Walt Disney

• 1. Introduction

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  Walt Disney holds the record for most Academy Awards won by an individual, with 22 wins from 59 nominations. Yet the man behind that record was, in private, shy, self-deprecating, and insecure. He once told a friend, "I'm not Walt Disney. I do a lot of things Walt Disney would not do. Walt Disney does not smoke. I smoke. Walt Disney does not drink. I drink." Born in Chicago on the 5th of December 1901 and raised largely in Missouri, he died of lung cancer in 1966 at the age of 65. Between those years sits an American animator, film producer, voice actor, and entrepreneur who reshaped how cartoons were made and what audiences expected from them. How does a boy paid to draw a neighbor's horse become a man whose company turns into one of the world's largest media conglomerates? What happens when a frightened innovator keeps gambling everything he has? And why, decades after his death, do people still argue so fiercely about who he really was?

• 2. Marceline And Missouri

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  In 1906, when Disney was four, his family moved to a farm in Marceline, Missouri, where his uncle Robert had just purchased land. There Disney was paid to draw the horse of a retired neighborhood doctor, an early spark for his interest in drawing. His father Elias subscribed to the Appeal to Reason newspaper, and the boy practiced by copying the front-page cartoons of Ryan Walker. Living near the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway line, Disney became enamored with trains. He later described his childhood in Marceline as one of the happiest and most formative periods of his life. In 1911, the family moved to Kansas City, where at Benton Grammar School he met Walter Pfeiffer, who introduced him to vaudeville and motion pictures. Elias had bought a newspaper delivery route, and Disney and his brother Roy woke at 4:30 every morning to deliver papers before school. The schedule was exhausting, and he often received poor grades after falling asleep in class, but he kept the route for more than six years. In mid-1918 he tried to join the Army to fight the Germans but was rejected as too young. After forging the date of birth on his birth certificate, he joined the Red Cross in September 1918 as an ambulance driver, arriving in France after the armistice and decorating his ambulance with his own cartoons.

• 3. Building A Studio

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  In January 1920, aged 18, Disney was laid off from the Pesmen-Rubin Commercial Art Studio in Kansas City, along with a fellow artist he had befriended named Ub Iwerks. Their first venture, the Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists, failed to attract customers. Disney drifted to the Kansas City Film Ad Company, which produced commercials using the cutout animation technique, and there he concluded that cel animation held more promise. His next attempt, the Laugh-O-Gram Studio established in May 1921, produced modernized fairy tales but never earned enough to stay solvent, going bankrupt in 1923. That year he moved to Hollywood at 21 years old, drawn partly because his brother Roy was convalescing from tuberculosis there. A New York distributor, Margaret J. Winkler, signed him to a series of Alice comedies, and he and Roy formed the Disney Brothers Studio, which later became the Walt Disney Company. By 1926 distribution had passed to Winkler's husband Charles Mintz. When Disney and Iwerks created Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the series was a critical and commercial success. Then, in February 1928, Mintz refused a larger budget, revealed that Universal owned the rights to Oswald, and poached most of Disney's animators. Only Iwerks chose to stay with him.

• 4. A Mouse And A Voice

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  Disney's first choice of name for his new character was Mortimer Mouse, but his wife Lillian thought it too pompous and suggested Mickey instead. Iwerks revised Disney's provisional sketches to make the character easier to animate. As one employee put it, "Ub designed Mickey's physical appearance, but Walt gave him his soul." Disney himself provided Mickey's voice until 1947. Mickey first appeared in May 1928 in a test screening of Plane Crazy, but neither it nor a second short found a distributor. Following the sensation of The Jazz Singer, Disney added synchronized sound to a third short, Steamboat Willie, creating the first post-produced sound cartoon. To improve the music he hired composer Carl W. Stalling, whose suggestion led to the Silly Symphony series; its first entry, The Skeleton Dance in 1929, was drawn and animated entirely by Iwerks. In 1930, Disney urged Iwerks to abandon drawing every frame in favor of sketching key poses and letting assistants fill the rest. When Disney pressed their distributor Pat Powers for higher payments, Powers refused and signed Iwerks away; Stalling resigned soon after. Disney suffered a nervous breakdown in October 1931, which he blamed on overworking, and recovered on an extended trip to Cuba and a cruise to Panama. New stars followed regardless: Pluto in 1930, Goofy in 1932, and Donald Duck in 1934.

