age’ of animation faded and the studio struggled as it made unprofitable propaganda films.

Political and religious views

In 1941, Disney also had to deal with a major strike by his writers and animators. This strike left a strong impression on Disney. He would later become a leading member of the anti-Communist organisation ‘Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals’ (the right-wing organisation was also considered to be anti-semitic.) At one point, he (unsuccessfully) tried to brand his labour union organisers as Communist agitators.

However, in the 1950s, Disney distanced himself from the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. However, by associating with the organisation, he was often associated with the anti-labour and anti-semitic philosophy it expressed. Disney was a Republican, though was not particularly involved in politics. It is often asked whether Walt Disney was anti-semitic.

His biographer, Neal Gabler stated:

“…And though Walt himself, in my estimation, was not anti-semitic, nevertheless, he willingly allied himself with people who were anti-semitic, and that reputation stuck. He was never really able to expunge it throughout his life.”

Walt Disney believed in the benefits of a religious approach to life, though he never went to church and disliked sanctimonious teachers.

“I believe firmly in the efficacy of religion, in its powerful influence on a person’s whole life. It helps immeasurably to meet the storms and stress of life and keep you attuned to the Divine inspiration. Without inspiration, we would perish.”

Ch. 15: Walt Lives!, p. 379

He respected other religions and retained a firm faith in God.

Post-war success

During the war, there was much less demand for cartoon animation. It took until the late 1940s, for Disney to recover some of its lustre and success. Disney finished production of Cinderella and also Peter Pan (which had been shelved during the war) In the 1950s, Walt Disney Productions also began expanding its operations into popular action films. They produced several successful films, such as ‘Treasure Island’ (1950), ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’ (1954) and ‘Pollyanna’ (1960)

In another innovation, the studio created one of the first specifically children’s shows – The Mickey Mouse Club. Walt Disney even returned to the studio to provide the voice. In the 1960s, the Disney Empire continued to successfully expand. In 1964, they produced their most successful ever film ‘Mary Poppins.’

In the late 1940s, Walt Disney began building up plans for a massive Theme Park. Walt Disney wished the Theme Park to be like nothing ever created on earth. In particular, he wanted it to be a magical world for children and surrounded by a train. Disney had a great love of trains since his childhood when he regularly saw trains pass near his home. It was characteristic of Walt Disney that he was willing to take risks in trying something new.

“Courage is the main quality of leadership, in my opinion, no matter where it is exercised. Usually, it implies some risk, especially in new undertakings. Courage to initiate something and to keep it going, pioneering and adventurous spirit to blaze new ways, often, in our land of opportunity.”

– The Disney Way Fieldbook (2000) by Bill Capodagli

After several years in the planning and building, Disneyland opened on July 17, 1955. Disney spoke at the address.

“To all who come to this happy place; welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past …. and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams and the hard facts that have created America … with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world.”

The success of Disneyland encouraged Walt to consider another park in Orlando, Florida. In 1965, another theme park was planned.

Walt Disney died of lung cancer on December 15, 1966. He had been a chain smoker all his life. An internet myth suggested Walt Disney had his body cryonically frozen, but this is untrue. It seems to have been spread by his employers, looking for one last joke at the expense of their boss.

After his death, his brother Roy returned to lead The Disney Company, but the company missed the direction and genius of Walt Disney. The 1970s were a relatively fallow period for the company, before a renaissance in the 1980s, with a new generation of films, such as ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ (1988) and ‘The Lion King’ (1994)

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “Biography of Walt Disney”, Oxford, UK. www.biographyonline.net , 8th August 2014. Last updated 1st March 2019.

Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination

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Walt Disney Biography

Born: December 5, 1901 Chicago, Illinois Died: December 15, 1966 Los Angeles, California American animator, filmmaker, and businessman

An American filmmaker and businessman, Walt Disney created a new kind of popular culture with feature-length animated cartoons and live-action "family" films.

Walter Elias Disney was born in Chicago, Illinois, on December 5, 1901, the fourth of five children born to Elias and Flora Call Disney. His father, a strict and religious man who often physically abused his children, was working as a building contractor when Walter was born. Soon afterward, his father took over a farm in Marceline, Missouri, where he moved the family. Walter was very happy on the farm and developed his love of animals while living there. After the farm failed, the family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where Walter helped his father deliver newspapers. He also worked selling candy and newspapers on the train that traveled between Kansas City and Chicago, Illinois. He began drawing and took some art lessons during this time.

Disney dropped out of high school at seventeen to serve in World War I (1914–18; a war between German-led Central powers and the Allies—England, the United States, and other nations). After a short stretch as an ambulance driver, he returned to Kansas City in 1919 to work as a commercial illustrator and later made crude animated cartoons (a series of drawings with slight changes in each that resemble movement when filmed in order). By 1922 he had set up his own shop as a partner with Ub Iwerks, whose drawing ability and technical skill were major factors in Disney's eventual success.

Off to Hollywood

Initial failure with Ub Iwerks sent Disney to Hollywood, California, in 1923. In partnership with his older brother, Roy, he began producing Oswald the Rabbit cartoons for Universal Studios. After a contract dispute led to the end of this work, Disney and his brother decided to come up with their own character. Their first success came in Steamboat Willie, which was the first all-sound cartoon. It also featured Disney as the voice of a character first called "Mortimer Mouse." Disney's wife, Lillian (whom he had married in 1925) suggested that Mickey sounded better, and Disney agreed.

Walt Disney. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Branching out

Disney rapidly expanded his studio operations to include a training school where a whole new generation of artists developed and made possible the production of the first feature-length cartoon, Snow White (1937). Other costly animated features followed, including Pinocchio, Bambi, and the famous musical experiment Fantasia. With Seal Island (1948), wildlife films became an additional source of income. In 1950 Treasure Island led to what became the studio's major product, live-action films, which basically cornered the traditional "family" market. Disney's biggest hit, Mary Poppins, was one of his many films that used occasional animation to project wholesome, exciting stories containing sentiment and music.

In 1954 Disney successfully invaded television, and by the time of his death the Disney studio had produced 21 full-length animated films, 493 short subjects, 47 live-action films, 7 True-Life Adventure features, 330 hours of Mickey Mouse Club television programs, 78 half-hour Zorro television adventures, and 280 other television shows.

Construction of theme parks

On July 18, 1957, Disney opened Disneyland in Anaheim, California, the most successful amusement park in history, with 6.7 million people visiting it by 1966. The idea for the park came to him after taking his children to other amusement parks and watching them have fun on amusement rides. He decided to build a park where the entire family could have fun together. In 1971 Disney World in Orlando, Florida, opened. Since then, Disney theme parks have opened in Tokyo, Japan, and Paris, France.

Disney also dreamed of developing a city of the future, a dream that came true in 1982 with the opening of Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT). EPCOT, which cost an initial $900 million, was planned as a real-life community of the future with the very latest in technology (the use of science to achieve a practical purpose). The two principle areas of EPCOT are Future World and World Showcase, both of which were designed for adults rather than children.

Disney's business empire

Furthermore, Disney created and funded a new university, the California Institute of the Arts, known as Cal Arts. He thought of this as the peak of education for the arts, where people in many different forms could work together, dream and develop, and create the mixture of arts needed for the future. Disney once commented: "It's the principal thing I hope to leave when I move on to greener pastures. If I can help provide a place to develop the talent of the future, I think I will have accomplished something."

Disney's parks continue to grow with the creation of the Disney-MGM Studios, Animal Kingdom, and an extensive sports complex in Orlando. The Disney Corporation has also branched out into other types of films with the creation of Touchstone Films, into music with Hollywood Records, and even into vacations with its Disney Cruise Lines. In all, the Disney name now covers a multi-billion dollar enterprise, with business ventures all over the world.

In 1939 Disney received an honorary (received without meeting the usual requirements) Academy Award, and in 1954 he received four more Academy Awards. In 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) presented Disney with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in the same year Disney was awarded the Freedom Foundation Award.

Walt Disney, happily married for forty-one years, was moving ahead with his plans for huge, new outdoor recreational areas when he died on December 15, 1966, in Los Angeles, California. At the time of his death, his enterprises had brought him respect, admiration, and a business empire worth over $100 million a year, but Disney was still mainly remembered as the man who had created Mickey Mouse almost forty years before.

For More Information

Barrett, Katherine, and Richard Greene. Inside the Dream: The Personal Story of Walt Disney. New York: Disney Editions, 2001.

Green, Amy Boothe. Remembering Walt. New York: Hyperion, 1999.

Logue, Mary. Imagination: The Story of Walt Disney. Chanhassen, MN: Child's World, 1999.

Thomas, Bob. Walt Disney: An American Original. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976.

Watts, Steven. The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

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Filmography

Walt Disney Biography

Birthday: December 5 , 1901 ( Sagittarius )

Born In: Chicago, Illinois, United States

Walt Disney was a showman in the truest sense of the word. A pioneering force in the world of animation, he transformed the entertainment industry completely, with his innovative ideas and creative visions. In his over four-decade long career, he changed the way the world looked at animation and was solely responsible for ushering the golden age of animation. Starting off as a mere animator, he soon turned into a business magnate, eventually becoming a major figure in the American animation industry. He co-founded the Walt Disney Production, along with his brother, which went on to become one of the best motion picture producers of the world. The cartoon characters that we love to see today, such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto, are all the brainchild of this artistic inventor. In addition to his contribution in the field of animation, he was the mastermind behind the conceptualization and final formulation of Disneyland, an innovative theme park for children and adults alike. Till date, no other person has singularly contributed to the animation industry as Walt Disney has. To know more about his life and profile, read on.

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Also Known As: Walter Elias Disney

Died At Age: 65

Spouse/Ex-: Lillian Bounds (1925–66)

father: Elias Disney

mother: Flora Call Disney

siblings: Herbert Arthur Disney, Raymond Arnold Disney, Roy Oliver Disney, Ruth Flora Disney

children: Diane Marie Disney, Sharon Mae Disney

Born Country: United States

Quotes By Walt Disney Animators

Height: 1.78 m

political ideology: Republican

Died on: December 15 , 1966

place of death: Burbank, California, United States

Ancestry: German American, Canadian American, British American, Irish American, Indian American

City: Chicago, Illinois

Notable Alumni: Kansas City Art Institute, School Of The Art Institute Of Chicago

Grouping of People: Smoker

Cause of Death: Lung Cancer

U.S. State: Illinois

Founder/Co-Founder: The Walt Disney Company

education: School Of The Art Institute Of Chicago, Kansas City Art Institute

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Walt Disney Movies

(Family, Short, Documentary)

(Documentary, Family, Short)

(Documentary, Short)

(Short, Documentary, Family)

(Musical, Fantasy, Comedy, Family)

(Documentary, Family)

(Adventure)

(Family, Documentary, Short)

Quotes By Walt Disney | Quote Of The Day | Top 100 Quotes

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Louise Krasniewicz , PhD, is an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.

Bibliographic information

About Walt Disney

During a 43-year Hollywood career, which spanned the development of the motion picture medium as a modern American art, Walter Elias Disney, a modern Aesop, established himself and his product as a genuine part of Americana.

David Low, the late British political cartoonist, called Disney “the most significant figure in graphic arts since Leonardo.” A pioneer and innovator, and the possessor of one of the most fertile imaginations the world has ever known, Walt Disney, along with members of his staff, received more than 950 honors and citations from throughout the world, including 48 Academy Awards® and 7 Emmys® in his lifetime.

Walt Disney’s personal awards included honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, the University of Southern California, and UCLA; the Presidential Medal of Freedom; France’s Legion of Honor and Officer d’Academie decorations; Thailand’s Order of the Crown; Brazil’s Order of the Southern Cross; Mexico’s Order of the Aztec Eagle; and the Showman of the World Award from the National Association of Theatre Owners.

The creator of Mickey Mouse and founder of Disneyland and Walt Disney World was born in Chicago, Illinois, on December 5, 1901. His father, Elias Disney, was an Irish-Canadian. His mother, Flora Call Disney, was of German-American descent. Walt was one of five children, four boys and a girl.

Raised on a farm near Marceline, Missouri, Walt early became interested in drawing, selling his first sketches to neighbors when he was only seven years old. At McKinley High School in Chicago, Disney divided his attention between drawing and photography, contributing both to the school paper. At night he attended the Academy of Fine Arts.

During the fall of 1918, Disney attempted to enlist for military service. Rejected because he was only 16 years of age, Walt joined the Red Cross and was sent overseas, where he spent a year driving an ambulance and chauffeuring Red Cross officials. His ambulance was covered from stem to stern, not with stock camouflage, but with drawings and cartoons.

After the war, Walt returned to Kansas City, where he began his career as an advertising cartoonist. Here, in 1920, he created and marketed his first original animated cartoons, and later perfected a new method for combining live-action and animation.

In August of 1923, Walt Disney left Kansas City for Hollywood with nothing but a few drawing materials, $40 in his pocket and a completed animated and live-action film. Walt’s brother Roy O. Disney was already in California, with an immense amount of sympathy and encouragement, and $250. Pooling their resources, they borrowed an additional $500 and constructed a camera stand in their uncle’s garage. Soon, they received an order from New York for the first “Alice Comedy” short, and the brothers began their production operation in the rear of a Hollywood real estate office two blocks away.

