Walt Disney was born in the Hermosa neighbourhood of Chicago, Illinois, on December 5, 1901. He lived in Marceline, Missouri for most of his childhood, where he started drawing, painting, and selling pictures to neighbours and friends of his family.
In 1911, his family moved to Kansas City, where a passion for trains was created by Disney. His uncle, Mike Martin, was a train engineer who worked on the Fort Madison, Iowa, and Marceline roads. Disney would later work with the railroad for a summer job, selling treats and newspapers to passengers.
Disney studied at the McKinley High School in Chicago, where he contributed as a cartoonist for the school paper and also attended drawing and photography lessons. He took classes at the Art Institute of Chicago at night.
Walt Disney dropped out of school at the age of 16 to join the Army but got rejected for being minor. In 1919, he moved back to the U.S.
In 1919, Disney moved to Kansas City as a newspaper artist to pursue a career. He got a job at the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio with his brother Roy, where he met the cartoonist Ubbe Eert Iwwerks, best known as Ub Iwerks. Disney worked at the Kansas City Film Ad Company where he made ads based on cutout animation.
Disney started experimenting with a camera about this time, doing hand-drawn cel animation. He wanted to start an animation company of his own. He hired Fred Harman from the ad company as his first worker.
To show their cartoons, which they called Laugh-O-Grams, Disney and Harman made a deal with a nearby Kansas City theatre. The cartoons became immensely successful, and Disney was able to buy his studio, which he named after himself.
A variety of employees were employed by Laugh-O-Gram, including Iwerks and Hugh, Harman’s partner. In Cartoonland, they did a series of seven-minute fairy tales incorporating both live-action and animation, which they called Alice.
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The studio had, however, been burdened with debt by 1923, and Disney was compelled to declare bankruptcy.
In 1923, Disney and his brother Roy moved to Hollywood with cartoonist Ub Iwerks, where the three started the Cartoon Studio of the Disney Brothers. The company eventually changed its name to, at Roy’s request, Walt Disney Studios.
The first contract to sell their Alice cartoons was with New York distributor Margaret Winkler at the Walt Disney Studios. They also invented a character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and each got $1,500 for the shorts. The studios broke away from their distributors in the late 1920s and made cartoons starring Mickey Mouse and his friends.
A new campus for Walt Disney Animation Studios was opened in Burbank in December 1939. In 1941, when Disney animators went on strike, there was a loss for the company. Several of them resigned. It will be years before the business recovered fully.
Flowers and Trees (1932), one of the most famous Disney Studio cartoons, was the first to be made in colour and to win an Oscar. In 1933, amid the Great Depression, The Three Little Pigs and its title song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” became a staple for the world.
A sound-and-music-equiped animated short called Steamboat Willie was Disney’s first commercial film starring Mickey Mouse. It premiered in New York on November 18, 1928, at the Colony Theater. The sound had just made its way into the movie, and Mickey’s voice was Disney, a character he had created, and that was drawn by Ub Iwerks, his chief animator. An immediate phenomenon was the cartoon.
Two earlier silent animated shorts starring Mickey Mouse, Plane Mad, and The Gallopin ‘Gaucho were created by the Disney brothers, their wives, and Iwerks, out of necessity. The team had discovered that, except for Iwerks, Disney’s New York distributor, Margaret Winkler, and her partner, Charles Mintz, had stolen the rights to the Oswald character and all Disney’s animators. As sound was already revolutionizing the movie industry, the two earliest Mickey Mouse films struggled to find distribution.
In 1929, Silly Symphonies was created by Disney, featuring Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto, newly created friends of Mickey.
More than 100 feature films have been made by Disney. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which premiered in Los Angeles on December 21, 1937, was his first full-length animated film. Despite the Great Depression, it created an unimaginable 1,499 million dollars and won eight Oscars. Over the next five years, this led Walt Disney Studios to complete another series of full-length animated films.
Disney produced “packaged features,” groups of shorts strung together to run at feature-length throughout the mid-1940s. By 1950, he focused again on animated characteristics.
The motion picture Mary Poppins, which came out in 1964 and combined live-action and animation, was Disney’s last major success that he made himself.
Disney was also among the first individuals to use television as a medium for entertainment. As was The Mickey Mouse Club, a variety show featuring a cast of teens known as the Mouseketeers, the Zorro, and Davy Crockett series were immensely popular with kids.
