Mr. Walt Disney
Also Known As: Walter Elias DisneyNationality: American
Political Ideology: Republican
Birth Date: December 5, 1901
Walt Disney was an American motion-picture and television producer and showman, famous as a pioneer of cartoon films and as the creator of Disneyland.
Walt Disney, byname of Walter Elias Disney, 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.
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.
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.
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.
Who Was Walt Disney?
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.Walt Disney, byname of Walter Elias Disney, 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.
Early Life
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 drawingand 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.
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.
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.
Walt Disney was one of five children, four boys and a girl. His father was Elias Disney, an Irish-Canadian, and his mother, Flora Call Disney, was German-American.
Disney 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. He moved back to the U.S. in 1919.
First Animated Cartoons
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.
The growing popularity of Mickey Mouse and his girlfriend, Minnie, however, attested to the public’s taste for the fantasy of little creatures with the speech, skills, and personality traits of human beings. (Disney himself provided the voice for Mickey until 1947.) This popularity led to the invention of other animal characters, such as Donald Duck and the dogs Pluto and Goofy. In 1933 Disney produced a short, The Three Little Pigs, which arrived in the midst of the Great Depression and took the country by storm. Its treatment of the fairy tale of the little pig who works hard and builds his house of brick against the huffing and puffing of a threatening wolf suited the need for fortitude in the face of economic disaster, and its song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”was a happy taunting of adversity. It was in this period of economic hard times in the early 1930s that Disney fully endeared himself and his cartoons to audiences all over the world, and his operation began making money in spite of the Depression.
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.
Feature-Length Cartoons
Walt Disney was never one to rest or stand still. He had long thought of producing feature-length animated films in addition to the shorts. In 1934 he began work on a version of the classic fairy tale Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), a project that required great organization and coordination of studio talent and a task for which Disney possessed a unique capacity. While he actively engaged in all phases of creation in his films, he functioned chiefly as coordinator and final decision maker rather than as designer and artist. Snow White was widely acclaimed by critics and audiences alike as an amusing and sentimental romance. By animating substantially human figures in the characters of Snow White, the Prince, and the Wicked Queen and by forming caricatures of human figures in the seven dwarfs, Disney departed from the scope and techniques of the shorts and thus proved animation’s effectiveness as a vehicle for feature-length stories.While Disney continued to do short films presenting the anthropomorphiccharacters of his little animals, he was henceforth to develop a wide variety of full-length entertainment films, such as Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi(1942). Disney also produced a totally unusual and exciting film—his multisegmented and stylized Fantasia (1940), in which cartoon figures and colour patterns were animated to the music of Igor Stravinsky, Paul Dukas, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and others. In 1940 Disney moved his company into a new studio in Burbank, California, abandoning the old plant it had occupied in the early days of growth.
A strike by Disney animators in 1941 was a major setback for the company. Many top animators resigned, and it would be many years before the company produced animated features that lived up to the quality of its early 1940s classics. Disney’s foray into films for the federal government during World War II helped the studio perfect methods of combining live-action and animation; the studio’s commercial films using this hybrid technique include The Reluctant Dragon(1941), Saludos Amigos (1942), The Three Caballeros (1945), Make Mine Music (1946), and Song of the South (1946).
The Disney studio by that time was established as a big-business enterprise and began to produce a variety of entertainment films. One popular series, called True-Life Adventures, featured nature-based motion pictures such as Seal Island(1948), Beaver Valley (1950), and The Living Desert (1953). The Disney studio also began making full-length animation romances, such as Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), and Peter Pan (1953), and produced low-budget, live-action films, including The Absent-Minded Professor (1961).
The Disney studio was among the first to foresee the potential of television as a popular entertainment medium and to produce programs directly for it. The Zorro and Davy Crockett series were very popular with children, and a weekly showcase (known by several titles, including Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color) became a Sunday night fixture. The Mickey Mouse Club, a variety show featuring a cast of teenage performers known as the Mouseketeers, was also successful. The climax of Disney’s career as a producer, however, came with his release in 1964 of the motion picture Mary Poppins, which won worldwide popularity.
