We explain who Walt Disney was, how he built his famous cartoon company and what is true about his life being frozen after his death.
Walt Disney produced some of the most popular animated films of the 20th century.
Who was Walt Disney?
Walt Disney He was an American cartoonist, illustrator and businessman, a pioneer in the animated film industry and creator of very popular children’s entertainment characters, such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.
Disney was, along with his brother Roy, the founder of The Walt Disney Companyone of the first animation companies in the United States, which over time became the largest children’s entertainment empire in the world. Throughout its history, this company was dedicated to the production of some of the most popular children’s films of the 20th century, as well as a chain of theme parks with a presence in the United States, Paris, Japan and Hong Kong.
Disney’s productions were highly successful and earned him national and international recognition, especially at the American Academy Awards, which he received twenty-two times, making him the most awarded person in the history of the award. Many of his animated films adapted traditional tales by the Grimm brothers (Jacob: 1785-1863; Wilhelm: 1786-1859) or Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875).
Disney was also the inventor of the multiplane camera for animated films, which allowed him to give his drawings the impression of three-dimensionality. Today he is considered an icon of American culture.
Walt Disney’s Wandering Youth
Walter Elias Disney was born on December 5, 1901 in Chicago, United States, to a working-class family. He was the fourth child of Elias Disney, a carpenter, farmer and builder, and his wife Flora Call, who was a schoolteacher.
Walter, nicknamed “Walt,” grew up on a farm in Missouri where his family moved when he was a baby. There he began his schooling and from a very early age he showed talent in drawing and the use of colors..
Soon his father gave up farming and moved the family to Kansas City, where Walt and his brothers Herbert, Raymond and Roy assisted him in his work as a morning paper carrier. At this time, Walter began studying illustration by correspondence, and later enrolled at the city’s Institute of Arts and Design. There, too, he discovered theatre and cinema, and discovered his passion for vaudeville..
In 1917, the family returned to Chicago. The young cartoonist began his secondary studies there and began his career as a cartoonist.producing cartoons in support of American troops in World War I (1914-1918). He also began his evening studies at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts.
The following year, he enlisted in the army and was sent to France as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross. Shortly before his arrival, the conflict had ended, so Walter returned to his country and settled in Kansas City, where he obtained his first job as an advertising artist, at the Pesmen-Rubin Commercial Art Studio.
At this company he met his first business partner, the cartoonist Ubbe Ert Iwerks (1901-1971), better known as Ub Iwerks, with whom he established an important friendship. When the company declared bankruptcy at the end of 1920, they both began working at the Kansas City Film Ad Company, where they discovered the potential of animation.
Disney’s business beginnings
From the association of Walter Disney and Ub Iwerks the famous Mickey Mouse was born.
In early 1922, Disney and his friend Iwerks founded the short-lived Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists. Using a second-hand video camera, they began producing animated advertising sketches for local businesses. They also filmed a series of humorous animated short films titled Laugh-O-gram and the pilot of an animated series about fairy tales.
Laugh-O-gram The company was somewhat successful and Disney hired other animators to form the Laugh-O-Gram Studio. However, money soon became scarce and, despite their hard work, Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists was declared bankrupt in 1923.
In the middle of that same year, Disney left for California, where his brother Roy lived. Sick with tuberculosis, Roy Disney aspired to become a film director, so he convinced his brother Walter to try his luck in Hollywood. Disney, for his part, hired his friend Iwerks to restart his animated fairy tale project.
The first project they undertook together in this new stage was a series of 56 short films about Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898). Under the initial title of Alice’s Wonderland, This set of animated short stories was distributed by a new company, created by the Disney brothers: The Disney Brothers Studio.
The initial success allowed them to expand the team, and in 1925 Disney hired the cartoonist Lillian Bounds, whom he married in July of that same year. In 1933 they had a daughter, named Diane, and three years later they adopted a newborn daughter and named her Sharon.
The birth of Mickey Mouse
The first animated short film starring Mickey was Plane Crazy in 1928.
In 1927 the Disney team produced its first successful animated character.called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. He was a cheerful and adventurous character, which brought them a distribution contract with Universal Studios. But soon the production company hired its own team of animators and illustrators, which ended up taking control of the character from Disney.
