Walter Elias "Walt" Disney (December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) was an American business magnate, animator, cartoonist, producer, director, screenwriter, entrepreneur, and voice actor. A major figure within the American animation industry and throughout the world, he is regarded as an international icon, and philanthropist, well known for his influence and contributions to the field of entertainment during the 20th century. As a Hollywood business mogul, he, along with his brother Roy O. Disney,
co-founded the Walt Disney Productions, which later became one of the
best-known motion picture producers in the world. The corporation is now
known as The Walt Disney Company and had an annual revenue of approximately US$36 billion in the 2010 financial year.
As an animator and entrepreneur, Disney was particularly noted as a
film producer and a popular showman, as well as an innovator in
animation and theme park design. He and his staff created some of the world's most well-known fictional characters including Mickey Mouse, for whom Disney himself provided the original voice. During his lifetime he received four honorary Academy Awards and won 22 Academy Awards from a total of 59 nominations, including a record four in one year, giving him more awards and nominations than any other individual in history. Disney also won seven Emmy Awards and gave his name to the Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resort theme parks in the U.S., as well as the international resorts like Tokyo Disney Resort, Disneyland Paris, and Hong Kong Disneyland.
He died on December 15, 1966 from lung cancer in Burbank, California. A year later, construction of the Walt Disney World Resort began in Florida. His brother Roy Disney inaugurated the Magic Kingdom on October 1, 1971.
Disney was born on December 5, 1901, at 2156 N. Tripp Avenue in Chicago's Hermosa community area to Irish-Canadian father Elias Disney and Flora Call Disney, who was of German and English descent.[8][9] His great-grandfather, Arundel Elias Disney, had emigrated from Gowran, County Kilkenny, Ireland where he was born in 1801. Arundel Disney was a descendant of Robert d'Isigny, a Frenchman who had travelled to England with William the Conqueror in 1066.[10] With the d'Isigny name anglicized as "Disney", the family settled in a village now known as Norton Disney, south of the city of Lincoln, in the county of Lincolnshire.
In 1878, Disney's father Elias had moved from Huron County, Ontario, Canada to the United States at first seeking gold in California before finally settling down to farm with his parents near Ellis, Kansas, until 1884. Elias worked for the Union Pacific Railroad and married Flora Call on January 1, 1888, in Acron, Florida, just 40 miles north of where Walt Disney World would ultimately be developed. The family moved to Chicago, Illinois, in 1890,[11] hometown of Elias' brother Robert[11] who helped Elias financially for most of Walt's early life.[11] In 1906, when Walt was four, Elias and his family moved to a farm in Marceline, Missouri,[12] where his brother Roy had recently purchased farmland.[12] In Marceline, Disney developed his love for drawing[13]
with one of the family's neighbors, a retired doctor named "Doc"
Sherwood, paying him to draw pictures of Sherwood's horse, Rupert.[13] His interest in trains also developed in Marceline, a town that owed its existence to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway which ran through it. Walt would put his ear to the tracks in anticipation of the coming train[9] then try and spot his uncle, engineer Michael Martin, conducting the train.
The Disneys remained in Marceline for four years,[14] before moving to Kansas City in 1911[15]
where Walt and his younger sister Ruth attended the Benton Grammar
School. At school he met Walter Pfeiffer who came from a family of
theatre aficionados, and introduced Walt to the world of vaudeville and
motion pictures. Before long Walt was spending more time at the
Pfeiffers' than at home.[16] As well as attending Saturday courses at the Kansas City Art Institute,[17] Walt often took Ruth to Electric Park, 15 blocks from their home, which Disney would later acknowledge as a major influence of his design of Disneyland.
Teenage years
In 1917, Elias acquired shares in the O-Zell jelly factory in Chicago and moved his family back to the city, where in the fall Disney began his freshman year at McKinley High School and took night courses at the Chicago Art Institute.
He became the cartoonist for the school newspaper, drawing patriotic
topics and focusing on World War I. Despite dropping out of high school
at the age of sixteen to join the army, Disney was rejected for being underage.
After his rejection by the army, Walt and a friend decided to join the Red Cross.
Soon after joining he was sent to France for a year, where he drove an
ambulance, but only after the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918.
Disney as an ambulance driver immediately after World War I
Hoping to find work outside the Chicago O-Zell factory, in 1919 Walt moved back to Kansas City to begin his artistic career. After considering whether to become an actor or a newspaper artist, he
decided on a career as a newspaper artist, drawing political caricatures
or comic strips. But when nobody wanted to hire him as either an artist
or even as an ambulance driver, his brother Roy, then working in a
local bank, got Walt a temporary job through a bank colleague at the
Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio where he created advertisements for newspapers, magazines, and movie theaters. At Pesmen-Rubin he met cartoonist Ubbe Iwerks and when their time at the studio expired, they decided to start their own commercial company together.