On July 13, 1925, Walt married one of his first employees, Lillian Bounds, in Lewiston, Idaho. They were blessed with two daughters — Diane, married to Ron Miller, former president and chief executive officer of Walt Disney Productions; and Sharon Disney Lund, formerly a member of Disney’s Board of Directors. The Millers have seven children and Mrs. Lund had three. Mrs. Lund passed away in 1993.

Mickey Mouse was created in 1928, and his talents were first used in a silent cartoon entitled Plane Crazy . However, before the cartoon could be released, sound burst upon the motion picture screen. Thus Mickey made his screen debut in Steamboat Willie , the world’s first fully synchronized sound cartoon, which premiered at the Colony Theatre in New York on November 18, 1928.

Walt’s drive to perfect the art of animation was endless. Technicolor® was introduced to animation during the production of his “Silly Symphonies.” In 1932, the film entitled Flowers and Trees won Walt the first of his 32 personal Academy Awards®. In 1937, he released The Old Mill , the first short subject to utilize the multiplane camera technique.

On December 21 of that same year, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , the first full-length animated musical feature, premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles. Produced at the unheard of cost of $1,499,000 during the depths of the Great Depression, the film is still accounted as one of the great feats and imperishable monuments of the motion picture industry. During the next five years, Walt completed such other full-length animated classics as Pinocchio , Fantasia , Dumbo and Bambi .

In 1940, construction was completed on Disney’s Burbank studio, and the staff swelled to more than 1,000 artists, animators, story men and technicians. During World War II, 94 percent of the Disney facilities were engaged in special government work including the production of training and propaganda films for the armed services, as well as health films which are still shown throughout the world by the U.S. State Department. The remainder of his efforts were devoted to the production of comedy short subjects, deemed highly essential to civilian and military morale.

Disney’s 1945 feature, the musical The Three Caballeros , combined live action with the cartoon medium, a process he used successfully in such other features as Song of the South and the highly acclaimed Mary Poppins . In all, 81 features were released by the studio during his lifetime.

Walt’s inquisitive mind and keen sense for education through entertainment resulted in the award-winning “True-Life Adventure” series. Through such films as The Living Desert , The Vanishing Prairie , The African Lion and White Wilderness , Disney brought fascinating insights into the world of wild animals and taught the importance of conserving our nation’s outdoor heritage.

Disneyland, launched in 1955 as a fabulous $17 million Magic Kingdom, soon increased its investment tenfold and entertained, by its fourth decade, more than 400 million people, including presidents, kings and queens and royalty from all over the globe.

A pioneer in the field of television programming, Disney began production in 1954, and was among the first to present full-color programming with his Wonderful World of Color in 1961. The Mickey Mouse Club and Zorro were popular favorites in the 1950s.

But that was only the beginning. In 1965, Walt Disney turned his attention toward the problem of improving the quality of urban life in America. He personally directed the design on an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT, planned as a living showcase for the creativity of American industry.

Said Disney, “I don’t believe there is a challenge anywhere in the world that is more important to people everywhere than finding the solution to the problems of our cities. But where do we begin? Well, we’re convinced we must start with the public need. And the need is not just for curing the old ills of old cities. We think the need is for starting from scratch on virgin land and building a community that will become a prototype for the future.”

Thus, Disney directed the purchase of 43 square miles of virgin land — twice the size of Manhattan Island — in the center of the state of Florida. Here, he master planned a whole new Disney world of entertainment to include a new amusement theme park, motel-hotel resort vacation center and his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. After more than seven years of master planning and preparation, including 52 months of actual construction, Walt Disney World opened to the public as scheduled on October 1, 1971. Epcot Center opened on October 1, 1982.

Prior to his death on December 15, 1966, Walt Disney took a deep interest in the establishment of California Institute of the Arts, a college level, professional school of all the creative and performing arts. Of Cal Arts, Walt once said, “It’s the principal thing I hope to leave when I move on to greener pastures. If I can help provide a place to develop the talent of the future, I think I will have accomplished something.”

California Institute of the Arts was founded in 1961 with the amalgamation of two schools, the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music and Chouinard Art Institute. The campus is located in the city of Valencia, 32 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles. Walt Disney conceived the new school as a place where all the performing and creative arts would be taught under one roof in a “community of the arts” as a completely new approach to professional arts training.

Walt Disney is a legend, a folk hero of the 20th century. His worldwide popularity was based upon the ideas which his name represents: imagination, optimism and self-made success in the American tradition. Walt Disney did more to touch the hearts, minds and emotions of millions of Americans than any other man in the past century. Through his work, he brought joy, happiness and a universal means of communication to the people of every nation. Certainly, our world shall know but one Walt Disney.

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Film and Television: Biographies

Disney, Walt

Disney, walt.

Animator. Nationality: American. Born: Walter Elias Disney in Chicago, 5 December 1901. Education: Attended McKinley High School, Chicago; Kansas City Art Institute, 1915. Family: Married Lillian Bounds, 1925; children: Diane, Sharon. Career: 1918—in France with Red Cross Ambulance Corps, arriving just after Armistice; 1919—returned to Kansas, became commercial art studio apprentice, met Ub Iwerks; with Iwerks briefly in business, doing illustrations and ads; 1920—joined Kansas City Film Ad Co., making cartoon commercials for local businesses; 1922—incorporated Laugh-o-Gram Films, first studio, went bankrupt; 1923—to Hollywood, contract with M. J. Winkler, began Alice in Cartoonland series; soon joined by Iwerks; 1927—ended Alice series, began Oswald the Lucky Rabbit series; salary dispute with Winkler; formed Walt Disney Productions; 1928— Steamboat Willie released, first synchronized sound cartoon, featuring Mickey Mouse; made deal with Pat Powers for independent distribution; 1930—began distributing through Columbia; 1932— Flowers and Trees , first cartoon in Technicolor and first to win an Academy Award; released through United Artists; 1937— Snow White , first feature-length cartoon, marked innovative use of multi-plane camera, developed by Disney Studios; began releasing through RKO; 1941—strike by Disney staff belonging to Cartoonists Guild; Art Babbitt fired, later rehired; changes introduced included credit titles on cartoon shorts; 1944—"Mickey Mouse" is password on D-Day invasion of Europe; 1945—"True Life Adventure" series began, Disney's first live-action films; 1951–60—Disney developed several television programs; 1954—formed Buena Vista Distributing Co. for release of Disneyand occasionally other films; hosting Disneyland TV series (later Walt Disney Presents , Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color , The Wonderful World of Disney ); 1955—Disneyland opened, Anaheim, California; The Mickey Mouse Club premiered on TV; 1960— Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color premiered on television; 1971—Walt Disney World opened in Orlando, Florida. Awards: Special Academy Award, 1932; Special Academy Award for contributions to sound, with William Garity and John N.A. Hawkins, 1941; Irving G. Thalberg Award, 1941; Best Director for his work as a whole, Cannes Film Festival, 1953. Died: California, 15 December 1966.

Films as Director, Animator and Producer:

Newman Laugh-O-Grams series

Cinderella ; The Four Musicians of Bremen ; Goldie Locks and the Three Bears ; Jack and the Beanstalk ; Little Red Riding Hood ; Puss in Boots

Alice's Wonderland ; Tommy Tucker's Tooth ; Martha

(Alice Series)

Alice and the Dog Catcher ; Alice and the Three Bears ; Alice Cans the Cannibals ; Alice Gets in Dutch ; Alice Hunting in Africa ; Alice's Day at Sea ; Alice's Fishy Story ; Alice's Spooky Adventure ; Alice's Wild West Show ; Alice the Peacemaker ; Alice the Piper ; Alice the Toreador

Alice Chops the Suey ; Alice Gets Stung ; Alice in the Jungle ; Alice Loses Out ; Alice on the Farm ; Alice Picks the Champ ; Alice Plays Cupid ; Alice Rattled by Rats ; Alice's Balloon Race ; Alice's Egg Plant ; Alice's Little Parade ; Alice's Mysterious Mystery ; Alice Solves the Puzzle ; Alice's Ornery Orphan ; Alice Stage Struck ; Alice's Tin Pony ; Alice the Jail Bird ; Alice Wins the Derby

Alice Charms the Fish ; Alice's Monkey Business ; Alice in the Wooly West ; Alice the Fire Fighter ; Alice Cuts the Ice ; Alice Helps the Romance ; Alice's Spanish Guitar ; Alice's Brown Derby ; Clara Cleans Her Teeth

Alice the Golf Bag ; Alice Foils the Pirates ; Alice at the Carnival ; Alice's Rodeo ( Alice at the Rodeo ); Alice the Collegiate ; Alice in the Alps ; Alice's Auto Race ; Alice's Circus Daze ; Alice's Knaughty Knight ; Alice's Three Bad Eggs ; Alice's Picnic ; Alice's Channel Swim ; Alice in the Klondike ; Alice's Medicine Show ; Alice the Whaler ; Alice the Beach Nut ; Alice in the Big League

(Oswald the Lucky Rabbit Series)

Trolley Troubles ; Oh, Teacher ; The Ocean Hop ; All Wet ; The Mechanical Cow ; The Banker's Daughter ; Great Guns ; Rickety Gin ; Empty Socks ; Harem Scarem ; Neck 'n Neck

The Ol' Swimmin' 'ole ; Africa Before Dark ; Rival Romeos ; Bright Lights ; Sagebrush Sadie ; Ozzie of the Mounted ; Ride 'em Plow Boy! ; Hungry Hoboes ; Oh, What a Knight ; Sky Scrappers ; Poor Papa ; The Fox Chase ; Tall Timber ; Sleigh Bells ; Hot Dog

Films as Head of Walt Disney Productions, co-d with Ub Iwerks:

(Mickey Mouse Series)

Steamboat Willie

Plane Crazy (made as silent, 1928, but released with synch sound); The Gallopin' Gaucho (made as silent, 1928, but released with synch sound); The Barn Dance ; The Opry House ; When the Cat's Away ; The Barnyard Battle ; The Plow Boy ; The Karnival Kid ; Mickey's Choo Choo ; The Jazz Fool ; Jungle Rhythm ; The Haunted House

The Barnyard Concert (sole director); Just Mickey ( Fiddling Around ) (sole director); The Cactus Kid (sole director)

(Silly Symphonies Series)

The Skeleton Dance ; E1 Terrible Toreador ; The Merry Dwarfs (sole director)

Night (sole director)

The Golden Touch (sole director)

Other Films as Head of Walt Disney Productions:

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Hand)

Pinocchio (Sharpsteen); Fantasia (Sharps teen)

The Reluctant Dragon (Luske, Handley, Beebe, Verity, Blystone and Werker) (+ ro); Dumbo (Sharpsteen)

Bambi (Hand); Saludos Amigos (Ferguson) (+ ro)

Victory through Air Power (Hand and Potter)

The Three Caballeros (Ferguson)

Make Mine Music (Grant); Song of the South (Jackson and Foster)

Fun and Fancy Free (Sharpsteen)

Melody Time (Sharpsteen); So Dear to My Heart (Luske and Schuster)

Ichabod and Mr. Toad ( The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad ) (Sharpsteen)

Cinderella (Sharpsteen); Treasure Island (Haskin)

Alice in Wonderland (Sharpsteen)

The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (Annakin)

Peter Pan (Luske, Geronimi, and Jackson); The Sword and the Rose (Annakin); Rob Roy , the Highland Rogue (French)

20,000 Leagues under the Sea (Fleischer); The Littlest Outlaw ( E1 pequino proscrito ) (Gavaldon)

Lady and the Tramp (Luske, Geronimi and Jackson); Davy Crockett and the River Pirates

The Great Locomotive Chase (Lyon); Westward Ho the Wagons! (Beaudine)

Johnny Tremain (Stevenson); Old Yeller (Stevenson)

The Light in the Forest (Daugherty); Sleeping Beauty (Geronimi); Tonka (L. Foster)

The Shaggy Dog (Barton); Darby O'Gill and the Little People (Stevenson); Third Man on the Mountain (Annakin); Toby Tyler, or Ten Weeks with a Circus (Barton)

Kidnapped (Stevenson); Pollyanna (Swift); Ten Who Dared (Beaudine); Swiss Family Robinson (Annakin); One Hundred and One Dalmatians (Reitherman, Luske and Geronimi); The Absent-Minded Professor (Stevenson)

Moon Pilot (Neilson); In Search of the Castaways (Stevenson); Nikki, Wild Dog of the North (Couffer and Haldane); The Parent Trap (Swift); Greyfriars Bobby (Chaffey); Babes in Toyland (Donohue)

Son of Flubber (Stevenson); The Miracle of the White Stallions ( Flight of the White Stallions ) (Hiller); Big Red (Tokar); Bon Voyage (Neilson); Almost Angels ( Born to Sing ) (Previn); The Legend of Lobo (Algar and Couffer)

Savage Sam (Tokar); Summer Magic (Neilson); The Incredible Journey (Markle); The Sword in the Stone (Reitherman); The Misadventures of Merlin Jones (Stevenson); The Three Lives of Thomasina (Chaffey)

A Tiger Walks (Tokar); The Moon-Spinners (Neilson); Mary Poppins (Stevenson); Emil and the Detectives (Tewksbury); Those Calloways (Tokar); The Monkey's Uncle (Stevenson)

That Darn Cat (Stevenson)

The Ugly Dachshund (Tokar); Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. (Paul) (story under pseudonym Retlaw Yensid); The Fighting Prince of Donegal (O'Herlihy); Follow Me, Boys! (Tokar); Monkeys, Go Home! (McLaglen); The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin (Neilson); The Gnome-Mobile (Stevenson)

The Jungle Book (commentary) (Reitherman)

Publications

By disney, book—.

