Walt Disney was an American animator, voice actor, film producer, and entrepreneur. He introduced several innovations in the cartoon industry. The cartoon characters he created - Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, the Three Little Pigs, etc. became internationally famous. But he did not limit his imagination to just creating cartoons. He also designed and built the first Disneyland theme park, which he intended to be the happiest place on earth. Read this biography of Walt Disney to find out how he became an animator and built an unconquerable empire.
Ancestors
Walt Disney's forefathers were Normans. They were the inhabitants of Normandy, a region in Northern France.
In the October of 1066, the Norman-French army led by the Duke of Normandy, William, attacked the English army led by the Anglo-Saxon king Harold Godwinson. This battle, known as the Battle of Hastings, began the Norman conquest of England. After winning the battle, William, the Duke of Normandy, became the king of England. During his reign, he defended England from foreign invasions and built several castles to strengthen England's defense. William died in the year 1087. Since then, England has been ruled by his successors. Even Queen Elizabeth II, the current queen of England, is his direct descendant. Thus, the battle of Hastings changed the history of England completely. Hence, due to his victory in such an important battle, William came to be known as William the Conqueror.
Origin of the family name Disney
Isigny Sur Mer is a town in Normandy that is renowned for its dairy farms. Like many people, Hughes Suhard and his son Robert joined William in his invasion of England. After he won the battle of Hastings, William acknowledged the help of Hughes and Robert and made them the lords of Isigny Sur Mer. However, Hughes and Robert chose to stay back in England and settled there. So they came to be known by their village name, i.e., Robert d'Isigny (Robert from Isigny). However, as several years went by, the name d'Isigny became Disney in English. This is how Walt Disney's family name originated.
In the seventeenth century, a part of the Disney family moved from England to Ireland. Arundel Elias Disney, Walt Disney's great grandfather, was born into this family two hundred years later. In 1834, Arundel and his brother Robert took their families and traveled to the USA. Even though their original plan was to stay in the USA, Arundel's family moved to Canada and settled there. There, Arundel set up a saw- and flour mill, which remained a local favorite for several years. In 1878, Arundel's son, Kepple, moved to California with his two sons in the hopes of finding gold. However, he ended up buying 200 acres of land instead. One of his sons who moved to the USA with him was Elias Charles Disney.
Elias initially worked on his father's farm. Then, in 1884, he left the farm to find another job. Throughout his life, he tried various jobs, like carpentry, farming, and building, and even tried to become a businessman. But he found little success in his ventures. In 1888, he married Flora Call, who was the daughter of his father's neighbor. They had five children. After their marriage, they moved to Chicago. In a few years, Elias became an active building contractor who built and sold houses. In 1900, he built the Saint Paul Congregational Church. Soon, he became an active member and trustee of this church while his wife became its treasurer. He also became a close friend of the church's preacher Rev. Walter Robinson Parr. Due to the love and respect for the preacher, Elias named his fourth son, Walter Elias Disney, after him.
Early life
Walter Elias Disney was born on December 5th, 1901, in Chicago. He was the fourth son of his parents Elias Charles Disney and Flora Call. His father was working as a building contractor when Walt was born. But when he was four years old, his father's brother bought a farm in Marceline, Missouri. So, his father, who hoped to make profits by farming, moved his family to the city of Marceline. There, Walt started his schooling.
By the time he started school, Walt had developed a liking for drawing. When he was a kid, a neighbor paid Walt to draw his horse. This motivated him to improve his skills further. So, he started practicing by copying the cartoons in the newspapers his father bought. He also started painting with crayons and watercolors.
Growing up on his father's farm, Walt fell in love with the animals there. They were his friends and companions. Walt knew each of these animals by name. He even created stories about their adventures. A little piglet, which was named Skinny, even followed little Walt everywhere like a puppy.
But in a few years, Disney farm started failing, and Walt's father became seriously ill. So, Walt's father sold the farm. Little Walt wept inconsolably when his beloved farm animals were auctioned off.