Significant Life Milestones of Him
Moving back to Kansas City in 1919, started working at the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio, as ad-writer. It was there that he met Ubbe Iwerks.In 1920, he found employment with Kansas City Film Ad Company. His profile included making commercials from cutout animations. He developed an interest in animation and decided to become an animator.
However, finding true interest in cel animation, he left the company to start his own business venture. He offered employment to Fred Harman, who was his colleague at Kansas City Film Ad Company.
He entered into a business deal with a local theatre owner, Frank L Newman to screen the cartoons which he named, Laugh-o-Grams. The popularity of the cartoons led to the opening of Laugh-o-Grams studio. However, financial debt caused the closure of the studio in 1923.
Impervious to the bankruptcy, he aimed to set up a studio in California. Together with his brother Roy, and Iwerks, he opened Disney Brother’s Studio.
They entered into a distribution deal with New York distributor Margaret Winkler for Walt's 'Alice Comedies', an animated shorts based upon ‘Alice's Wonderland’. They invented a character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit for which they contracted the shorts at $1,500 each.
In 1925, he recruited ink-and-paint artist Lillian Bound, little knowing then that the two would become lifelong partners.
The dream-run for Disney ended in 1928 when he realized that Universal Pictures had bought the trademark for Oswald and that most of his creative designers, except Iwerk, had forsaken him for the Universal Pictures.
Together with Iwerk, he worked on creating a new character, based on his pet mouse which he adopted during the Laugh-o-Gram days. The final touches to the sketch gave the world of animation a new character in Mickey Mouse.
While the first two animated shorts did not bring Mickey Mouse much fame due to them being silent movies, the third short, was sound and music equipped became an instant success and created a sensation. Walt gave his voice for Mickey.
After the supper success of Mickey’s third short, Streamboat Willie, he launched sound in all of his subsequent cartoons.
In 1929, he released a series of musical shorts, titled ‘Silly Symphonies’, which featured Mickey’s friends, Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto and Mickey’s girlfriend Minnie Mouse.
In 1933, he created his most memorable cartoon short, ‘The Three Little Pigs’. The cartoon was a big hit and garnered positive reviews. Furthermore, its anthem song, ‘Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf’ became an iconic number during the Great Depression.
In 1935, he created history by launching ‘Flowers and Trees’, then one of the most popular cartoon shorts, in color. For the same, he was bestowed with the prestigious Academy Award.
In 1934, he planned to come up with a full-length animation feature. People deemed it to be ‘Disney’s Folly’ and the mark of his downfall. His wife and brother even encouraged in talking him out of the project but in vain.
After a successful training schedule, his high-profile leap of a feature film titled, ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, went into production in 1934. After three years, the film premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre, Los Angeles.
‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ opened to public in February 1938. The film was a blockbuster at the box office and went on to become the most successful film of 1938. In its initial release, the film had grossed $8 million.
The grand success of Snow White not only catapulted the position of Disney in the world of animation but also brought about an era, which later was given the name as the Golden Age of Animation.
Following the success of his first film, he started working on several others, including, ‘Pinnochio’, ‘Fantasia’, ‘Dumbo’ and ‘Bambi’. Simultaneously, the short staff continued to work on the characters of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto cartoon series
In 1939, he opened the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank. However, two years later, a strike by Disney Animators resulted in heavy losses for the studio as many of the animators resigned from work.
By 1950s, after stabilizing the financial condition of Walt Disney Studios, he started focussing again on feature films. The first to release was ‘Cinderella’ in 1950, which was followed by ‘Alice in Wonderland’, ‘Peter Pan’, ‘Treasure Island’, ‘Lady in the Tramp’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘101 Dalmatians’.