Sketch Book , Old Saybrook, CT, 1993.

By DISNEY: articles—

"What I've Learned from Animals," in American Magazine , February 1953.

"The Lurking Camera," in Atlantic Monthly ( New York ), August 1954.

"Too Long at the Sugar Bowls: Frances C. Sayers Raps with Disney," in Library Journal ( New York ), 15 October 1965.

On DISNEY: books—

Rotha, Paul, Celluloid, the Film Today , New York, 1931.

Bardeche, Maurice, and Robert Brasillach, Histoire du Cinéma , Paris, 1935.

Field, Robert D., The Art of Walt Disney , New York,1942.

Eisenstein, Sergei, Film Sense , translated and edited by Jay Leyda, New York, 1947.

Clair, René, Reflections on the Cinema , translated by Vera Traill, London, 1953.

Manvell, Roger, and J. Huntley, The Technique of Film Music , New York, 1957.

Martin, Pete, (ed.), The Story of Walt Disney , New York, 1957.McGowan, Kenneth, Behind the Screen: The History and Techniques of Motion Pictures , New York, 1965.

Stephenson, Ralph, Animation in the Cinema , New York, 1967.

Bessy, Maurice, Walt Disney , Paris, 1970.

Kurland, Gerald, Walt Disney: The Master of Animation , New York, 1971.

Maltin, Leonard, The Disney Films , New York, 1973, revised edition, 1984.

Thomas, Frank, and Ollie Johnston, Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life , New York, 1982.

Bruno, Eduardo, and Enrico Ghezzi, Walt Disney , Venice, 1985.

Mosley, Leonard, The Real Walt Disney , London, 1986.

Schickel, Richard, The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney , London, 1986.

Culhane, Shamus, Talking Animals and Other People , New York, 1986 + filmo.

Taylor, John, Storming the Magic Kingdom , New York, 1987.

Grant, John, Encyclopaedia of Walt Disney's Animated Characters , New York, 1987.

Thomas, Frank, and Ollie Johnston, Too Funny for Words , New York, 1987.

Holliss, Richard, and Brian Sibley, The Disney Studio Story , London, 1988.

Duchene, Alain, Walt Disney n'est pas mort! , Paris, 1989.

Ford, Barbara, Walt Disney , New York, 1989.

Grover, Ron, The Disney Touch , Homewood, Illinois, 1991.

Jackson, Kathy Merlock, Walt Disney: A Bio-bibliography , Westport, CT, 1993.

Merritt, Russell, Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney , Gemona, 1993.

Fanning, Jim, Walt Disney , New York, 1994.

Smoodkin, Eric, (ed.), Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom , New York, 1994.

Thomas, Bob, Walt Disney: An American Original , New York, 1994.

West, John G., Jr., The Disney Live-action Productions , Milton, WA, 1994.

Eliot, Marc, Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince, A Biography , Deutsch, 1995.

Finch, Christopher, The Art of Walt Disney: From Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdom , New York, 1995.

Bell, Elizabeth, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells, editors, From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture , Bloomington, Indiana, 1995.

Cole, Michael D. Walt Disney: Creator of Mickey Mouse , Springfield, NJ, 1996.

Watts, Steven, The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life , Boston, 1997.

Sherman, Robert B., and Richard M. Sherman, Walt's Time: From Before to Beyond , Santa Clarita, California, 1998.

On DISNEY: articles—

"The Mechanized Mouse," in The Saturday Review of Literature (New York), 11 November 1933.

Mann, Arthur, in Harper (New York), May 1934.

Bragdon, Claude, "Straws in the Wind," in Scribner's Magazine (New York), July 1934.

Boone, Andrew R., "A Famous Fairytale is Brought to the Screen as the Pioneer Feature Length Cartoon in Color," in Popular Science Monthly (New York), 1938.

Jeanne, René, "Comment naquirent les dessins animés," in Revue des Deux Mondes (Paris), 15 March 1938.

Moellenhoff, F., "Remarks on the Popularity of Mickey Mouse," in American Imago , (Detroit, Michigan) no. 3, 1940.

Boone, R., "Mickey Mouse Goes Classical," in Popular Science Monthly (New York), January 1941.

Ahl, Frances Norene, "Disney Techniques in Educational Film," in The Social Studies , December 1941.

"Walt Disney: Great Teacher," in Fortune (New York), August 1942.

"Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck Work for Victory," in Popular Science Monthly (New York), September 1942.

Mosdell, D., "Film Review," in Canadian Forum , November 1946.

Wallace, Irving, "Mickey Mouse and How He Grew," in Colliers (New York), 9 April 1949.

"A Silver Anniversary for Walt and Mickey: Disney's Magic Wand Has Enriched the World with Birds, Beasts and Fairy Princesses," in Life (New York), 2 November 1953.

"Disney Comes to Television," in Newsweek (New York), 12 April 1954.

Fishwick, Marshall, "Aesop in Hollywood: The Man and the Mouse," in Saturday Review (New York), 10 July 1954.

"Cinema: Father Goose—Walt Disney: To Enchanted Worlds on Electronic Wings," in Time (New York), 27 December 1954.

McEvoy, J.P., "McEvoy in Disneyland: A Visit with the Wonderful Wizard of Filmdom," in Reader's Digest (Pleasantville, New York), February 1955.

"A Wonderful World: Growing Impact of the Disney Art," in Newsweek (New York), 18 April 1955.

Powell, Dilys, "Hayley Mills on the Pickford Path," in New York Times , 13 August 1961.

Sadoul, Georges, "Sur le 'huitième art'," in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), June 1962.

Special Disney issue of National Geographic (Washington, D.C.), August 1963.

"The Wide World of Walt Disney," in Newsweek (New York), 31 December 1963.

Whitaker, Frederic, "A Day with Disney," in American Artist (New York), September 1965.

Aubriant, Michel, "Le vrai Walt Disney est mort il y a des années mais ne soyons pas injustes . . . ," in Paris Presse , 21 December 1966.

Comolii, Jean-Louis, and Michel Delahaye, "Le Cinéma à l'expo de Montréal," in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), April 1967.

"Disney without Walt . . . Is Like a Fine Car without an Engine. Will the Great Entertainment Company Find a New Creative Boss? Or Will It Slowly Lose Momentum?," in Forbes (New York), 1 July 1967.

Tucker, N., "Who's Afraid of Walt Disney," in New Society , no.11, 1968.

Gessner, Robert, "Letters to the Editor: Class in Fantasia ," in The Nation (New York), 30 November 1970.

"The Ten Greatest Men of American Business—As You Picked Them," in Nation's Business , March 1971.

Pérez, F., "Walt Disney, una pedagogía reaccionaria," in Cine Cubano (Havana), no. 81–83, 1973.

Murray, J.C., "Lest We Forget," in Lumiere (Melbourne), November 1973.

Stuart, A., "Decay of an American Dream," in Films and Filming (London), November 1973.

Special Disney issue of Kosmorama (Copenhagen), November 1973.

Canemaker, J., "A Visit to the Walt Disney Studio," in Filmmakers Newsletter (Ward Hill, Massachusetts), January 1974.

Sklar, Robert, in Movie Made America: A Social History of American Movies , New York, 1975.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan, "Dream Masters," in Film Comment (New York), January-February 1975.

Smith, D.R., "Ben Sharpsteen . . . 33 Years with Disney," in Millimeter (New York), April 1975.

Beckerman, H., "Animation Kit: Movies, Myth and Us," in Filmmakers Newsletter (Ward Hill, Massachusetts), September 1975.

Brody, M., "The Wonderful World of Disney: Its Psychological Appeal," in American Imago (Detroit, Michigan), no. 4, 1976.

"Disney Night at the A.S.C.," in American Cinematographer ( Los Angeles ), February 1977.

Paul, W., "Art, Music, Nature and Walt Disney," in Movie (London), Spring 1977.

Schupp, P., "Mickey a cinquante ans," in Sequences (Montreal), January 1979.

Canemaker, J., "Disney Animation: History and Technique," in Film News (NewYork), January-February 1979.

Hulett, S., "A Star Is Drawn," in Film Comment (New York), January-February 1979.

Canemaker, J., "Disney Design: 1928–1979," in Millimeter (New York), February 1979.

Barrier, M., "'Building a Better Mouse': Fifty Years of Disney Animation," in Funnyworld (New York), Summer 1979.

Smith, D.R., "Disney Before Burbank: The Kingswell and Hyperion Studios," in Funnyworld (New York), Summer 1979.

Cawley, J., Jr., "Disney Out-Foxed: The Tale of Reynard at the Disney Studio," in American Classic Screen (Shawnee Mission, Kansas), July-August 1979.

"Journals: Tom Allen from New York," in Film Comment (New York), September-October 1981.

Griffithiana (Gemona, Italy), no. 34, December 1988.

CinémAction (Conde-sur-Noireau), no. 51, April 1989.

Kosmorama (Copenhagen), vol. 35, no. 188, Summer 1989.

Animatrix , no. 6, 1990/1992.

Cineforum , no. 319, 1992.

Skoop , October 1992.

Plateau , no. 2, 1993.

The South Atlantic Quarterly , no. 1, 1993.

New York Times , 6 May 1993.

New York Times , 8 May 1993.

Positif , no. 388, June 1993.

New York Times , 13 July 1993.

New York Times , 18 July 1993.

Newsweek , 26 July 1993.

Before Walt Disney, there was Emile Cohl (the "first animator," who made over 250 films in the early years of the twentieth century); Winsor McCay (whose Gertie the Dinosaur, created in 1914, was the original animated personality); John Randolph Bray (the Henry Ford of animation, whose technological and organizational contributions revolutionized the art form); and Otto Messmer, inventor of Felix the Cat, the Charlie Chaplin of animated characters and the most popular cartoon creation of the 1920s, entertaining audiences before Mickey Mouse ever uttered a squeak.

So why is Walt Disney synonymous with animation? How could Fantasia , Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , and Bambi have been re-released to theaters every few years and then marketed to home video, to delight generations of children? Simply because no other animator ever duplicated the Disney studio's appealingly lifelike cartoon characters and wonderful flair for storytelling.

First, Disney was an innovator, a perfectionist who was forever attempting to improve his product and explore the medium to its fullest potential. He was the first to utilize sound in animation, in Steamboat Willie , which was the third Mickey Mouse cartoon. The soundtrack here is more than just a gimmick: for example, in an animal concert, a cow's udder is played like a bagpipe and its teeth are transformed into a xylophone. The musical accompaniment thus emerges from the background, becoming an integral element in the film's structure.

In Flowers and Trees , Disney was the first to utilize three-strip Technicolor in animation, a process devised by Joseph Arthur Ball: three different negatives, each recording a primary color, replaced the single camera film previously used. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first full-length cartoon feature: during the production, Disney staffers developed the multiplane method of realistically creating the illusion of perspective and depth. The camera, operated by several technicians, filled an entire room. A sequence was drawn and painted on several panes of glass, with each one carefully placed and rigidly held down. Cels of the animated characters were placed on the various planes, which would then be moved past the camera at varying speeds. Those close to the camera would go by rapidly; those in the rear would be moved more slowly.

Just as significantly, however, Disney was a master organizer and administrator. As a result, from the 1930s on, the Disney Studio practically monopolized the animation industry. He established an industrialized assembly line , employing hundreds of animators and technicians who regularly churned out high-quality, Academy Award-caliber product. In the early 1930s, he opened distribution offices in London and Paris. He instigated large merchandising campaigns to reap additional profits via T-shirts, toys, and watches. Today, Disneyland and Disneyworld are living monuments to his memory. And it is not surprising that Disney eventually stretched his talents beyond pure animation, first combining cartoons with actors and, finally, producing live-action features, wildlife documentaries, and television series. In 1950, he produced Treasure Island , his first non-animated feature. In 1953, he made his first nature documentary, The Living Desert. The following year, he premiered his weekly television anthology series, which aired for decades. And he established the Buena Vista company as a distribution outlet for his films.

Yet Walt Disney's ultimate legacy remains his animated stories, and the narrative elements which lifted them above his competition. His characters are not just caricatures who insult each other, bash each other with baseball bats, or push each other off cliffs. They are lifelike, three-dimensional creatures with personalities all their own: they are simple, but never simplistic, and rarely, if ever, fail to thoroughly involve the viewer.

It is virtually impossible to rank the best of Disney's animated features in order of quality or popularity. Snow White , with its enchanting storyline and sweet humor, remains a joy for audiences many decades after its release. It is the perfect romantic fairy tale, with Snow White and her Prince Charming in a happy-ever-after ending, the comic relief of the lovable dwarfs, and the villainy of the evil Queen. The film's financial history is typical of most Disney features: originally budgeted at $250,000, it eventually cost $1,700,000 to produce. It earned $4.2 million in the United States and Canada alone when first released; by the mid-1990s, it had grossed over $175-million.

Jiminy Cricket singing "When You Wish Upon a Star" is the highlight of Pinocchio . Bambi is easily the most delicate of all Disney features. And there is Fantasia , a series of animated sequences set to musical classics conducted by Leopold Stokowski and performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra : Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker Suite , Dukas's The Sorcerer's Apprentice , Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring , and Beethoven's Symphony No.6 in F Major , among others. Fantasia is ambitious, innovative, controversial—how dare anyone attempt to visually interpret music?—and, ultimately, timeless.