After selling the farm, his family moved to Kansas City. There, using the money from the sale of the farm, his father purchased a newspaper delivery route to deliver newspapers. He had 700 customers who bought morning newspapers and 600 customers who bought evening and Sunday newspapers. So, he compelled his sons to help him deliver newspapers. Therefore, Walt and his brother Roy woke up at 04:30 am every day and delivered newspapers before going to school. After coming back from school, they delivered newspapers once again. The schedule was exhausting, and Walt often fell asleep in class. He even got low grades at school. Yet, he stuck to this schedule for almost six years.
Love for Drawing
But despite the hectic schedule and low school grades, Walt's love for drawing did not diminish. So, he started attending art courses in the Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design on Saturdays. He also started taking a correspondence course to study cartooning.
By 1917, his father sold the newspaper route and started working in the management of a company. So, he moved his family to Chicago. So, Walt moved to Chicago and started studying at the McKinley High school there. Walt hoped to become a newspaper cartoonist one day. So, he started taking photographs and drawing for the school paper. Meanwhile, he continued to study cartooning on the side.
Inspired by the success of his Laugh-O-Grams, and the success of Paul Terry's animated version of Aesop's Fables, the 19-year-old Walt Disney tried to do something more ambitious. He decided to create animated fairy tales. So, with the help of Rudy Ising, who later co-founded MGM and Warner Brothers, and other cartoonists, Walt started creating his first animated fairy tale. It took them six months to get it ready. Walt and his team made six of these animated fairy tales, which were seven minutes long. However, before any of these fairy tales could be released to the public, Disney's studio went bankrupt.
Walt Disney's First Failure
Walt Disney gave the distribution rights for these Laugh-O-Gram fairy tales to a company called Pictorial Clubs of Tennessee. The company promised to pay $11,100 for these six videos. But it never paid the money. So, by 1922, many of Walt's workers, working overtime and without pay, quit his company. Desperate to keep the company alive, Walt came up with a brilliant idea. Until then, films had been made by putting a cartoon character in a live-action scene. Walt inverted the idea and put a little girl, the four-year-old Virginia Davis, in a cartoon scene among cartoon figures.
This cartoon was based on Alice's adventures in Wonderland. So, Walt called the cartoon Alice in Cartoonland. Even though it was a brilliant and novel idea, it was not enough to save the company. Within a few weeks after making the twelve and a half minute movie, Alex in Cartoonland, the company went bankrupt. So, after his first failure, Walt moved to Hollywood, to help his brother recover from tuberculosis. He decided to work as a cinematographer there, since Hollywood was the center of the growing film industry in the USA. At that time, Walt was 21 years old.
After moving to Hollywood, Walt heard that a film distributor was looking to buy the rights of a cartoon series. So, he signed a contract with her for creating several Alice in Cartoonland episodes at $1,500 per episode. Now, Walt understood the potential of the Alice cartoons he made. So, Walt and his brother Roy created the Disney Brothers Studio, which was later renamed to Walt Disney Studio. Then, they signed a contract with the little girl Virginia Davis, who was acting as Alice in the series, for $100/month and convinced her family to move to Hollywood. After that, they persuaded Iwerks to join them too. So, with Roy as business manager, Walt and Iwerks started creating the cartoons.
Walt Disney Studios, Paris branch
Family life
In early 1925, Walt hired an artist called Lillian Bounds and started dating her. Soon, they liked each other and got married in July of that year. Walt was 24 years old at that time, and Lillian was 26. They had two daughters.
Introducing Mickey Mouse
From 1923 to 1927, Walt Disney and his studio mostly created Alice cartoons. Alice cartoons featured a real-life little girl who acted among cartoon characters.
By 1927, Walt Disney became tired of creating Alice cartoons and its mixed format. He decided to create a cartoon with only cartoon characters instead. By that time, the film distributor with whom Walt worked had married a film producer called Charles Mintz, who took over her cartoon distribution business. So, Walt started dealing with Mintz instead.
In 1927, Mintz asked Walt to create a cartoon to rival 'Felix the Cat,' the popular cartoon of that time. Walt responded by creating 'Oswald, the Lucky Rabbit.' Mintz distributed the new cartoon through Universal Pictures.