In January 1920, Disney and Iwerks formed a short-lived company
called, "Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists". However, following a rough
start, Disney left temporarily to earn money at the Kansas City Film Ad
Company, and was soon joined by Iwerks who was not able to run their
business alone. While working for the Kansas City Film Ad Company, where he made commercials based on cutout animations, Disney became interested in animation, and decided to become an animator.
The owner of the Ad Company, A.V. Cauger, allowed him to borrow a
camera from work to experiment with at home. After reading the Edwin G.
Lutz book Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development, Disney considered cel
animation to be much more promising than the cutout animation he was
doing for Cauger. Walt eventually decided to open his own animation
business, and recruited a fellow co-worker at the Kansas City Film Ad Company, Fred Harman, as his first employee.
Walt and Harman then secured a deal with local theater owner Frank L.
Newman, arguably the most popular "showman" in the Kansas City area at
the time, to screen their cartoons at his local theater, which they titled Laugh-O-Grams.
Laugh-O-Gram Studio
Presented as "Newman Laugh-O-Grams",[31] Disney's cartoons became widely popular in the Kansas City area[32] and through their success, he was able to acquire his own studio, also called Laugh-O-Gram,[33] for which he hired a vast number of additional animators, including Fred Harman's brother Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising, and his close friend Ubbe Iwerks.[34]
Unfortunately, studio profits were insufficient to cover the high
salaries paid to employees. Unable to successfully manage money,[35] Disney's studio became loaded with debt[35] and wound up bankrupt[36] whereupon he decided to set up a studio in the movie industry's capital city, Hollywood, California.[37]
Film and business career in Hollywood
As aspiring animators and entrepreneurs, Disney and his brother Roy pooled their money and set up a cartoon studio in Hollywood[38] where they needed to find a distributor for Walt's new Alice Comedies, which he had started making while in Kansas City[36] but never got to distribute. Disney sent an unfinished print to New York distributor Margaret Winkler, who promptly wrote back to him that she was keen on a distribution deal for more live-action/animated shorts based upon Alice's Wonderland.[39]
Alice Comedies
Virginia Davis, the live-action star of Alice’s Wonderland
and her family relocated from Kansas City to Hollywood at Disney's
request, as did Iwerks and his family. This was the beginning of the Disney Brothers' Studio located on Hyperion Avenue in the Silver Lake district, where it remained until 1939. In 1925, Disney hired a young woman named Lillian Bounds to ink and paint celluloid. After a brief courtship, the pair married that same year.
The new series, Alice Comedies, proved reasonably successful, and featured both Dawn O'Day
and Margie Gay as Alice with Lois Hardwick also briefly assuming the
role. By the time the series ended in 1927, its focus was more on the
animated characters and in particular a cat named Julius who resembled Felix the Cat, rather than the live-action Alice.
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit
Main article: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit
By 1927, Charles Mintz
had married Margaret Winkler and assumed control of her business. He
then ordered a new, all-animated series to be put into production for
distribution through Universal Pictures. The new series, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit,
was an almost instant success, and the character, Oswald – drawn and
created by Iwerks – became a popular figure. The Disney studio expanded
and Walt re-hired Harman, Rudolph Ising, Carman Maxwell, and Friz Freleng from Kansas City.
Disney went to New York in February 1928 to negotiate a higher fee
per short and was shocked when Mintz told him that not only did he want
to reduce the fee he paid Disney per short but also that he had most of
his main animators, including Harman, Ising, Maxwell, and Freleng—but
not Iwerks, who refused to leave Disney—under contract and would start
his own studio if Disney did not accept the reduced production budgets.