Since Disney's death in 1966, his studio has had its failures and triumphs. After a dry spell in the late 1960s and 1970s, it established a subsidiary, Touchstone Pictures, which successfully debuted in 1984 with the PG-rated Splash. In the intervening years, the studio struck deals with the likes of Bob and Harvey Weinstein of Miramax Films and Merchant-Ivory Productions, and marketed such traditionally un-Disney-like fare as Pulp Fiction, Kids, Pretty Woman , and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. But the studio remains mostly synonymous with animation. In the 1990s, it produced a string of animated features which ranks with its classics of decades past: The Lion King, Pocahontas, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin. As of 1996, The Lion King rated number five on Variety's list of all-time money-earning champs, taking in over $312 million. Also ranked in the top 50 were other animated and non-animated Disney fare, which certifies the studio's status as a major Hollywood player: Aladdin (number 16, $217-million); Toy Story (number 24, $182 million); Pretty Woman (number 26, $178 million); the previously mentioned Snow White (number 29); Three Men and a Baby (number 34, $167 million); Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (number 42, $154 million); Beauty and the Beast (number 49, $145 million); and The Santa Clause (number 50, $144 million).

In 1991, Beauty and the Beast became the first animated film ever nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award. And in 1995 came Toy Story , a groundbreaking feature produced completely on computer.

An essay on Walt Disney would be incomplete without a note on Mickey Mouse, the most famous of all Disney creations and one of the world's most identifiable and best-loved characters. Appropriately, Disney himself was the voice of Mickey, who was originally named Mortimer. The filmmaker himself best explained the popularity of his mouse: ". . . Mickey is so simple and uncomplicated, so easy to understand, that you can't help liking him."

With pen, pencil, ink, and paint, Walt Disney created a unique, special world. Max and Dave Fleischer, Walter Lantz, Chuck Jones, and many others may all be great animators, but Disney is unarguably the most identifiable name in the art form.

—Rob Edelman

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Disney, Walt 1901-1966

Bibliography.

Walter Elias Disney and his brother Roy established the Walt Disney Company in the late 1920s to produce short animations. The company ’ s first synchronized-sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie (1928), featured Mickey Mouse, a character that became one of the best-known icons in the world. In the wake of the nineteenth-century transformation of the oral tradition of fairy tales into a literary tradition by the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen , and others, Disney, in the early decades of the twentieth century, employed technological advances to turn literary fairy tales into animations. The first feature-length animation, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), paved the way for the Disney brand of family-oriented celluloid fantasies targeting children as their primary audience.

A 1941 strike by Disney animators seeking more recognition, along with economic hard times, crippled the company, but World War II (1939 – 1945) reenergized the Disney Company through government commissions. The Three Caballeros (1944) was made at the behest of Nelson Rockefeller ’ s Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs to promote “ Good Neighborliness ” between North America and Latin America . The conservative Disney also served as a Federal Bureau of Investigation ( FBI ) agent from 1940 to his death in 1966. The public image of “ Uncle Walt ” with a gentle smile and with roots in rural small-town America is the result of mythmaking, which masks Walt Disney ’ s traumatic childhood and distrustful personality. Disney ’ s vendetta against striking employees of his studio in the 1940s betrays not only a suspicious and controlling character but an anticommunist obsession. His hidden career as a secret informant in the last two decades of his life gives a perverse twist to the family entertainment Disney has come to symbolize.

The Disney television show went on the air in 1954. Theme parks proved to be far more successful than animations and live-action films and television. Disneyland in Anaheim, California , opened in 1955, followed by Disney World in Orlando , Florida , in 1971. Tokyo saw the Japanese version of Disneyland in 1983, France in 1992, and Hong Kong in 2005. Having languished after Walt Disney ’ s death, the Disney Company resurged under Michael Eisner in the 1980s. Disney has now grown into a global business conglomerate of film studio, television network, cable company, magazine, merchandise bearing various Disney logos, theme parks and resorts, and other ventures, with revenues totaling over $25 billion around the turn of the century. Disney also works through the Touchstone label, Miramax Films, Buena Vista International, and other business entities to produce and distribute less family-oriented shows.

With its increasing monopoly of media and entertainment, Disney has given rise to the phenomenon of Disneyfication , that is, trivialization and sanitization. The key to the success of the “ Magic Kingdom ” is indeed carefully controlled, heavily edited images of childhood innocence and fun. Yet what appears to the child to be happy tunes and carefree joy often veils sexist, racist, ageist, and neo-imperialist reality. From Sleeping Beauty to the Little Mermaid to Mulan, every Disney female lead embodies idealized Euro-American beauty in facial features, balletic physique, and youth-culture obsessions. These Disney females, including the sword-wielding Mulan, ultimately derive their meaning in life through male characters. The blatant racism in the happy plantation African Americans in The Song of the South (1946) and the slant-eyed, buck-toothed, pidgin-speaking Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp (1955) and The Aristocats (1970) has gone underground, occasionally resurfacing in, for example, the cruel, hand-chopping Arabs in Aladdin (1992) and the stereotypical, “ multicultural ” duo of “ kung fu ” Mulan and her familiar, the blabbering Mushu dubbed by Eddie Murphy .

Theme parks best exemplify the Disney culture of control. The enclosed environment of these sites separates visitors from the outside world, encouraging consumption in the guise of family fun. Main Street U.S.A. at Disneyland is, of course, a shopping mall. Various adventures at Disneyland are centrally themed to formulate a narrative and to shape consumer perception. Even Disney employees with smiling faces are trained in “ performative labor ” : they are not so much working as role-playing; they are cast members in the Disney discourse of happiness.

Any critique of Disneyfication faces the challenge that animated fantasy is customarily regarded as devoid of ideology, notwithstanding the fact that the racial, gender, national, and capitalist undertones of Disney have repeatedly been the subject of study. Adults ’ nostalgia for childlike simplicity and pleasure further leads to an acquiescence to Disney ’ s ahistorical and apolitical universe. Assuredly, growing up anywhere in the world, one is invariably nurtured on Disney ’ s breast milk of superior quality in terms of ingenuity and craftsmanship. To contend that consumers have been fed with something aesthetically refined but culturally suspect is likely to provoke vigorous opposition. Yet the 1995 defeat of the proposed 3,000-acre Disney theme park in Virginia ’ s Civil War battlegrounds signals the potential of grassroots resistance to corporate greed and expansionism. With the shadows of the omnivorous, lawsuit-happy Disney Company looming over the twenty-first century, new battles will be fought far away from Virginia. Globalization has brought Disney to every corner of the world. In the company of giants such as McDonald ’ s, Nike, Coca-Cola, and Microsoft, Disney ’ s transnational operations will continue to perpetuate Americanization globally, but it remains a severely constricted vision of America, one enjoyed principally by middle-class visitors to Disney World and passive consumers of Disney culture.

Bell, Elizabeth, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells, eds. 1995. From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture . Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Giroux, Henry A. 1999. The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Smoodin, Eric, ed. 1994. Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom . New York : Routledge.

Sheng-mei Ma

" Disney, Walt . " International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences . . Encyclopedia.com. 22 Feb. 2023 < https://www.encyclopedia.com > .

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Walt Disney 's name has not always been synonymous with childhood. In the 1930s his work was seen as populist and avant-garde. It was considered populist because, three decades earlier, he had been born into poverty, and his cartoons had the simple outlines of folk art . (They were seen as "his" cartoons even though, as the story goes, one of his animators had to teach him to draw his signature Mickey Mouse.) Disney's cartoons were considered avant-garde because the cinema was a new art form, and at this time when photography still had only dubious claims to artistry and live-action motion pictures could be seen merely as moving photographs, animated cartoons could make a greater claim to artistry. The preeminent name in the art of animation – thanks to Mickey Mouse, the Silly Symphonies, and "The Three Little Pigs" – was Walt Disney .

Early in his career Disney was both a popular success and the darling of intellectuals. Between 1932 and 1941 his work won thirteen Academy Awards, and he was granted honorary degrees by Yale and Harvard. The philosopher Mortimer

Adler rhapsodized about Disney's greatness, as did the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein; the French filmmaker Ren é Clair called his artistry sublime; the artist David Low called him the most significant graphic artist since Leonardo. The film historian Lewis Jacobs referred to Disney as the most acclaimed of current directors: Disney's willingness to plow profits into new technology and to take financial risks to achieve desired effects was, for Jacobs, a sign of artistic integrity – not, as it would later be construed, entrepreneurial savvy.

Disney's audience included both young and old. Critics often praised his films for addressing the young, the old, indeed "artists, intellectuals, children, workers, and everyday people the world over," to quote the Atlantic Monthly in 1940. Consider the Disney merchandise of the 1930s, which included not just Mickey Mouse dolls but also ashtrays, beer trays, negligees, and Donald Duck Coffee. (Disney pioneered tieins and cross-merchandising, and the corporation is now the industry leader in cross-promotion.)

Changing Attitudes

In the 1940s Disney's productions continued to be popular with the general public, but his reputation among critics and intellectuals waned. In the 1950s it plummeted. This shift may have resulted from Disney's decision to include human figures in his feature-length cartoons, starting with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1938, and that these figures imitated real life only imperfectly. Perhaps disenchantment derived from the bitter strike at Disney Brothers Studios in 1941, or from the experimentalism of The Three Caballeros in 1945. Perhaps, too, critics resented the fact that Disney simply did not focus as much on his cartoons as he had in the past, producing live-action films, nature documentaries, television programs, and theme parks, launching what has been called the first multimedia empire.

Disney's reputation continued to suffer in the 1950s. The reason may have had something to do with the advent of television. Previously cartoon shorts had been an expected part of an evening's entertainment at the movies, no matter how sophisticated the feature film. But in the decades following World War II , cartoons appeared less often in the theater and more often on Saturday morning television. Eventually, they were regarded as strictly for children.

In other words, once Disney's cartoons came to be seen as suitable only for children, and once he himself became Uncle Walt to millions of viewers, Disney's cartoons were no longer suitable for intellectuals. In a twentieth-century intellectual climate where anything considered juvenile was suspect (a very different climate from that of the nineteenth century) Disney's productions were devalued.

Some critics disapproved of Disney's works even in the 1930s. As a Mickey Mouse book was placed on the recommended reading list for New York City schools in 1938, Louise Seaman Bechtel, in the Saturday Review of Literature, regretted "the pressing semi-reality of all the hurrying scenes in color on the screen, the over-elaborated story and crowded canvas" of the film Snow White. In later decades one of the louder salvos was fired by the librarian Frances Clarke Sayers, who in a 1965 letter to the Los Angeles Times (later expanded into an article for the Horn Book Magazine ) made an often-quoted statement bemoaning the obviousness of Disney's work, particularly its violence, mediocrity, vulgarity, and its "pretending that everything is so sweet, so saccharine, so without any conflict except the obvious conflict of violence." Other critics include Richard Schickel, who in his The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney (1968) lamented, "In this most childlike of our mass communicators I see what is most childish and therefore most dangerous in all of us who were his fellow Americans."

I'm Going to Disney World!

In recent years Disney's popularity with the general public has soared. Disney products are seen as cute, safe, and cheerful. The company's CEO Michael Eisner claimed, in the 2001 annual report, that Disney's various studios had been number one at the U.S. box office for six of the previous seven years and number one internationally for five of them.

He added that Disney was the largest publisher of children's books in the world and that more than a billion people worldwide had used a Disney product during the previous year. Giants slugger Barry Bonds exclaimed, upon hitting his record-breaking homerun in 2001, "I'm going to Disney World!," and in the wake of terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush advised the American public, "Go down to Disney World in Florida . Take your families and enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed."

Yet cultural critics and film historians continue to accuse the entertainment company of reinforcing corporate, patriarchal, ethnocentric, and imperialistic values by modifying, for instance, traditional tales such as "Snow White," " Cinderella ," "Sleeping Beauty," and "Beauty and the Beast." Only in Disney's version is Snow White such a happy housewife for the dwarfs. While traditional tales with oral sources have been altered throughout their history to reflect the concerns and biases of individual tellers and transcribers, once Walt Disney Productions (as the company is now known) creates a version of a story – whether it is a traditional tale or a classic text such as Pinocchio or Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or Winnie-the-Pooh – Disney's version becomes the standard one for millions of children. The Little Mermaid 's underwater witch is now visualized around the world as a drag queen named Ursula, and the American Indian Pocahontas is a brunette Barbie.

Other cultural critics and historians find points of contestation in Disney's films. In From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture Elizabeth Bell found visual images of strength and discipline in the fairy-tale heroines, whose bodies were modeled on those of classical dancers. Lori Kenschaft, in her essay "Just a Spoonful of Sugar? Anxieties of Gender and Class in Mary Poppins, " reminded us that not everyone experiences a film such as Disney's Mary Poppins in the same way, especially in this age of multimedia and fast-forwarding: whereas one individual might register the energy of the chimney sweeps in the film, another viewer might pick up on the film's intermittent critiques of class and gender.