Walt Disney was continuously looking to improve his cartoons. So, after creating 27 episodes of 'Oswald, the Lucky Rabbit,' Walt's production costs began to increase. Therefore, he traveled with his wife Lillian to New York to meet Mintz and renegotiate the cost for each episode. However, instead of increasing the cost for each episode, Mintz reduced it even further. He also owned the copyright for 'Oswald, the Lucky Rabbit.' Moreover, without Walt's knowledge, Mintz had bought off many of Walt's employees. So, he pressured Walt to continue working at the reduced cost. If Walt declined, Mintz threatened to form his own team using Walt's employees to continue creating the cartoon. Shocked and saddened by the betrayal, Walt refused the offer and returned to Hollywood.
On his way back, Disney and his wife boarded a train for the ride back. In his depressed state, Walt sketched a character called Mortimer Mouse. His wife liked the sketch, but not the name. So, she suggested the name Mickey Mouse. Walt liked the name. So, he immediately copyrighted Mickey Mouse. Iwerks, who had decided to stay with Walt instead of going with Mintz, refined the sketch. Together, they started creating Mickey Mouse cartoons. However, they couldn't find a distributor for their new cartoon.
Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon with soundtracks, became an instant hit. But the real skill of Walt Disney was to give his cartoon characters real-life, moral characteristics. Therefore, Steamboat Willie captured the attention and imagination of the viewers easily and so, became very popular. Steamboat Willie got rave reviews. Everyone who watched it loved Mickey Mouse. This increased the reputation of Walt Disney Studio.
Silly Symphonies
Motivated by the success of Steamboat Willie, Walt created 'Silly Symphonies' in 1929. Silly Symphonies is a series of cartoons that involved characters other than Mickey Mouse, like Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto, etc.
Both the Mickey Mouse cartoons and the Silly Symphonies cartoons were extremely successful. However, the costs started to increase as Walt strived to continuously improve them. So, Walt asked Iwerks to sketch only the characters in the cartoons and let the less expensive assistants paint the background. He also met Pat Powers for an increase in payments for his cartoons. Pat Powers, however, responded by canceling the partnership with Walt and employing Iwerks to work for him. So, Walt Disney was heartbroken and felt betrayed once again. Since Pat Powers was no more a distributor for Walt Disney Studios, Walt signed up Columbia Pictures for the distribution. Under their distribution, Walt's cartoons were distributed internationally and became famous globally.
In 1931, a new technique for introducing color in films, called Technicolor, became famous. Until then, most cartoons were filmed in Black and White. So, when the new technique came out, Walt made a deal for exclusive rights of the technique for two years. The new Silly Symphony cartoon that came out that year in color won the academy awards in the best short subject category in 1932. The following year, Walt Disney Studio released the next cartoon in the Silly Symphony series, The Little Pigs. It won an academy award in the best short subject category too.
Feature-length cartoons
Riding high on the success of his Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony cartoon series, Walt Disney embarked on his most ambitious project ever. He decided to create feature-length cartoons. Everyone at that time, including his own wife and his brother Roy, was against Walt's idea. Until then, cartoons were mostly under ten minutes long. So, nobody believed that people would sit and watch a feature-length cartoon for an hour.
Walt Disney was a man who was always eager to experiment. Moreover, he believed that feature-length cartoons would be more profitable than the shorts he was creating until then. So, despite the stark opposition, Walt set about creating the first feature-length cartoon, 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.'
Walt Disney introducing his seven dwarfs - By Unknown author - Screenshot from public domain movie's trailer., Public Domain, Link
Walt Disney invested heavily in the movie. He paid his animators to take courses in a professional art institute. He even brought animals into the studio so that his animators could look at them and learn to create realistic movements of animals in animation. Finally, after four years and $1.5 million, the movie was ready in 1937. $1.5 million was a massive amount at that time. Moreover, due to the Great Depression, people were reluctant to spend any money. So, people dubbed 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' Disney's folly or stupidity. Yet, outwitting everyone's expectations, the movie became a big box-office hit. Despite the Great Depression and people's reluctance to spend money, the movie amassed $416 million.
The success of 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' did not just change the future of Walt Disney studio. It gave rise to the golden age of animation. It charmed millions of viewers and created a new entertainment field.
Labor Strikes
After the success of his first feature-length cartoon, Walt produced more feature-length cartoons in the following years. However, due to the start of the second world war, people became less inclined to visit theaters. So, Walt's new cartoons, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi, were not as successful as their predecessor. Moreover, due to the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Walt had built a big studio employing about 1000 workers. So, Walt Disney Studio ran into debt.