Universal, not Disney, owned the Oswald trademark, and could make the
films without Walt. Disney declined Mintz's offer and as a result lost
most of his animation staff whereupon he found himself on his own again.[40]
It subsequently took his company 78 years to get back the rights to the Oswald character when in 2006 the Walt Disney Company reacquired the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit from NBC Universal, through a trade for longtime ABC sports commentator Al Michaels.[41]
Mickey Mouse
Main article: Mickey Mouse
After losing the rights to Oswald, Disney felt the need to develop a
new character to replace him, which was based on a mouse he had adopted
as a pet while working in his Laugh-O-Gram studio in Kansas City.[42]
Ub Iwerks reworked the sketches made by Disney to make the character
easier to animate although Mickey's voice and personality were provided
by Disney himself until 1947. In the words of one Disney employee, "Ub
designed Mickey's physical appearance, but Walt gave him his soul."[42] Besides Oswald and Mickey, a similar mouse-character is seen in the Alice Comedies, which featured "Ike the Mouse". Moreover, the first Flip the Frog
cartoon called Fiddlesticks showed a Mickey Mouse look-alike playing
fiddle. The initial films were animated by Iwerks with his name
prominently featured on the title cards. Originally named "Mortimer",
the mouse was later renamed "Mickey" by Lillian Disney, who thought that
the name Mortimer did not sound appealing. Mortimer eventually became
the name of Mickey's rival for Minnie – taller than his renowned
adversary and speaking with a Brooklyn accent.
The first animated short to feature Mickey, Plane Crazy was a silent film like all of Disney's previous works. After failing to find a distributor for the short and its follow-up, The Gallopin' Gaucho, Disney created a Mickey cartoon with sound called Steamboat Willie. A businessman named Pat Powers provided Disney with both distribution and Cinephone, a sound-synchronization process. Steamboat Willie became an instant success,[43] and Plane Crazy, The Galloping Gaucho, and all future Mickey cartoons were released with soundtracks. After the release of Steamboat Willie,
Disney successfully used sound in all of his subsequent cartoons, and
Cinephone also became the new distributor for Disney's early sound
cartoons.[44] Mickey soon eclipsed Felix the Cat as the world's most popular cartoon character and by 1930, despite their having sound, cartoons featuring Felix had faded from the screen after failing to gain attention. Mickey's popularity would subsequently skyrocket in the early 1930s.
Silly Symphonies
Following in the footsteps of Mickey Mouse series, a series of musical shorts titled, Silly Symphonies were released in 1929. The first, The Skeleton Dance
was entirely drawn and animated by Iwerks, who was also responsible for
drawing the majority of cartoons released by Disney in 1928 and 1929.
Although both series were successful, the Disney studio thought it was
not receiving its rightful share of profits from Pat Powers, and in 1930, Disney signed a new distribution deal with Columbia Pictures. The original basis of the cartoons was their musical novelty with the first Silly Symphony cartoons featuring scores by Carl Stalling.
Iwerks was soon lured by Powers into opening his own studio with an
exclusive contract, while Stalling would also later leave Disney to join
Iwerks. Iwerks launched his Flip the Frog series with the first voiced color cartoon Fiddlesticks, filmed in two-strip Technicolor. Iwerks also created two other cartoon series, Willie Whopper and the Comicolor. In 1936, Iwerks shut down his studio
in order to work on various projects dealing with animation technology.
He would return to Disney in 1940 and go on to pioneer a number of film
processes and specialized animation technologies in the studio's
research and development department.
By 1932, although Mickey Mouse had become a relatively popular cinema character, Silly Symphonies was not as successful. The same year also saw competition increase as Max Fleischer's flapper cartoon character, Betty Boop, gained popularity among theater audiences. Fleischer, considered Disney's main rival in the 1930s,[50] was also the father of Richard Fleischer, whom Disney would later hire to direct his 1954 film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Meanwhile, Columbia Pictures dropped the distribution of Disney cartoons to be replaced by United Artists. In late 1932, Herbert Kalmus, who had just completed work on the first three-strip technicolor camera, approached Walt and convinced him to reshoot the black and white Flowers and Trees in three-strip Technicolor. Flowers and Trees would go on to be a phenomenal success and would also win the first Academy Award for Best Short Subject: Cartoons in 1932. After the release of Flowers and Trees, all subsequent Silly Symphony
cartoons were in color while Disney was also able to negotiate a
two-year deal with Technicolor, giving him the sole right to use their
three-strip process, a period eventually extended to five years. Through Silly Symphonies, Disney also created his most successful cartoon short of all time, The Three Little Pigs (1933).[56]
The cartoon ran in theaters for many months, featuring the hit song
that became the anthem of the Great Depression, "Who's Afraid of the Big
Bad Wolf".
In 1932, Disney received a special Academy Award for the creation of
"Mickey Mouse", a series which switched to color in 1935 and soon
launched spin-offs for supporting characters such as Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto. Pluto and Donald became standalone cartoons in 1937, with Goofy following in 1939. Of all Mickey's partners, Donald Duck, who first teamed up with Mickey in the 1934 cartoon, Orphan's Benefit, was arguably the most popular, going on to become Disney's second most successful cartoon character of all time.