The company struggled financially in the 1930s and 1940s, achieving stability only in the late 1950s, and since Walt Disney's death in 1966 the corporation has experienced a number of ups and downs. In 1999 and again in 2002 Fortune magazine called it the "world's most troubled entertainment giant." Nevertheless, it is one of the largest media corporations in the world, firmly ensconced in the Fortune 100, with annual revenues of more than twenty-five billion dollars. Its holdings include Touchstone Pictures, Miramax, the Disney Channel, Radio Disney, Hyperion Books, Hollywood Records, the various theme parks, and the television networks ABC and ESPN. It is arguably the most influential corporation in the world. For Disney gets us young and helps to shape our understanding of who we are, getting us to whistle while we work, to be unafraid of the big bad wolf, to wish upon a star that some day our prince will come, indeed to accept Disney products as the spoonful of sugar that helps any medicine go down, in this small world after all.

bibliography

Bell, Elizabeth, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells, eds. 1995. From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Kenschaft, Lori. 1999. "Just a Spoonful of Sugar? Anxieties of Gender and Class in Mary Poppins. " In Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children's Literature and Culture, ed. Beverly Lyon Clark and Margaret R. Higonnet. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press.

The Project on Disney. 1995. Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Sayers, Frances Clarke, and Charles M. Weisenberg. 1965. "Walt Disney Accused." Horn Book Magazine 40: 602 – 611.

Schickel, Richard. 1968. The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney. New York : Simon and Schuster.

Smoodin, Eric, ed. 1994. Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom. New York : Routledge.

Watts, Steven. 1997. The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Beverly Lyon Clark

CLARK, BEVERLY LYON " Disney . " Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society . . Encyclopedia.com. 22 Feb. 2023 < https://www.encyclopedia.com > .

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CLARK, BEVERLY LYON "Disney ." Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society . . Retrieved February 22, 2023 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/children/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/disney

Walt Disney

Born: December 5, 1901 Chicago , Illinois Died: December 15, 1966 Burbank, California Animator and cofounder, Walt Disney Company

During his career, Walt Disney found ways to make children of all ages believe in a certain kind of magic. His films brought talking animals to life. His theme parks transported people to distant lands or make-believe castles. And through Walt Disney Productions, the Disney name became one of the most famous and trusted brands in the world. His company promoted him as a carefree man whose only goal was to "bring happiness to the millions." In business, however, Disney was demanding, seeking perfection in his art and total control of his business.

"When does a person stop being a child? Can you say that a child is ever entirely eliminated from the adult? I believe that the right kind of entertainment can appeal to all persons, young or old."

Struggling Artist

Walter Elias Disney was born on December 5, 1901, in Chicago, Illinois. He was the fourth son of Elias and Mary Disney. He also had a younger sister. In 1905, the Disneys moved to a farm in Marceline, Missouri . Disney later recalled the small-town atmosphere of the town when he built Disneyland. His family moved again in 1911, settling in Kansas City . Mr. Disney began a successful paper route, and Walt and his brother Roy helped him. Walt also showed an early interest in art, copying a popular comic strip and making up his own.

By high school, with his family now living in Chicago, Disney was winning recognition for his art, publishing his cartoons in the school paper. In 1918, about a year after the United States entered World War I (1914-18), Disney lied about his age to volunteer as a Red Cross ambulance driver. He arrived in Europe shortly after the war ended and spent most of his time as a chauffeur for army officers. In his free time, he kept drawing cartoons.

When he returned to the United States in 1919, Disney settled in Kansas City and began his career as an artist. His first job was at a commercial art studio, drawing animals in farm-equipment catalogues. Disney later worked for the Kansas City Slide Company, which created advertising films for local companies. Disney began to study the new art of animation for the ads, then began experimenting with his own cartoon films. By 1921, he was working on his own on the side, making short cartoons he called Laugh-O-Grams. Disney officially incorporated the company in 1922 and produced cartoons of fairy tales. The next year, however, the company went bankrupt. Disney took a half-finished film of Alice's Wonderland, which combined live actors with cartoon figures, and headed for California.

Walt Disney's earliest animation may have been a flip book he made for his sister when he was nine years old. He drew a series of pictures on different pieces of paper. Flipping the pages made the figures appear to move.

The Daring Animator and His New Company

Disney set up a studio in his uncle's shop so he could finish Alice's Wonderland and make other films like it. His brother Roy was also in California, and he loaned Disney money to get his company off the ground. The two brothers went into business together, forming Disney Brothers Studio. By 1924, the "Alice" cartoons were playing in theaters on the East Coast and receiving positive reviews. Disney's personal life was also improving, as he started dating Lilly Bounds, a young woman he had hired to work at the studio. They were married in June 1925 and eventually had two daughters, one of them adopted.

Although Disney and his company struggled financially during the early years, he did well enough to buy a new studio and hire more workers. Disney was also constantly looking for new opportunities. In 1928, while coming home from a business trip in New York , he had an idea for a new cartoon creature, a mouse. Disney wanted to call him Mortimer Mouse; his wife suggested Mickey instead. Mickey became Disney's first cartoon star.

Around the same time, Disney saw that sound films, then a novelty, would change Hollywood . Matching music with cartoon action, however, was not easy, and Disney demanded perfection. At one point he sold his beloved car to finance a recording for one of his cartoons. Disney also worked hard, sometimes falling asleep in his studio after working late into the night.

After the success of Mickey Mouse and other short cartoons, Disney began planning his first full-length feature. In 1934, an excited Disney acted out the story of "Snow White" for his staff, playing all the roles. He was convinced the film would be a success. Once again, Disney was right in guessing what people would pay to see. As Time magazine wrote many years later, Disney had "a deep, intuitive identification with the common impulses of common people."

Building New Worlds

Creating animated films let Disney invent worlds that did not exist and gave him the control he craved. During the 1940s, he had an idea for a real world that he could also shape as he chose. Bob Thomas quotes him in Walt Disney: An American Original: The concept of Disneyland "started when my daughters were very young, and I took them to amusement parks on Sundays. … I said to myself … why can't there be a better place to take your children, where you can have fun together?"

At the new home Walt Disney built for his family during the 1940s, he included a half-mile railroad track for his own model train, which was large enough to carry several people at once.

In 1952, Disney formed a second company, Walt Disney Inc., to build his new theme park. He later changed the name to WED Enterprises. Out of WED came the Imagineers, the designers of new rides and new technologies that could make Disney's dreams come to life. One Disney idea was creating moving models of people that could talk. WED created these figures, called Audio-Animatronics.

Michael Eisner: The "Outsider" Who Saved Disney

In 1984, Michael Eisner became the first person with no personal connection to Walt Disney to lead Walt Disney Productions. And unlike most Americans, Eisner had never even grown up on Disney films as a child. He admitted that he first saw them with his own children. But like Disney, Eisner seemed to have a flair for the creative. And like the company's founder, Eisner could be difficult to work with, as he fought to have things done his way.

The product of a wealthy New York family, Eisner was born in 1942. He originally planned to study medicine, but found himself drawn to entertainment. After college, Eisner took a job at NBC, then moved over to ABC, where he worked with Barry Diller , one of the rising young television executives of the 1960s. During the 1970s, Eisner scheduled such hit shows as Happy Days and Welcome Back, Kotter. From television he moved to motion pictures , working for Diller at Paramount Pictures. Eisner, as president, helped Paramount regain its position as one of the top studios in Hollywood.

When Disney Productions first considered hiring Eisner, some important investors questioned if he was the right person to run the company. As he wrote in his autobiography Work in Progress, Eisner told them they needed someone with creativity to keep the company growing. "In a creative business," he said, "you … have to be willing to take chances and even to fail sometimes, because otherwise nothing innovative is ever going to happen." When Eisner got the job, he found ways to make money from old Disney products and created new animated classics to revive the Disney image.

During the 1990s, Eisner's moves made Disney one of the most successful stocks in the United States . But Eisner's personal style, considered arrogant by some, did not please everyone who worked for him. Disney developed a reputation as the cheapest film studio in Hollywood. And Disney's movement away from strict family entertainment into more "adult" content upset some people who felt Eisner was betraying Disney's wholesome image.

Disney under Eisner was also criticized for being too concerned with making money and controlling markets, instead of offering good entertainment. But in 2002, Eisner insisted to Fortune that he and the Disney company were still committed to quality. "There are two ways to make money in entertainment," he said, "the high road or the low road. The low road is a road that I don't choose to be on."

Disney, however, was not content with just building theme parks. He wanted to create a whole town. In the early 1960s, Disney's company began buying thousands of acres in central Florida . Part of the land would become a second theme park — Disney World — but Disney wanted to use some of it for a planned community, the "City of Tomorrow." In October 1966, Disney gave an interview describing his vision.

Bob Thomas quotes him as saying, "It's like the city of tomorrow ought to be. … It will be a planned, controlled community, a showcase for American industry and research, schools, cultural and educational opportunities."

Disney called his idea the Environmental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT). Today's EPCOT features exhibits on science and technology, along with tributes to several foreign countries, but it is not the town Disney envisioned. Celebration, a nearby planned community the company opened in 1998, is probably closer to what Disney had in mind.

Disney's comments on EPCOT were some of the last public statements he ever made. A lifelong smoker, he died of lung cancer just a few months later, on December 15, 1966. Newspapers around the world mourned the loss of a man who had brought so much happiness to children and adults.

For many years, people spread a rumor that Walt Disney had ordered his body frozen after his death, hoping it could be unfrozen years later when doctors had a cure for cancer. The rumor was untrue.

For More Information

Eisner, Michael, with Tony Schwartz. Work in Progress. New York : Random House, 1998.

Masters, Kim. The Keys to the Kingdom: How Michael Eisner Lost His Grip. New York: William Morrow, 2000.

Schweizer, Peter, and Rochelle Schweizer. Disney: The Mouse Betrayed. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc. 1998.

Thomas, Bob. Walt Disney: An American Original. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976.

Watts, Steven. The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

Periodicals

Boroughs, Don, et al. "Disney's All Smiles." U.S. News & World Report (August 14, 1995): p. 32.

"From the Archives." Time (December 28, 1998): p. 14.

Gabor, Andrea, and Steve Hawkins. "Of Mice and Money in the Magic Kingdom." U.S. News & World Report (December 22, 1986): p. 44.

Gunther, Marc. "Has Eisner Lost the Disney Magic?" Fortune (January 7, 2002): p. 64.

Huey, John. "Eisner Explains Everything." Fortune (April 17, 1995): p. 44.

Koepp, Stephen. "Do You Believe in Magic." Time (April 25, 1988): p. 66.

Koselka, Rita. "Mickey's Midlife Crisis." Forbes (May 13, 1991): p. 42.

Schickel, Richard. "Walt Disney." Time (December 7, 1998): p. 124.

Streisand, Betty. "Shareholders Smell a Rat." U.S. News & World Report (March 3, 1997): p. 59.

Vinzant, Carol. "Eisner's Mousetrap." Fortune (September 6,1999): p. 106. Wiegner, Kathleen K. "The Tinker Bell Principle." Forbes (December 2,1985): p. 102.

Buena Vista Online Entertainment. [On-line] http://www.bventertainment.go.com (accessed on August 16, 2002).

Disney Online. [On-line] http://www.disney.go.com (accessed on August 16, 2002).

" Disney, Walt . " Leading American Businesses . . Encyclopedia.com. 22 Feb. 2023 < https://www.encyclopedia.com > .

"Disney, Walt ." Leading American Businesses . . Encyclopedia.com. (February 22, 2023). https://www.encyclopedia.com/reference/trade-magazines/disney-walt

"Disney, Walt ." Leading American Businesses . . Retrieved February 22, 2023 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/reference/trade-magazines/disney-walt

(1901-1966) The Walt Disney Company

Walt Disney was one of the great pioneers of filmmaking and the creator of several classic films, most notably his feature-length animated films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio. Disney, who grew up almost without a childhood, found a way to amuse himself as an adult by making cartoons and filling them with characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Creator of cartoons, live-action movies, theme parks, and television programs for the whole family, Disney introduced wholesome family entertainment on a world scale, and was one of the major entertainment forces of the twentieth century.

Personal Life

Walter Elias Disney, known throughout most of his life as Walt Disney, was born on December 5, 1901, in Chicago, Illinois. He had three older brothers and a younger sister. He and one of his older brothers remained especially close throughout Disney's lifetime and pursued the same business together.

Disney's parents, Elias and Flora Disney, came from farming backgrounds, Elias from Canada and Flora from Ohio. Walt's father was a strong influence on the entire family. A stern religious fundamentalist, he readily disciplined his children with his belt. He also denied the children toys, games, and sporting equipment associated with childhood, and this experience may have had some impact on Disney's later passion for the entertainment of children.

Growing up in the Disney family was further complicated by the father's pro-union activism and his political support of the socialist presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, as well as his tendency to change jobs frequently. The family was forced to move to both rural and urban areas all over the Midwest, from Chicago to Marceline, Missouri, to Kansas City , Missouri, and back to Chicago. Disney's father worked in farming, railway shops, carpentry and contracting work, and newspaper distribution. The family was always on the verge of financial collapse, and everyone in the family who could do some kind of work, like deliver newspapers, did.

Disney, according to his brother and lifelong business partner Roy, always enjoyed country life. He loved the animals he encountered, some of which may have inspired him to create cartoon animals in his later career in filmmaking.

Disney had a difficult time gaining an education because of his family's constant moving and his need to work to help support the family. When he was 16, though, he was able to join an art class at the Chicago Academy and Fine Arts, where he developed his modest drawing skills.