• 5. Disney's Folly

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  By 1934, Disney had grown dissatisfied with cartoon shorts and believed a feature-length film would be more profitable. Industry insiders nicknamed the four-year production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs "Disney's Folly" and predicted it would bankrupt the company. The film cost $1.5 million, three times over budget. To make the animation realistic, Disney sent his animators to courses at the Chouinard Art Institute and brought animals into the studio for study. His team developed a multiplane camera that set drawings on glass at varying distances, creating an illusion of depth as the camera seemed to pass through a scene. Snow White premiered in December 1937 to high praise, and by May 1939 its gross of $6.5 million made it the most successful sound film to that date. The Walt Disney Family Museum calls the years that followed the Golden Age of Animation. Yet Pinocchio and Fantasia, both released in 1940, performed poorly, partly because European revenue dropped after the start of World War II in 1939. Deep in debt, the company made its first public stock offering in 1940 and imposed heavy salary cuts. Those cuts, and Disney's high-handed manner, led to a 1941 animators' strike that lasted five weeks. Disney accepted a goodwill trip to South America to be absent during a resolution he knew would go against him.

• 6. War, Debt And Reinvention

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  Shortly after Dumbo was released in October 1941, the United States entered World War II, and Disney formed a training films unit to make instruction films such as Four Methods of Flush Riveting for the military. He agreed with Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. to produce Donald Duck cartoons promoting war bonds, and made propaganda shorts including Der Fuehrer's Face, which won an Academy Award. The military films barely covered costs, and Bambi lost $200,000 at the box office in 1942. By 1944 the company owed the Bank of America $4 million. At a meeting about its future, the bank's founder Amadeo Giannini told his executives, "They're good this year, they're good next year, and they're good the year after.... You have to relax and give them time to market their product." In 1948, Disney launched the True-Life Adventures nature films, beginning with Seal Island, which won an Academy Award. In early 1950, his studio's first animated feature in eight years, Cinderella, cost $2.2 million and earned nearly $8 million in its first year. Around this time he established his own distribution division, Buena Vista, and entrusted daily animation work to his key animators, the Nine Old Men, while he turned toward new ventures.

• 7. From Park To City

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  A visit to Griffith Park in Los Angeles with his daughters left Disney wanting a clean, unspoiled park where children and parents could have fun together. He toured the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen and absorbed its cleanliness and layout. After a Burbank site proved too small, he bought a larger plot in Anaheim, 35 miles south of the studio, and formed WED Enterprises, funding designers he called Imagineers with his own money. Disneyland opened in July 1955, its ceremony broadcast on ABC to 70 million viewers; its central Main Street, U.S.A. was a replica of the main street in Marceline. After a month the park drew over 20,000 visitors a day, and 3.6 million guests in its first year. The ABC money was contingent on television programs, so Disney produced Walt Disney's Disneyland, which earned an audience share over 50%, and then The Mickey Mouse Club. He provided four exhibits for the 1964 New York World's Fair, among them It's a Small World, built for PepsiCo, and Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln with its animatronic Abraham Lincoln. In 1964 he produced Mary Poppins, the most successful Disney film of the 1960s, though author P. L. Travers disliked it intensely. In late 1965 he announced plans for Disney World near Orlando, Florida, whose heart was to be the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, which he described as "a community of tomorrow that will never be completed." Diagnosed with lung cancer in early November 1966, he died on the 15th of December that year, before either the park or EPCOT was finished.

• 8. The Man And The Argument

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  Playwright Robert E. Sherwood described Disney as "almost painfully shy... diffident," and his biographer Richard Schickel believed he hid that insecure personality behind a public identity. Disney gave staff little encouragement because of exceptionally high expectations; the animator Floyd Norman recalled that when Disney said "That'll work," it counted as high praise. Accusations have trailed his name. Some called him antisemitic for giving Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl a tour of his studio a month after Kristallnacht, though a spokesperson said she "crashed the gate." Biographer Neal Gabler, the first writer granted unrestricted access to the Disney archives, concluded the evidence does not support the charge, noting Disney was named "Man of the Year" in 1955 by the B'nai B'rith chapter in Beverly Hills. Story man Joe Grant, who was Jewish and worked closely with him, said, "there was no evidence of antisemitism... It's much ado about nothing." On race, Gabler wrote that Disney "was no racist" but, like most white Americans of his generation, "was racially insensitive." During Song of the South, Disney became close friends with its star James Baskett and campaigned successfully for an Honorary Academy Award for him, making Baskett the first black actor so honored. Floyd Norman, the studio's first black animator, said Disney's treatment of all people "can only be called exemplary." Mark Langer wrote that Disney "remains the central figure in the history of animation," a verdict still being weighed against a minor planet named 4017 Disneya in his honor.