Just how did Walt Disney develop a passion that would later change the world of entertainment
There have been companies show up on the main stage and flourish for awhile, but then, it seems, we see them die out or simply be surpassed by the competition. We see that they have had a great idea or product and that great idea/product pushes the company into rarified air only to watch the competitors come up with a better idea/product. We see companies all of the time, who are led by a charismatic visionary, but then, when that leader leaves, they falter under new leadership.
So how is the Walt Disney Company different than almost any other company in the history of business? Or is it?
This question has to be answered by going back to its origins. Into the mind of one man from Chicago, Illinois.
Walter Elias Disney, born in 1901 to Elias and Flora Disney, was the 4th son of 5 children. At an early age, he developed a passion for art and used it as a medium to show his creativity. He took art classes as a boy and when his family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, in 1911, he met Walter Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer’s family introduced Walt to the world of vaudeville and motion pictures.
During his time in Missouri, Walt attended weekend classes at the Kansas City Art Institute as well as a course in cartooning.
Elias moved his family back to Chicago in 1917, where Walt became the cartoonist for the high school newspaper. He continued his schooling be art schooling by attending the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts.
Walt would draw patriotic pictures of World War I for the school newspaper, inspiring him to attempt to enroll in the U.S. Army. After being rejected for being too young, Walt forged the date of birth on his birth certificate and joined the Red Cross.
While serving as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross, he would paint cartoons on the side of his ambulance and had some of his pictures published in the army newspaper, Stars and Stripes.
At the age of 18, Walt returned to Kansas City where he got a job as a commercial illustrator at the Pesman-Rubin Commercial Art Studio. While drawing pictures for advertising, theater programs and catalogs, Walt met a man who, later, would help him change the entertainment industry…Ub Iwerks.
In 1920, Disney began to became interested in animation. With the help of a borrowed book on animation and a camera, he started experimenting at home.
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 theaters. 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.
They, then, invented a character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, which was distributed for $1,500 each, and 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.
Recognizing the possibilities for sound in animated-cartoon films, Disney quickly produced a Mickey Mouse cartoon equipped with voices and music, entitled Steamboat Willie. When it appeared in 1928, Steamboat Willie was a sensation. In the words of one Disney employee, “Ub designed Mickey’s physical appearance, but Walt gave him his soul.”
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 the early 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression, Disney fully endeared himself and his cartoons to audiences all over the world, and his operation began making money in spite of the hard economic times.
Disney hired the professional composer and arranger Carl Stalling, on whose suggestion the Silly Symphony series was developed, providing stories through the use of music. Also hired at this time were several local artists, some of whom stayed with the company as core animators; the group later became known as the Nine Old Men.
Co-creator of Mickey Mouse, Ub Iwerks left to start Iwerks Studio in 1930.
Color 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).
In 1933, Disney produced The Three Little Pigs. The film won Disney another Academy Award in the Short Subject (Cartoon) category. The film’s success led to a further increase in the studio’s staff, which numbered nearly 200 by the end of the year.
Disney realized the importance of telling emotionally gripping stories that would interest the audience, and he invested in a “story department” separate from the animators, with storyboard artists who would detail the plots of Disney’s films.
A passion and creativity had been developed, a company had been formed. From art classes to a full fledged business, Walt Disney never stopped testing the limits of what was possible in animation and entertainment.
These early successes would lead to what would then be deemed to be the golden age of animation…..
Stay tuned for the second part of our series, Creation of an Empire.
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