Disney dropped out of high school at age 17 to serve in World War I . He had tried to follow his brother Roy into the Navy but was rejected because he was underage. He was accepted as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross after altering the birthdate on his application. He served in France for a short time and returned to the United States in 1919. After returning from the war, he moved on his own to Kansas City , Missouri, where he worked a variety of jobs as a commercial artist and cartoonist.

Disney met Lillian Bounds, one of the employees in his first cartoon-film studio in the early 1920s, and they married on July 13, 1925. The marriage lasted a lifetime, and they produced two daughters.

Disney was known as a perfectionist and a demanding man. Some people saw him as self-centered, and he seemed often baffled when people disagreed with him. He was described by friends and coworkers as a driven man, even "a workaholic." Disney's personal life was filled with paradoxes. He smoked constantly, yet seemed to dislike this bad habit in others. Politically, he was the total opposite of his father. Disney joined the Republican Party in California and remained a firm political conservative. Though he loved country life, he spent most of his life in cities. A complex man, he suffered two nervous breakdowns in his life, one at age 30, and another a decade later, after half the cartoonists of his company went out on strike against him in a dispute about his labor practices.

By 1960, Disney had become a wealthy man, despite many ups and downs in his career. Just as he neared the pinnacle of his career, after having won five Oscars for his production of the movie Mary Poppins, he learned that his lifetime of cigarette smoking was to have consequences. He had surgery for lung cancer in 1966. Though he appeared to be recovering, he had a relapse and died on December 15, 1966.

Disney received more than 700 awards for his creative achievements, including an honorary Academy Award in 1939, four Academy Awards in 1954, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to him by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965. He was also honored with the Freedom Foundation Award later that same year.

Career Details

By 1922, Disney had set up his first small cartoon-production company in Kansas City with Ub Iwerks, whose drawing ability and technical inventiveness were prime factors in Disney's eventual success. Their business soon failed, though, and Disney took a job with an ad service that made cartoon advertisements to be shown between movies at the local theater. Disney gained a basic understanding of the medium and, anxious to get back out on his own, moved to Hollywood, California, in 1923 and started a business with his brother Roy. Out of his "garage" operation there, Disney filmed a live performance with cartoon figures from Alice in Wonderland. He expanded on this idea with the creation of a series called Alice in Cartoonland. He produced 56 of these cartoons in three years and in 1927 returned to a straight cartoon format with his Oswald the Rabbit series, producing 26 of these cartoons in less than two years.

By about 1927, Disney began looking for a new approach to his cartoons and a new character. He came up with a mouse character called Mortimer, but his wife Lilly thought the name was too stiff and convinced Disney to go with Mickey instead. Mickey Mouse came to life in 1928, first as a pilot, then as an adventurer, a sort of pirate-character. Late in 1928, after seeing the first sound movie, The Jazz Singer , Disney decided to make the first all-sound, talking-and-music cartoon, with Mickey Mouse starring as "Steamboat Willie."

By 1936, eight years later, critics and fans alike agreed that Mickey Mouse was the most recognized figure in the world. Songs were written about him. Watches had his face on them. He could be found everywhere. Disney was called "a genius."

During this time, Disney studios launched other successful cartoon characters, including Donald Duck and Pluto. Although he had stopped actually drawing the cartoons himself by 1927, and relied on a staff of animators to implement his ideas, Disney himself was the voice of Mickey Mouse in all the cartoons from 1928 to 1946. Disney's cartoons, both short and full-length features, won many awards. During the 1930s, the Disney cartoons were a phenomenon of worldwide success. This success led to the establishment of immensely profitable, Disney-controlled, sidelines in advertising, publishing, and franchised goods, which helped shape popular tastes for nearly 40 years.

Disney expanded his business rapidly, creating new studios and a training school for animators. It was these students, using state-of-the-art technology, who made possible the first feature-length cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Other costly animated features followed, including Pinocchio and Bambi.

In the 1940s, despite his many successes, Disney produced a series of financial "flops," including a film now regarded as a classic, the animated feature Fantasia. Fantasia did poorly at the box office, and Disney was devastated. Then half his artists went on strike against him, protesting his dictatorial style. Some say that if it were not for a government contract he obtained to produce service-related training films, Disney might have gone bankrupt by the end of World War II .

Luckily, he was able to reexamine his studio operations and pursue other directions successfully. During the 1950s he made a series of live-action feature movies, such as Treasure Island, and his favorite, So Dear To My Heart. With the advent of Seal Island, Disney moved into wildlife films, and expanded production of live-action pictures, which led to many other family films. His elaborate production of Mary Poppins, which won five Academy Awards two years before Disney's death, was one example of a successful family film that used occasional animation and plenty of music.

In 1954, Disney also began to do something revolutionary for the time: he began to produce for television, which had been the traditional "enemy" of the movie business. During the 1950s, Disney joined with American Broadcasting Company TV productions and made a fortune producing Davy Crockett and The Mickey Mouse Club for television exclusively. By the time of his death, Disney had more than 280 television shows to his name.

Disney also began to develop his famous Disneyland theme parks, the first opening in 1957 in Anaheim, California. Disney World, in Orlando, Florida, was not completed until after his death, in 1971. Disney's vision was to interconnect all his many business ventures so that one would help the other; in other words, seeing his work on TV would cause people to want to go to Disneyland, and going to Disneyland would cause people to want to see family-oriented Disney movies.

Disney's dream of creating a city of the future was realized in 1982 with the opening of EPCOT, which stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, a real-life community of the future. Disney theme parks have continued to expand with the opening of Disney-MGM Studios and Animal Kingdom.

Chronology: Walt Disney

1901: Born.

1923: Produced his first cartoon series, "Alice in Cartoonland."

1928: Created Mickey Mouse.

1937: Produced first great critical and financial success, Snow White and Seven Dwarfs.

1941: Began making training and instructional films for the armed forces.

1954: Appearance of the television show, Disneyland.

1954: Received four Academy Awards.

1955: Opened Disneyland theme park.

1966: Died.

By the 1960s, Disney had created a diversified empire, founded on the animal icons, like Mickey Mouse, that had first brought him such fame. The Disney empire is noted for its traditional family values, wholesome middle-class productions, and high level of quality control. Today, the Walt Disney Company , with the creation of Touchstone Pictures, has branched out to a broader range of films. Disney also owns Hollywood Records, and even has its own cruise line. It is a multibillion-dollar enterprise with undertakings all over the world.

Social and Economic Impact

The impact of Walt Disney's career has been felt throughout much of the twentieth century. His creation of wholesome cartoon characters and first-rate animation made Disney what British cartoonist David Low called "the most significant figure in graphic arts since Leonardo." After Disney's death, his classic films continue to be shown, the TV Disney Channel broadcasts his work to TV audiences 24 hours a day, and his theme parks in America and elsewhere (including Tokyo and Paris) sell his wholesome vision of America as a mecca. Disney's impact on childhood entertainment is almost immeasurably great and, at the time of his death, Disney's business empire was estimated to be worth over $100 million a year. In addition, Disney created a new university, the California Institute of the Arts. Disney once said, "If I can help provide a place to develop the talent of the future, I think I will have accomplished something." "Walt Disney" continues to be a household name in American homes.

Sources of Information

Contact at: The Walt Disney Company 500 S. Buena Vista St. Burbank, CA 91521 Business Phone: (818)560-1000 URL: http://www.disney.com

Bibliography

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"Disney, Walt ." Business Leader Profiles for Students . . Encyclopedia.com. (February 22, 2023). https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/economics-magazines/disney-walt

"Disney, Walt ." Business Leader Profiles for Students . . Retrieved February 22, 2023 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/economics-magazines/disney-walt

The name "Disney" is synonymous with children's entertainment. Disney movies, television (see entry under 1940s—TV and Radio in volume 3) shows, and animated characters help create some of the happiest and most magical childhood memories. "Disney" is also the name of the founder of a moving picture empire: Walt Disney (1901–1966), a visionary who in 1923 formed Walt Disney Productions and began producing experimental animated short films. Little did he imagine that this modest beginning would evolve into an entertainment industry giant that would create classic animated short subjects and features, live-action films and television series—and even spawn fantasy-oriented theme parks.

The first Disney series was called Alice in Cartoonland and mixed live-action and animation. Among the individual titles in the series were Alice's Wild West Show (1924), Alice's Egg Plant (1925), and Alice Chops the Suey (1925). In 1927, Disney and Ub Iwerks (1901–1971), a fellow animator and special-effects wizard, created a series of short films based on a character named Oswald the Rabbit. The following year they conjured up Mickey Mouse, the character who is most closely associated with Disney—and the creation that put Disney on the Hollywood map. Plane Crazy (1928) and The Gallopin' Gaucho (1928), the first two Mickey Mouse cartoons, were silent. The next, Steamboat Willie (1928; see entry under 1920s—Film and Theater in volume 2), was a talkie, with Disney himself providing Mickey's trademark squeaky voice.

Audiences were entranced by the singing, dancing, and talking mouse. Disney followed this success with his Silly Symphonies cartoon series, the first of which was The Skeleton Dance (1929). What made this series distinctive was that the scenarios and characters' movements were created in conjunction with the sounds of a prerecorded music track. The most famous was The Three Little Pigs (1933), which introduced the hit song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" Meanwhile, Mickey Mouse continued starring in Disney cartoons. He was eventually joined by a host of animated pals, including Pluto (1930), Minnie Mouse (1933), Donald Duck (1934), and Goofy (who first appeared as Dippy Dawg in 1932).

In the early 1930s, Disney worked with the Technicolor corporation, to add color to his cartoons. His first colored short, Flowers and Trees, won an Academy Award in 1932, and Technicolor signed an exclusive agreement to color Disney's animations.

Disney had long desired to produce a feature-length animated film. At the time, no one had ever chanced such an expensive and risky endeavor. In 1934, he began to realize this dream, all the while aware that he was gambling with the future of his flourishing company. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the initial Disney animated feature, was released to great critical and commercial acclaim. The key to its success was that its characters were not artificially or excessively portrayed but rather were presented as distinct personalities who believably expressed emotion. In addition, the film featured original musical numbers. Snow White was followed by Pinocchio (1940); Dumbo (1941); Bambi (1942); Cinderella (1950); Alice in Wonderland (1951); Lady and the Tramp (1955); 101 Dalmatians (1961); and many others. Easily the most ambitious early Disney feature was Fantasia (1940; see entry under 1940s—Film and Theater in volume 3), made in conjunction with conductor Leopold Stokowski (1882–1977). Fantasia was a bold attempt to unite classical music and the movements of animated characters.

In 1941, a number of Disney animators went on strike, in protest of Disney's authoritarian command of the studio and what by then had evolved into a formulaic (systematic) animation style. Many eventually resigned and established their own animation studio, United Productions of America (UPA). Disney survived the crisis and soon became heavily involved in the war effort, producing a series of propaganda and training films during World War II (1939–45). Among them were the feature documentary Victory through Air Power (1943), which included live-action and animation, and Der Fuhrer's Face (1943), in which Donald Duck lampooned Adolf Hitler (1889–1945).

With the post– World War II era came the production of a short nature documentary, Seal Island (1948), whose success prompted a "True-Life Adventure" series of feature-length follow-ups. The Living Desert (1953) was the first. The studio also produced its initial live-action feature, Treasure Island (1950). Subsequent features ranged from Rob Roy —The Highland Rogue (1954) to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), Davy Crockett —King of the Wild Frontier (1955; see entry under 1950s—TV and Radio in volume 3) to Old Yeller (1957) and Pollyanna (1960). During the 1960s, the studio produced live-action comedies, beginning with The Shaggy Dog (1959) and including The Absent-Minded Professor (1961) and The Parent Trap (1961). Mary Poppins (1964; see entry under 1960s—Film and Theater in volume 2) was not the first film to feature animation blended with live action, but it became one of the most beloved.

During the 1950s, television sets were fast becoming staples in American homes, and Disney eagerly entered the TV marketplace. In 1954, he began a weekly anthology series that initially was known as Disneyland. This series was broadcast for decades under different titles and on different networks. Disneyland was followed by a classic afternoon children's series called The Mickey Mouse Club (1955–59; see entry under 1950s—TV and Radio in volume 3). In 1955, Disney opened Disneyland, the company's first fantasy theme park, on 160 acres of land in Anaheim, California. That same year, he established his own film distribution company, Buena Vista.

The company suffered artistically in the wake of its founder's death in 1966. In general, Disney movies lost their sparkle. On the upside, Walt Disney World, a second theme park, opened in Orlando, Florida, in 1971, but the studio's entertainment output was mired in mediocrity. A low point came in 1979 when top animator Don Bluth (1938–) and a number of colleagues left Disney to form their own company, citing the studio's artistic and commercial deterioration.