A visit to Children’s fairyland in Oakland inspired him for the concept of Disneyland. After five years of immense planning, projecting, fund raising and execution, the grand opening of Disneyland Theme Park took place on July 17, 1955. The park primarily gave children and families to explore the world of fantasy.
Walt Disney's Films Find 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 (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942).
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-1940s, 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 a live-action film called Treasure Island (1950), Alice in Wonderland(1951), Peter Pan (1953), Lady and 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(1964), which mixed live action and animation.
Disneyland
In the early 1950s Disney had initiated plans for a huge amusement park to be built near Los Angeles. When Disneyland opened in 1955, much of Disney’s disposition toward nostalgic sentiment and fantasy was evident in its design and construction. It soon became a mecca for tourists from around the world. A second Disney park, Walt Disney World, near Orlando, Florida, which was under construction at the time of his death, opened in 1971.Disney's $17 million Disneyland theme park opened on July 17, 1955, in Anaheim, California, with actor (and future U.S. president) Ronald Reagan presiding over the activities on what was once an orange grove. After a tumultuous opening day involving several mishaps (including the distribution of thousands of counterfeit invitations), the site became known as a place where children and their families could explore, enjoy 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. With the original site having some attendance ups and downs over the years, Disneyland has expanded its rides over time and branched out globally with parks in Tokyo, Paris and Hong Kong, with a Shanghai location that opened in June 2016. Sister property California Adventure also opened in 2001.Disneyland California is most certainly a land of enchantment where children and the young at heart find that dreams really do come true. Disneyland Park is a seamless blend of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Smiling train conductors, marching bands and the clip-clop of horse drawn carriages bring you back to carefree days. You can also rocket through the galaxy, board a runaway train or trek through the jungle. Laughter is always in the air, with friendly smiles all around. The secret to Disneyland is its ability to change yet, remain the same. As Walt Disney said "Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.Combine the magic of Disney with the best that California has to offer and the result is Disney California Adventure, a theme park that celebrates the Golden State in style. Once you enter the gates of Disney California Adventure, you are transported to the land of promise, opportunity and glamour. Disney California Adventure is a journey from the California of yesterday to today.
Disney California Adventure is a tribute to this land of dreams. Its larger than life images and icons seem to be plucked from a Hollywood blockbuster. From Grizzly Peak (an icon at Disney California Adventure) to a white knuckled roller coaster, the sights and sounds are inspired by the rich history of this majestic state.
Guests of Disney California Adventure can ‘soar’ around the world, bob along white water rapids, meet their favorite super heroes or simply savor a glass of wine from the Napa Valley. Whether you prefer "action, comedy or romance," Disney California Adventure has something for everyone. When the "Entertainment Capital of the World" gets a touch of Disney, you know that Disney California Adventure will be an unforgettable experience.
Legacy
Disney’s imagination and energy, his whimsical humour, and his gift for being attuned to the vagaries of popular taste inspired him to develop well-loved amusements for “children of all ages” throughout the world. Although some criticized his frequently saccharine subject matter and accused him of creating a virtual stylistic monopoly in American animation that discouraged experimentation, there is no denying his pathbreaking accomplishments. His achievement as a creator of entertainment for an almost unlimited public and as a highly ingenious merchandiser of his wares can rightly be compared to the most successful industrialists in history.He gave the world of animation a new ideology to work on and is believed to be responsible for the Golden Age of Animation. Most of the cartoon characters that we reckon today, Micky Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, and so on are the brain-child of this international icon, who became a major figure in the American animation industry in 20th century. Disneyland, the most popular theme park of the world, was also conceptualized and created by him.
Awards & Achievements
He received four honorary Academy Awards and twenty-two Academy Awards in his life for his distinguished works.He was the proud recipient of seven Emmy awards.
Personal Life & Legacy
He married Lillian Bound in 1925. The couple was blessed with a daughter, Diane Marie Disney in 1933. They adopted Sharon Mae Disney in 1936.He died on December 15, 1966 due to lung cancer. Two days later, he was cremated and his ashes were interred at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.
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