Commercial Success
In 1929, Disney created Silly Symphonies, which
featured Mickey's newly created friends, including Minnie Mouse, Donald
Duck, Goofy and Pluto. One of the most popular cartoons, Flowers and Trees, was the first to be produced in color and to win an Oscar. In 1933, The Three Little Pigs and its title song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" became a theme for the country in the midst of the Great Depression.
On December 21, 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,
the first full-length animated film, premiered in Los Angeles. It
produced an unimaginable $1.499 million, in spite of the Depression, and
won a total of eight Oscars. During the next five years, Walt Disney
Studios completed another string of full-length animated films, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi.
In December 1939, a new campus for Walt Disney Studios was opened in
Burbank. A setback for the company occurred in 1941, however, when there
was a strike by Disney animators. Many of them resigned, and it would
be years before the company fully recovered. During the mid-40s, Disney
created "packaged features," groups of shorts strung together to run at
feature length, but by 1950, he was once again focusing on animated
features. Cinderella was released in 1950, followed by Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953), a live-action film called Treasure Island (1950), Lady in the Tramp (1955), Sleeping Beauty (1959) and 101 Dalmatians (1961). In all, more than 100 features were produced by his studio.
Disney was also among the first to use television as an entertainment medium. The Zorro and Davy Crockett series were extremely popular with children, as was The Mickey Mouse Club, a variety show featuring a cast of teenagers known as the Mouseketeers. Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color
was a popular Sunday night show, which Disney used to begin promoting
his new theme park. Disney's last major success that he produced himself
was the motion picture Mary Poppins, which mixed live action and animation.
Disneyland
Disney's $17 million Disneyland theme park opened in 1955.
It was a place where children and their families could explore, take
rides and meet the Disney characters. In a very short time, the park had
increased its investment tenfold, and was entertaining tourists from
around the world.
Death
Within a few years of the opening, Disney began plans for a
new theme park and Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow in
Florida. It was still under construction when, in 1966, Disney was
diagnosed with lung cancer. He died on December 15, 1966, at the age of
65. Disney was cremated, and his ashes interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery
in Los Angeles, California.
After his brother's death, Roy
carried on the plans to finish the Florida theme park, which opened in
1971 under the name Walt Disney World.
Walter Elias "Walt" Disney was born on December 5, 1901, in Hermosa,
Illinois. He and his brother Roy co-founded Walt Disney Productions,
which became one of the best-known motion-picture production companies
in the world. Disney was an innovative animator and created the cartoon
character Mickey Mouse. He won 22 Academy Awards during his lifetime,
and was the founder of theme parks Disneyland and Walt Disney World.
Early Life
Walter Elias "Walt" Disney was born on December 5, 1901, in
the Hermosa section of Chicago, Illinois. His father was Elias Disney,
an Irish-Canadian, and his mother, Flora Call Disney, was
German-American. Disney was one of five children, four boys and a girl.
He lived most of his childhood in Marceline, Missouri, where he began
drawing, painting and selling pictures to neighbors and family friends.
In 1911, his family moved to Kansas City, where Disney developed a love
for trains. His uncle, Mike Martin, was a train engineer who worked the
route between Fort Madison, Iowa, and Marceline. Later, Disney would
work a summer job with the railroad, selling snacks and newspapers to
travelers.
Disney attended McKinley High School in Chicago,
where he took drawing and photography classes and was a contributing
cartoonist for the school paper. At night, he took courses at the
Chicago Art Institute. When Disney was 16, he dropped out of school to
join the army but was rejected for being underage. Instead, he joined
the Red Cross and was sent to France for a year to drive an ambulance.
Early Cartoons
When Disney returned from France in 1919, he moved back to
Kansas City to pursue a career as a newspaper artist. His brother Roy
got him a job at the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio, where he met cartoonist
Ubbe Iwerks. From there, Disney worked at the Kansas City Film Ad
Company, where he made commercials based on cutout animation. Around
this time, Disney began experimenting with a camera, doing hand-drawn
cel animation, and decided to open his own animation business. From the
ad company, he recruited Fred Harman as his first employee.
Walt and Harman made a deal with a local Kansas City theater to screen their cartoons, which they called Laugh-O-Grams.
The cartoons were hugely popular, and Disney was able to acquire his
own studio, upon which he bestowed the same name. Laugh-O-Gram hired a
number of employees, including Harman's brother Hugh and Ubbe Iwerks.
They did a series of seven-minute fairy tales that combined both live
action and animation, which they called Alice in Cartoonland. By 1923, however, the studio had become burdened with debt, and Disney was forced to declare bankruptcy.
Disney
and his brother, Roy, soon pooled their money and moved to Hollywood.
Iwerks also relocated to California, and there the three began the
Disney Brothers' Studio. Their first deal was with New York distributor
Margaret Winkler, to distribute their Alice cartoons. They also invented a character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and contracted the shorts at $1,500 each.
In 1925, Disney hired an ink-and-paint artist named Lillian Bound. After a brief courtship, the couple married.
A
few years later, Disney discovered that Winkler and her husband,
Charles Mintz, had stolen the rights to Oswald, along with all of
Disney’s animators, except for Iwerks. Right away the Disney brothers,
their wives and Iwerks produced three cartoons featuring a new character
Walt had been developing called Mickey Mouse. The first animated shorts
featuring Mickey were Plane Crazy and The Gallopin' Gaucho,
both silent films for which they failed to find distribution. When
sound made its way into film, Disney created a third,
sound-and-music-equipped short called Steamboat Willie. With Walt as the voice of Mickey, the cartoon was an instant sensation.