To recover the company from debt, Walt offered shares of his company. It was enough to save his company. However, it was not the last of the problems that Walt would face.
Around 1940, workers of movie studios started forming unions, demanding higher wages and better working conditions. Walt, however, believed that this was the work of communists who had infiltrated his company. So, he was against these unions. However, this led to heated meetings and numerous strikes. Finally, tired of fighting anymore, Walt gave in, and hence, Walt Disney Studio became unionized.
World War II
While the onset of World War II created huge problems for Walt Disney, it also brought new opportunities. As Walt Disney Studio was a leading cartoon maker, the US government asked for Walt's help to create training films for the millions of men it was sending overseas to fight. Walt obliged and created almost 68 hours of training material using his popular cartoon characters.
Major films and television productions
After the second world war ended, Walt Disney resumed creating feature-length cartoons. Walt's first feature-length animation after eight years, Cinderella that came in 1950, was a big hit. Made with a budget of $2.9 million, it earned $263 million. After its success, Walt Disney released more feature-length animations like Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan, in the following years.
In the 1950s, Walt also started focusing on producing live-action movies like 'The Treasure Island.' So, he began focusing less on animation.
Disneyland
Walt Disney had always wanted to build theme park. But he got serious about it after World War 2. He would take his daughters out every Saturday when they were little. He used to take them to a park. Walt would sit on a bench and eat peanuts while his daughters rode the merry-go-round there. While sitting there alone and looking at his daughters, Walt decided to build a theme park where both parents and their children can have fun.
In the 1950s, he started getting serious about it and visiting other amusement parks, carnivals and fairs to gather ideas. Walt Disney had an elaborate plan for the new theme park, which he called Disneyland.
According to Walt's plan, Disneyland would have an entrance gate to the main street. This main street would resemble the city Marceline, where the farm Walt grew up was located. When one takes a walk through the main street, one would reach Cinderella's castle. Then, the path would branch off to four different lands. These four lands are - Adventure Land, which resembles the remote jungles of Africa, South America, & Asia; Frontier Land, which resembles the nineteenth-century America that was home to cowboys, saloons, etc.; Fantasy Land, which contains a castle and characters from Disney cartoons; Tomorrow Land, which has attractions that portray the views from the future.
Walt Disney wanted to make the Theme Park clean and innovative. He also wanted to make it the happiest place on earth by bringing the characters from his cartoons alive.
But he did not want the shareholders of the Walt Disney Studio to complain if the venture failed. So, he set up a separate funding body for the Theme park. Besides using his personal wealth, he obtained a part of the funding from the Bank of America. American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), a television network, provided an investment of $500,000 in return for Walt Disney Studio doing a weekly television series. These weekly television shows eventually became famous. It also offered a loan of $4.5 million.
Thus, by obtaining funds from several sources, Walt finished the construction of Disneyland in one year. It had cost him $17 million. The ABC telecast the opening of Disneyland. The first day after opening was catastrophic since rides broke down, food stalls ran out of food, and a gas leak led to the temporary closing of some areas. Yet, despite all these initial problems, the guests loved Disneyland. By the end of one year, almost 3.6 million visitors had visited Disneyland. Today, Disneyland has branches all over the world.
Walt Disney World
Following the success of Disneyland, Walt Disney planned to build another theme park that would be five times bigger. However, before the project could be completed, Walt Disney died. It would only be completed only five years after his death.
Death
In 1966, Walt was diagnosed with lung cancer. So, one of his lungs was removed. After several chemotherapy sessions, Walt collapsed in his home. So, he was admitted to a hospital, where he died on December 15th, 1966.
Interesting Facts about Walt Disney
1. Walt Disney had won more academy awards than anyone else. He has won 22 academy awards till now.
2. Most of the Mickey mouse cartoons were drawn by his cartoonists.
3. Walt's favorite character was Goofy.
4. Walt loved trains. So, he built a lot of trains in his theme parks.
5. Walt gave his housekeeper shares of his company every year for Christmas. By the time she died, these shares had added up to $9 million.
6. When he built Disneyland, Walt built a secret apartment there for his own use.
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