In 1984, the studio formed Touchstone Pictures, a subsidiary that would produce and release a more adult-oriented product. The first Touchstone film was Splash (1984), a romantic comedy about a man who falls for a mermaid. The comedy was a box office smash. Other hits followed, including Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1985), Three Men and a Baby (1987), Stakeout (1987), Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), Pretty Woman (1990), and Sister Act (1992). Pretty Woman, which made a star of its leading actress, Julia Roberts (1967–), offered a modern-day twist on the Cinderella story in that it was the tale of a prostitute who is romanced by a millionaire.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, Disney recaptured its status as an animation giant. The production of a series of features—including The Black Cauldron (1985), The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and The Lion King (1994; see entry under 1990s—Film and Theater in volume 5)—enchanted a new generation of youngsters. Disney expanded its empire to include video distribution; a cable TV (see entry under 1970s—TV and Radio in volume 4) station; book publishing ; Broadway (see entry under 1900s—Film and Theater in volume 1) show production; and the ownership of hotels, real estate, professional sports teams, and the ABC television network, which it purchased in 1996 for $19 billion. By this time, the company had also evolved into a merchandising giant. Decades earlier, it had marketed a line of Mickey Mouse watches that were treasured by coming-of-age baby boomers (see entry under 1940s—The Way We Lived in volume 3). In the 1990s, the company opened numerous stores in malls (see entry under 1950s—Commerce in volume 3) and storefronts across the globe. On sale were Disney-related T-shirts (see entry under 1910s—Fashion in volume 1), pins, figurines, mugs, and stuffed animals—and the latest designs in Mickey Mouse watches.

Across the years, the Disney studio has savored its successes and rode out its rough times. Other motion picture production companies have evolved into mega-giant corporations, and others have produced animated films and children's entertainment. None remains as synonymous with childhood, magic, and Americana as Disney.

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Born: December 5, 1901 Chicago , Illinois Died: December 15, 1966 Los Angeles , California American animator, filmmaker, and businessman

An American filmmaker and businessman, Walt Disney created a new kind of popular culture with feature-length animated cartoons and live-action "family" films.

Walter Elias Disney was born in Chicago, Illinois, on December 5, 1901, the fourth of five children born to Elias and Flora Call Disney. His father, a strict and religious man who often physically abused his children, was working as a building contractor when Walter was born. Soon afterward, his father took over a farm in Marceline, Missouri , where he moved the family. Walter was very happy on the farm and developed his love of animals while living there. After the farm failed, the family moved to Kansas City , Missouri, where Walter helped his father deliver newspapers. He also worked selling candy and newspapers on the train that traveled between Kansas City and Chicago, Illinois. He began drawing and took some art lessons during this time.

Disney dropped out of high school at seventeen to serve in World War I (1914 – 18; a war between German-led Central powers and the Allies — England, the United States , and other nations). After a short stretch as an ambulance driver, he returned to Kansas City in 1919 to work as a commercial illustrator and later made crude animated cartoons (a series of drawings with slight changes in each that resemble movement when filmed in order). By 1922 he had set up his own shop as a partner with Ub Iwerks, whose drawing ability and technical skill were major factors in Disney's eventual success.

Off to Hollywood

Disney reinvested all of his profits toward improving his pictures. He insisted on technical perfection, and his gifts as a story editor quickly pushed his firm ahead. The invention of such cartoon characters as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Minnie, and Goofy, combined with the clever use of music, sound, and folk material (as in The Three Little Pigs ), made the Disney shorts of the 1930s successful all over the world. This success led to the establishment of the hugely profitable, Disney-controlled sidelines in advertising, publishing, and merchandising.

Branching out

Construction of theme parks

On July 18, 1957, Disney opened Disneyland in Anaheim, California, the most successful amusement park in history, with 6.7 million people visiting it by 1966. The idea for the park came to him after taking his children to other amusement parks and watching them have fun on amusement rides. He decided to build a park where the entire family could have fun together. In 1971 Disney World in Orlando , Florida , opened. Since then, Disney theme parks have opened in Tokyo , Japan , and Paris , France .

Disney's business empire

In 1939 Disney received an honorary (received without meeting the usual requirements) Academy Award, and in 1954 he received four more Academy Awards. In 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908 – 1973) presented Disney with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in the same year Disney was awarded the Freedom Foundation Award.

Walt Disney, happily married for forty-one years, was moving ahead with his plans for huge, new outdoor recreational areas when he died on December 15, 1966, in Los Angeles , California. At the time of his death, his enterprises had brought him respect, admiration, and a business empire worth over $100 million a year, but Disney was still mainly remembered as the man who had created Mickey Mouse almost forty years before.

Barrett, Katherine, and Richard Greene. Inside the Dream: The Personal Story of Walt Disney. New York : Disney Editions, 2001.

Green, Amy Boothe. Remembering Walt. New York : Hyperion, 1999.

Logue, Mary. Imagination: The Story of Walt Disney. Chanhassen, MN: Child's World, 1999.

Thomas, Bob. Walt Disney: An American Original. New York : Simon and Schuster, 1976.

Watts, Steven. The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

" Disney, Walt . " UXL Encyclopedia of World Biography . . Encyclopedia.com. 22 Feb. 2023 < https://www.encyclopedia.com > .

"Disney, Walt ." UXL Encyclopedia of World Biography . . Encyclopedia.com. (February 22, 2023). https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/disney-walt

"Disney, Walt ." UXL Encyclopedia of World Biography . . Retrieved February 22, 2023 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/disney-walt

Disney, Walter Elias

Disney, walter elias.

Walt Disney (1901 – 1966) was a major business pioneer of the twentieth century. He created cartoons, live-action movies, imaginative theme parks, and wholesome family entertainment on a global scale. Having himself grown up almost without a childhood, Disney found a way to find the child in everyone by making cartoons and filling them with amusing characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

Born in 1901, Walt Disney had a difficult upbringing. His father Elias, a restless and unsuccessful carpenter and farmer, was a stern religious fundamentalist who readily disciplined his children with his belt. He also denied the children toys, games, and sporting equipment. This experience may have had an impact on his son's later determination to look on the sunny side of life. As the father changed jobs, the family moved frequently: from Chicago to Marceline, Missouri , to Kansas City , Missouri, and back to Chicago. Because of the family's constant traveling and the necessity for the children to contribute to the household's income, Disney's formal education ended at the ninth grade. At age 16, hoping to become a newspaper cartoonist, he joined an art class at the Academy of Fine Arts to develop his drawing skills.

In 1919, after a stint as a driver in the Red Cross Ambulance Corps during World War I (1914 – 1918), Disney moved to Kansas City , Missouri. There he worked at a variety of jobs as a commercial artist and cartoonist. With another young artist, Ub Iwerks, he formed his first small cartoon-film production company in the early 1920s. Along with brief animated advertising films, the company produced a series of animated fairy tales, "Alice in Cartoonland." With Disney's brother Roy as business manager, the little film company moved to Hollywood and produced 56 "Alice" films in three years. They also introduced the "Oswald the Rabbit" series, producing 26 of these cartoons in less than two years.

Mickey Mouse came to life in 1928, first as an airplane pilot, then as an adventurer and a sort of pirate-character. After viewing the first sound movie, " The Jazz Singer ," late in 1928, Disney decided to make the first talking-and-music cartoon: Mickey Mouse as "Steamboat Willie." (He used his own voice for Mickey.) Soon, Mickey was joined by a girlfriend, Minnie. Their popularity led to the invention of such familiar characters as Donald Duck, Pluto, and Goofy. By 1936, eight years after the mouse with human characteristics appeared on the scene, Mickey Mouse had become one of the most widely recognized personalities in the world. Throughout the 1930s Disney continued to make both long and short cartoon features, many of which later became classics, including "Snow White," "Pinocchio," and "Dumbo."

In the 1940s, despite his many successes, Disney produced a series of financial failures, notably "Fantasia," a very different animated film set to classical music and later regarded as a classic. Disney was devastated when "Fantasia" did poorly at the box office and when half his artists went on strike to protest his dictatorial style. The training films combining live action with cartoon characters that he made for the federal government during World War II (1939 – 1945), however, turned Disney in a new and very successful direction.

Following the war, Disney made many films combining live-action and cartoons, including "The Song of the South ." His company also produced very popular full-length animated films, including " Cinderella ," "Alice in Wonderland," and "Peter Pan." In the early 1950s Disney made a popular series of nature films. His film career was capped by "Mary Poppins" in 1964, for which he won five Academy Awards.

By the mid-1950s Disney had begun to produce such television shows as " Davy Crockett " and "The Mickey Mouse Club." At the same time, he was also developing the first of his famous Disneyland theme parks. The first Disneyland, near Los Angeles , California , opened in 1955. Disney's brilliant move was to integrate all his business ventures, using his television programs to motivate people to visit Disneyland, intending Disneyland to inspire parents and children to attend family-oriented Disney films. Disneyland was such a success that later the Disney company opened another theme park, Disney World, near Orlando , Florida .

By the 1960s Disney had created a very diversified entertainment empire, built on cartoon themes, animal icons, nostalgic sentiment, and a high level of quality control. His imagination, highly-developed merchandising skills, and uncanny ability to tap into the fantasies of children of all ages ensured that his company would thrive long after his death from lung cancer in 1966.

Walter Elias Disney

An American film maker and entrepreneur, Walter Elias Disney (1901-1966) created a new kind of popular culture in feature-length animated cartoons and live-action "family" films.

Walter Elias Disney was born in Chicago, IL, on December 5, 1901, the fourth of five children born to a Canadian farmer and a mother from Ohio. He was raised on a Midwestern farm in Marceline, Missouri, and in Kansas City , where he was able to acquire some rudimentary art instruction from correspondence courses and Saturday museum classes. He would later use many of the animals and characters that he knew from that Missouri farm in his cartoons.

He dropped out of high school at 17 to serve in World War I . After serving briefly overseas as an ambulance driver, Disney returned in 1919 to Kansas City for an apprenticeship as a commercial illustrator and later made primitive animated advertising cartoons. By 1922, he had set up his own shop in association with Ub Iwerks, whose drawing ability and technical inventiveness were prime factors in Disney's eventual success.

Initial failure sent Disney to Hollywood in 1923, where in partnership with his loyal elder brother Roy, he managed to resume cartoon production. His first success came with the creation of Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie. Steamboat Willie was the first fully synchronized sound cartoon and featured Disney as the voice of a character first called "Mortimer Mouse." Disney's wife, Lillian, suggested that Mickey sounded better and Disney agreed.

Living frugally, he reinvested profits to make better pictures. His insistence on technical perfection and his unsurpassed gifts as story editor quickly pushed his firm ahead. The invention of such cartoon characters as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Minnie, and Goofy combined with the daring and innovative use of music, sound, and folk material (as in The Three Little Pigs ) made the Disney shorts of the 1930s a phenomenon of worldwide success. This success led to the establishment of immensely profitable, Disney-controlled sidelines in advertising, publishing, and franchised goods, which helped shape popular taste for nearly 40 years.

Disney rapidly expanded his studio facilities to include a training school where a whole new generation of animators developed and made possible the production of the first feature-length cartoon, Snow White (1937). Other costly animated features followed, including Pinocchio, Bambi, and the celebrated musical experiment Fantasia. With Seal Island (1948), wildlife films became an additional source of income, and in 1950 his use of blocked funds in England to make pictures like Treasure Island led to what became the studio's major product, live-action films, which practically cornered the traditional "family" market. Eventually the Disney formula emphasized slick production techniques. It included, as in his biggest hit, Mary Poppins, occasional animation to project wholesome, exciting stories heavily laced with sentiment and, often, music.

In 1954, Disney successfully invaded television, and by the time of his death, the Disney studio's output amounted to 21 full-length animated films, 493 short subjects, 47 live-action films, seven True-Life Adventure features, 330 hours of Mickey Mouse Club television programs, 78 half-hour Zorro television adventures, and 280 other television shows.

On July 18, 1957, Disney opened Disneyland, a gigantic projection of his personal fantasies in Anaheim, CA, which has proved the most successful amusement park in history with 6.7 million people visiting it by 1966. The idea for the park came to him after taking his children to other amusement parks and watching them have fun on amusement rides. He decided to build a park where the entire family could have fun together. In 1971, Disney World, in Orlando, FL, opened. Since then, Disney theme parks have opened in Tokyo and Paris.

Disney had also dreamed of developing a city of the future, a dream realized in 1982 with the opening of EPCOT, which stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. EPCOT, which cost an initial $900 million, was conceived of as a real-life community of the future with the very latest in high technology. The two principle areas of EPCOT are Future World and World Showcase, both of which were designed to appeal to adults rather than children.

In addition to his theme parks, Disney created and endowed a new university, the California Institute of the Arts, known as Cal Arts. He thought of this as the ultimate in education for the arts, where people in many different disciplines could work together, dream and develop, and create the mixture of arts needed for the future. Disney once commented: "It's the principle thing I hope to leave when I move on to greener pastures. If I can help provide a place to develop the talent of the future, I think I will have accomplished something."

Disney's parks continue to grow with the creation of the Disney-MGM Studios, Animal Kingdom, and a extensive sports complex in Orlando. The Disney Corporation has also branched out into other types of films with the creation of Touchstone Films, into music with Hollywood Records, and even vacationing with its Disney Cruise Lines. In all, the Disney name now lends itself to a multi-billion dollar enterprise, with multiple undertakings all over the world.

In 1939, Disney received an honorary Academy Award and in 1954 he received four Academy Awards. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson presented Disney with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and in the same year Disney was awarded the Freedom Foundation Award.

Happily married for 41 years, this moody, deliberately "ordinary" man was moving ahead with his plans for gigantic new outdoor recreational facilities when he died of circulatory problems on December 15, 1966, at St. Joseph's Hospital in Los Angeles , CA. At the time of his death, his enterprises had garnered him respect, admiration, and a business empire worth over $100 million-a-year, but Disney was still remembered primarily as the man who had created Mickey Mouse over two decades before.

