A successful business turns into a movie-making and entertainment dream
See Creation of an Empire – Part 1 for the first part of our series.
By 1934, Walt became unsatisfied by cartoon shorts and thought a full-length film would be more profitable. he studio began the four-year production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, based on the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. When news leaked out about the project, many in the film industry predicted it would bankrupt the company; industry insiders nicknamed it “Disney’s Folly”.
Disney first got the idea to do a Snow White film when he was 15, while he was working as a newsboy in Kansas City. The budget for the film eventually grew to over $2 million -an astronomical figure for the time. To put this in perspective, Snow White had gone 400% over budget. It actually ended up costing more than the value of the entire Walt Disney studio. And Disney had never made a feature film of any kind before. Also, this was to be the first-ever animated feature film in color.
During this time, Disney animators invented the multiplane camera which allowed drawings on pieces of glass to be set at various distances from the camera, creating an illusion of depth. The glass could be moved to create the impression of a camera passing through the scene.
Snow White premiered in December 1937 to high praise from critics and audiences. The film became the most successful motion picture of 1938 and by May 1939 its total gross of $6.5 million made it the most successful sound film made to that date.
The success of Snow White heralded one of the most productive eras for the studio; the Walt Disney Family Museum calls the following years “the ‘Golden Age of Animation’ ”. With work on Snow White finished, the studio began producing Pinocchio in early 1938 and Fantasia in November of the same year. Both films were released in 1940, and neither performed well at the box office—partly because revenues from Europe had dropped following the start of World War II in 1939. The studio made a loss on both pictures and was deeply in debt by the end of February 1941.
In response to the financial crisis, Disney and his brother Roy started the company’s first public stock offering in 1940, and implemented heavy salary cuts, which caused the animator’s strike in 1941 which lasted 5 weeks. As a result of the strike and the financial state of the company, several animators left the studio.The strike temporarily interrupted the studio’s next production, Dumbo (1941), which Disney produced in a simple and inexpensive manner.
Shortly after the release of Dumbo in October 1941, the U.S. entered World War II. Walt Disney met with Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the Secretary of the Treasury, and agreed to produce short Donald Duck cartoons to promote war bonds as well as other military films. The military films generated only enough revenue to cover costs, and the feature film Bambi—which had been in production since 1937—underperformed on its release in April 1942, and lost $200,000 at the box office.
Disney’s production of short films decreased in the late 1940s, coinciding with increasing competition in the animation market from Warner Bros. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). In 1948, Disney initiated a series of popular live-action nature films, titled True-Life Adventures, with Seal Island the first winning the Academy Award.
In early 1950, Disney produced Cinderella, his studio’s first animated feature in eight years. Costing $2.2 million to produce, it earned nearly $8 million in its first year.
Disney was less involved than he had been with previous pictures because of his involvement in his first entirely live-action feature, Treasure Island (1950). Other all-live-action features followed, many of which had patriotic themes.
He continued to produce full-length animated features too, including Alice in Wonderland (1951) and Peter Pan (1953). From the early to mid-1950s, Disney began to devote less attention to the animation department, entrusting most of its operations to his key animators, the Nine Old Men, although he was always present at story meetings. Instead, he started concentrating on other ventures.
These films and innovations in movie-making, as well as, a successful business would allow him to continue his dream of entertainment and move into the realm of theme parks.
Stay tuned for the next part of this series looking at the life and career of Walt Disney!