Outraged by this display of disloyalty, Disney decided to create a new character to compete with Universal. He took Oswald as his base and, together with his friend Iwerks, transformed him into a mouse, which they initially named “Mortimer Mouse.” However, at the suggestion of Disney’s wife, they later opted for a simpler name: Mickey (“Miguelito”).
The first animated short film that this new character starred in was Plane Crazy (“Crazy About Airplanes”) in 1928. And that same year, Disney registered Mickey Mouse as his first official character. Regarding the origin of the character, Disney explained it much later as follows:
“I can’t say exactly how the idea came about. We wanted a different animal. Since we had a cat, a mouse immediately came to mind. We felt that audiences, and especially children, like small, ‘cute’ animals. I think we owe a lot to Charlie Chaplin for how it came about. We wanted something attractive, and we thought of a little rodent that had something of Chaplin’s melancholy: a little guy trying to do things as best as possible.”.
Taken from Disney & Its Worlds (2003). Translated by Etecé.
TO Plane Crazy He continued Galloping Gaucho (“The Galloping Gaucho”), also in 1928, but none of the short films were particularly successful. That’s when it appeared The Jazz Singer (“The Jazz Singer”), the first film with synchronized sound, and Disney understood what was missing from his previous works.. Thus, in that same year, the first great success of his company appeared: Steamboat Willie (“Willie and the Steamboat”).
Starring Mickey Mouse and his girlfriend Minnie, it was the first Disney short with synchronized sound and was a resounding success. The sound work was done in conjunction with the American composer and arranger Carl W. Stalling (1981-1972), with whom Disney inaugurated a series of hugely successful sound cartoons in 1929: Silly Symphonies (“Silly Symphonies”).
The first installment of the Silly Symphonies was The Skeleton Dance (“The Dance of the Skeletons”), which was tremendously popular. Drawn by Iwerks and scored by Stalling, it was a very influential piece in its genre and has been referenced numerous times throughout the history of cartoons..
In Silly Symphonies Many of the classic characters from the Disney animated universe also appeared in the following years, such as Goofy, Pluto and Donald Duck.
The Golden Age of Disney
With “Trees and Flowers” from 1932, Disney won his first Oscar.
The 1930s brought new challenges and opportunities for Disney. Iwerks left the studios to found his own company, Iwerks Studio, and with him left his former producer, Pat Powers. Disney then signed a contract with Columbia Pictures to distribute the Mickey Mouse cartoons, which were becoming increasingly successful internationally.
Disney’s company, however, was on the rise. It hired new local artists, many of whom later became part of the group of the “nine old men of Disney”, its senior team of cartoonists and animators. Also, She hired various female illustrators and scriptwriters, who made significant contributions to a sector dominated at that time by male workers..
These included Bianca Majolie (1900-1997) and Sylvia Holland (1900-1974), the first women to hold the position of storyboard artist at the company, as well as Mary Blair (1911-1978), hired in 1940 as an art supervisor and Disney’s right-hand woman in the following decades, and the reporter and aviator Mary Goodrich (1907-2004), hired in 1938.
In 1932, Disney took another step in innovation when he appeared Flowers and trees (“Trees and Flowers”), the first of his animated short films to use the technology Technicolor in three bandsabandoning traditional black and white.
The short film was a huge success: not only was it a box office record for the time, but in 1933 it received the first Academy Award from the American Academy for the best animated short film. From then on, Silly Symphonies also appeared in colors.
That same year, Disney presented what is considered the most successful animated short film of all time: Three Little Pigs (“The Three Little Pigs”), based on the famous fairy tale. The film set new box office records and earned the Disney studio its second Oscar.Amid unprecedented success, the studios increased their payroll by nearly 200 people and launched their “story department” tasked with coming up with new projects.
In 1934, Disney began production of his first feature film, inspired by another traditional tale: Snow White and the Seven DwarfsUntil then, no other studio had dared to undertake something like this, and there were even those who spoke of “Disney’s nonsense.”
The project cost one and a half million dollars. Disney animators took specialized courses and brought live animals to the studio, to ensure the realism of their drawings. In addition, Disney animators developed the multiplane camera, an innovative technique that allowed…