DISNEY, WALT

Walter Elias Disney (December 5, 1901–December 15, 1966) was a motion picture and television producer and entrepreneur. After a childhood and youth in the Midwest, Walt Disney entered the field of animated cartoon films in the 1920s and ultimately achieved world fame with the creation of Mickey Mouse. He went on to a long and successful career producing cartoons, feature-length films, and wildlife documentaries, then branched out into television during the 1950s and broke new ground in that medium as well. He also pioneered the concept of theme parks with Disneyland in Anaheim, California, and Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, the latter in progress at the time of his death.

Although Disney achieved recognition in a variety of fields during his life, his lasting reputation as an artist rests on his work in animated cartoons. The Disney studio introduced technological innovations and a new level of artistic brilliance into animation, transforming a relatively crude medium into a dazzling and sophisticated form. The years of this transformation, and Walt Disney's peak years as an artist, were the 1930s and early 1940s—a period corresponding almost exactly to the Great Depression —during which Disney produced a series of one-reel Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony cartoons, then ambitiously tackled the making of feature-length animated films. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Disney's first full-length animated film, was a commercial success that captivated audiences and demonstrated the viability of the genre. By the early 1940s, in films like The Old Mill (1937), Snow White, and Fantasia (1940), the studio had established a standard of artistic excellence in animation that has never since been equaled.

The Depression years lent more than a backdrop to this creative phenomenon; they had a direct bearing on the process. In the early 1930s, when Disney's explosive growth was beginning, numerous artists were drawn to his studio out of simple necessity. Veterans of the period have testified that, in those bleak economic times, jobs for artists were exceedingly scarce. Cartoonists, fine draftsmen, skilled painters, and other artists flocked to the Disney studio, grateful for a chance at steady employment. Disney, in turn, displayed an uncanny knack for assessing the varied gifts of these artists, and encouraged them to use their distinctive abilities to elevate the quality of the films.

In addition, the films themselves reflected the spirit of their time. Mickey Mouse, created in 1928, gradually achieved nationwide recognition during 1929, and thus the rise of his popularity coincided with the onset of the Depression. Mickey, with his humble barnyard origins, made an ideal mascot for an America faced with hard times; his unflagging good cheer and plucky resourcefulness seemed to symbolize the indomitable spirit of the country. In his very first film, Plane Crazy, he improvises an airplane out of an old jalopy and other found objects, and in many succeeding films he similarly makes do with whatever unlikely items may be at hand.

An even more striking morale builder was the 1933 Silly Symphony Three Little Pigs. In this immensely popular cartoon, a nation facing a figurative "wolf at the door" saw the title characters defeat their Big Bad Wolf through a combination of optimism and hard work. The Pigs and their taunting theme song, "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" sparked a nationwide craze in 1933, and observers have often seen the film as an antidote to the Depression. Other Silly Symphonies like Grass-hopper and the Ants and The Wise Little Hen (both 1934) entertainingly stressed the benefits of diligence and industry.

The happy antics of Mickey, the Pigs, and other Disney creations made life a little more bearable for millions of Americans during the 1930s. Small wonder that those same Americans continued to reward Disney with their loyal support in succeeding decades.

Barrier, Michael. Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age . 1999.

Greene, Katherine, and Richard Greene. The Man behind the Magic: The Story of Walt Disney. 1991.

Isbouts, Jean-Pierre, director. Walt: The Man behind the Myth. 2001.

Kaufman, J. B. "Three Little Pigs: Big Little Picture." American Cinematographer 69, no. 11 (November 1988): 38–44.

Merritt, Russell, and J. B. Kaufman. A Companion to Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies. 2004.

Watts, Steven. The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. 1997.

J. B. Kaufman

" Disney, Walt . " Encyclopedia of the Great Depression . . Encyclopedia.com. 22 Feb. 2023 < https://www.encyclopedia.com > .

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NEARBY TERMS

Walt Disney's Rocky Road to Success

Disney had a strained relationship with his father

Born in Chicago in 1901 and raised in Missouri, Disney was the fourth son among five siblings. His father, Elias, was a domineering figure who was allegedly abusive as he tried, unsuccessfully, to make ends meet for the family. To escape from his stressful circumstances, Young Disney found solace in drawing. Still, he'd watch his older brothers, one by one, runoff from home to escape their father, and soon he'd follow suit by lying about his age to become an ambulance driver during World War I. (Years later when his father died, Disney reportedly refused to cut a business trip short and therefore missed his dad's funeral.)

His first cartoon business went bankrupt

When he returned home from war, Disney became an apprentice at a Kansas City commercial art studio. Itching to set off on his own, he and his older brother Roy launched their own cartoon business, Laugh-O-Gram Studios, in 1920, but the company went bankrupt a couple of years later.

With the loss of his first business, Disney packed his bags, and with just $40 to his name, took off to Los Angeles to try his hand at acting. But he failed at that, too. Still, there was a silver lining to his move. Noticing there weren't any animations studios in California, Disney convinced Roy to join him out West so they could set up shop. Not so long after, Disney found his first major success with the creation of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

Disney's character Oswald was plenty lucky, becoming a huge star in one-reel animation, but Disney himself would find his luck had run out. Traveling to New York to renegotiate his contract, he discovered that his producer had taken his team of animators from under him and that he no longer had any legal rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

But instead of fighting the loss or plotting his revenge, Disney decided to walk away and start over again. It was on the train ride back to California that he created Mickey Mouse.

Disney had a nervous breakdown after creating Mickey Mouse

After years of eating beans and driving up his debts, Disney finally brought Mickey Mouse to life on film starting in the late 1920s and earned his way back to the top of his industry. But it wasn't easy. Bankers rejected the concept of his famous mouse over 300 times before one said yes.

Even with the success of Mickey Mouse, Disney still faced challenges in keeping his business afloat. Not only was he overworked, but tensions with his employer — who eventually stole his longtime and best animator from him — led to Disney having a nervous breakdown.

After taking some time off with his wife to recuperate, Disney returned with a bold new idea: He would develop a full-length animation feature, which he'd call Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). It would become a huge success at the box office, yet the films that followed — Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940) and Bambi (1942) — would end up being duds.

His animators went on strike during World War II

If Disney didn't already have enough burdens to shoulder, more were on the way. His animators went on strike at the start of World War II and contributed to his mounting debt that ran upwards of $4 million dollars. After the war was over, his company was slow to rebuild, but during this time, Disney learned to diversify his business by turning to television, despite pressures from the film studios to stay on the big screen.

His gamble paid off. With the success of TV shows like The Mickey Mouse Club and Davy Crockett , Disney was able to harness enough capital to launch his biggest venture yet: Disneyland.

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The opening of Disneyland was called 'Black Sunday'

Disneyland opened on July 17, 1955, in Anaheim, California. Like most of Disney's enterprises, it got off to a rocky start. Forged tickets were bringing more visitors than anticipated, adding to a line that trailed seven miles long. With temps soaring up to 100 degrees, the new asphalt was melting women's high heels, drinking fountains were defunct (thanks to a plumber's strike) and some of the rides malfunctioned. Critics blasted the opening of Disneyland, calling it "Black Sunday."

But as always, Disney's tenacity and perseverance turned his latest endeavor around. Disneyland became a colossal success, clearing out his financial debts, and to this day, operates as an integral part of his business empire.

Commenting on the benefits of failure, Disney once said: "All the adversity I’ve had in my life, all the troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me. You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you."

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Walt Disney
Walt Disney, in full Walter Elias Disney, (born December 5, 1901, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died December 15, 1966, Los Angeles, California), American motion-picture and television producer and showman, famous as a pioneer of animated cartoon films and as the creator of such cartoon characters as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.
Walt Disney
Disney was one of five children, four boys and a girl. Walt Disney's Childhood Disney was born on December 5, 1901, in the Hermosa section of Chicago, Illinois. He lived most of his childhood...
Walt Disney
Born in Chicago in 1901, Disney developed an early interest in drawing. He took art classes as a boy and got a job as a commercial illustrator at the age of 18. He moved to California in the early 1920s and set up the Disney Brothers Studio with his brother Roy.
Walt Disney
As a teenager, Walt Disney was a member of the Order of DeMolay, a youth organization affiliated with Free Masons. Interred at Forest Lawn, Glendale, California, USA. Facing the Freedom Mausoleum, to your left hand side are two small private gardens. His is the one farthest back.
Biography of Walt Disney, Animator and Film Producer
Fast Facts: Walt Disney Known For:Disney was a pioneering animator and film producer who won 22 Academy Awards and built one of the largest media empires in the world. Born:December 5, 1901 in Chicago, Illinois Parents:Elias and Flora Disney Died:December 15, 1966 in Burbank, California
Walt Disney Biography
Walt Disney (1901 - 1966) was a film producer, media magnate and co-founder of the Walt Disney Company. He was an iconic figure in the Twentieth Century media and entertainment industry, helping to produce many films.
Walt Disney Biography
Walt Disney Biography Born: December 5, 1901 Chicago, Illinois Died: December 15, 1966 Los Angeles, California American animator, filmmaker, and businessman An American filmmaker and businessman, Walt Disney created a new kind of popular culture with feature-length animated cartoons and live-action "family" films. Early life
Biography for Kids: Walt Disney
Walter Elias Disney was born in Chicago, Illinois on December 5, 1901. When he was four years old his parents, Elias and Flora, moved the family to a farm in Marceline, Missouri. Walt enjoyed living on the farm with his three older brothers (Herbert, Raymond, and Roy) and his younger sister (Ruth).
Walt Disney, a Short Biography
Disney became one of the best-known motion picture producers in the world. He is particularly noted for being a film producer and a popular showman, as well as an innovator in animation and theme park design. Disney is famous for his contributions in the field of entertainment during the 20th century.
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Birthday: December 5, 1901 ( Sagittarius) Born In: Chicago, Illinois, United States 527 86 T V & Movie Producers #1 Animators #1 Business People #7 Quick Facts Also Known As: Walter Elias Disney Died At Age: 65 Family: Spouse/Ex-: Lillian Bounds (1925-66) father: Elias Disney mother: Flora Call Disney
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Walt Disney: A Biography takes a cultural approach, looking at Disney as both a product of his culture and a cultural innovator who influenced entertainment, education, leisure, and even...
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The creator of Mickey Mouse and founder of Disneyland and Walt Disney World was born in Chicago, Illinois, on December 5, 1901. His father, Elias Disney, was an Irish-Canadian. His mother, Flora Call Disney, was of German-American descent. Walt was one of five children, four boys and a girl. Raised on a farm near Marceline, Missouri, Walt early ...
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WALT DISNEY Biography Word Search Puzzle Worksheet Activity. by. Puzzles to Print. 4.8. (17) $1.25. PDF. Introduce your students to the life and work of the great American entrepreneur, animator and film producer, Walt Disney, with this engaging word search puzzle worksheet.
Waltograph
The typeface is not, as many assume, based on the actual handwriting of Walt Disney; rather, it is an extrapolation of the Walt Disney Company's corporate logotype, which was based on a stylized version of Walt Disney's autograph. First released in 2000, Walt Disney Script was continuously updated and eventually renamed Waltograph in 2004.
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Disney, Walt 1901-1966. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Walter Elias Disney and his brother Roy established the Walt Disney Company in the late 1920s to produce short animations. The company ' s first synchronized-sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie (1928), featured Mickey Mouse, a character that became one of the best-known icons in the world. In the wake of the nineteenth-century transformation of the oral ...
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Disney came from humble beginnings. Walt Disney at the age of 1, in 1902. (Credit: Apic/Getty Images) Born in Chicago on December 5, 1901, Walt Disney, the fourth of five children, moved...
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Disney had a strained relationship with his father Born in Chicago in 1901 and raised in Missouri, Disney was the fourth son among five siblings. His father, Elias, was a domineering figure who...
Walt Disney
Walter Elias "Walt" Disney (/ ˈ d ɪ z n i /; December 5, 1901 - December 15, 1966) was an American entrepreneur, animator, writer, voice actor and film producer.Disney was an important person in the American animation industry and throughout the world. He is regarded as an international icon and philanthropist.
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Walt Disney nació el 5 de diciembre de 1901 en el 1249 de la Avenida Tripp, en el barrio de Hermosa de Chicago. [4] Era el cuarto hijo de Elias Disney, originario de la Provincia Unida de Canadá e hijo de irlandeses, y Flora (de soltera Call), una estadounidense con ascendientes alemanes e ingleses. [5] [6] Además de Walt, los hijos de Elias y Flora eran Herbert, Raymond y Roy, mientras que ...
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Walt Disney Studios Park. Walt Disney Studios Park je zábavní park v rekreační oblasti Disneyland Paris ve Francii. Vznikl v roce 2002 v sousedství parku Disneyland Park a železniční stanice Marne-la-Vallée Chessy. Tématem parku při otevření byly filmy a filmová studia. Hlavní budovy mají vzhled filmových ateliérů.
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A Walt Disney World Railroad (WDWRR) egy 3 láb (914 mm) nyomtávolságú örökségvédelem alatt álló vasút és attrakció, amely a Walt Disney World Magic Kingdom vidámparkjában, a floridai Bay Lake-ben található, az Amerikai Egyesült Államokban. Útvonala 1,5 mérföld (2,4 km) hosszú, és a park nagy részét körbejárja, a park három különböző területén található ...