The success story of artist turned entrepreneur, Walt Disney, mirrors the early period of growth of the motion picture entertainment industry. He made it to the top of his profession, but he began with a very humble, hard-working start. All along the way there were setbacks, bankruptcies, difficulties with distributors, and people turning their backs on him when the going was a little rough. His contributions to our culture are many. Here’s how it all came to pass.
The Early Artist: Walt Disney spent much of the growing-up years of his life between two cities: Chicago, Illinois, and Kansas City, Missouri. He had in interest in drawing from an early age, and first received compensation for his work as a child by drawing the horse of a retired doctor. He was impressed by the cartoons of Ryan Walker, an artist for the newspaper Appeal to Reason, and developed his drawing skills along with crayons and watercolors by practicing drawing those cartoons. In Kansas City, he attended Benton Grammar School where he later credited the school and his favorite teacher, Daisy Beck, for encouraging his interests in drawing cartoons and storytelling. In high school in Chicago, he became the cartoonist for the school newspaper, and attended art classes during off hours. After a stint driving ambulances for the Red Cross in post WWI Europe, he returned to Kansas City where he worked as an apprentice artist at the Pesmen-Rubin Commercial Arts Studio drawing illustrations for advertisements—all before he reached age 20.
The Early Entrepreneur: He became friends with another artist, Ub Iwerks, at Pesmen-Rubin; and when the firm’s business declined in 1920, they both were laid off. After trying their own hand at the commercial art business, they both went to work for the Kansas City Film Ad Company that produced film commercials using the cutout animation technique. Disney became interested in animation and pursued it at home on his own time with books and a camera. He learned that the cutout animation technique involved using characters, props, and backgrounds cut from paper or other materials, in stop-motion form. He would make a still photo of the layout and then change it slightly to make the next photo show a slight movement. The rapid succession of displaying a series of the photos tended to make the characters move about in a motion picture. He further learned that the cell animation method by which each frame was drawn by hand had more promise in making animated motion pictures. With Fred Harman, another artist from the Kansas City Film Ad Company, he formed his own studio and started making animated short cartoons, known as Laugh O Grams, for the local movie theater. His longest short feature, Alice’s Wonderland, was a 12 ½ minute film that combined live action with animation. The Laugh-O-Grams were popular, but did not generate very much revenue, and after two years, the studio closed in bankruptcy. Undaunted, he moved to Hollywood where his older brother Roy was convalescing from a bout of Tuberculosis. He continued making short films in the Alice’s Wonderland series but found that marketing them was quite difficult. They were not by themselves a commercial success, but did attract the interest of Margaret Winkler, the founder of the company that later became Screen Gems. Winkler signed a contract with Disney to produce a series of short films in the Alice’s Wonderland genre with options on two additional series. To produce the series, Disney then formed a new company with Roy that eventually became The Walt Disney Company. The series showed a lot of promise, but it steered Disney away from full length feature animation films that he sought to develop. He then developed a new short-film animation character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, but he had a falling out with Winkler’s husband, Charles Mintz, who had taken over the distribution of Disney’s output. No only did Disney lose his rights to Oswald, but he lost most of his staff, retaining only his long-time friend, Iwerks.
The Pioneer of Animation: While traveling by train back to Los Angeles from a business trip to New York in 1928, Disney thought up a new character to replace Oswald in his short-films. This character was later named Mickey Mouse, and it became the mainstay of his entire enterprise throughout his life to this day. It took a few tries, but Mickey Mouse finally got widespread acceptance with the short-film, Steamboat Willie, that featured synchronized sound, becoming the first cartoon to do so. Disney then signed a contract with Pat Powers to use the “Powers Cinephone” recording system to synchronize the sound track to the Mickey Mouse cartoon series and distribute them. The contract was expanded to include another series using the Powers Cinephone that became known as “Silly Symphonies.” Both series became widely successful, but the cost to produce them with the cell animation method was driving down the studio’s profitability. To reduce costs Disney attempted to install the inbetweening pose animation method or “tweening” that greatly reduced the number of frames that were individually painted from scratch. With tweening the frames in between two key frames would be created by assistant artists and would show only the character or prop change between the two key frames. This reduced by at least half the number of key frames the artist had to draw. The tweening process helped, but both Walt and Roy Disney thought that they should be better compensated and sought out a new contract with Powers in 1930. Not only did Powers refuse to renegotiate the contract, he ended the existing agreement and wound up hiring Iwerks, Disney’s long-time friend and leading artist, away from him. In picking up the pieces of the Powers Cinephone contract, Disney took the Mickey Mouse series that was growing in worldwide popularity over to Columbia pictures. He negotiated another deal with United Artists for the Silly Symphonies Series that included exclusive usage of the Technicolor three-strip process for a period of three years. The new three-strip process was actually the fourth rendition of Technicolor’s color film processing system first proposed in 1924, but perfected by 1929. Disney was one of the early users of the process, and also one of the first studios to upgrade to the successive exposure process in 1937. To further maintain the concept of telling emotionally gripping stories to interest his audience, Disney separated the animators from writing the story, handing that task to storyboard artists who would plot the films away from those who developed them.
The Film Producer: In spite of his success with it, Disney became dissatisfied with just making cartoons that played in theaters before the feature film, and sought to achieve his goal of making a full-length animated feature. He then set out to make Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs based on an 1812 German fairy tale entitled Snow White. It took nearly four years to complete and ran 300% over budget, but the naysayers disappeared when the production became an instant success. It’s first year gross made Snow White the most financially successful sound film to that date (1937). During this period his animators developed a method that would add depth perception to the background of his animated works. The system, known as multiplane camera, used drawings on glass that lent the perception of depth to the product and could be moved to increase or decrease the depth as the camera moved through the scene. Snow White’s success provided the studio with its best era of animated film production, referred to as the “The Golden Age of Animation” by the Walt Disney Family Museum. As World War II began in Europe in 1939, Disney’s international audience declined and so did his studio’s revenues. When the U.S. entered the war in 1941, Disney formed a Training Films Unit within the studio that produced instructional films for the military-industrial complex that helped prosecute the war effort. He also produced short-films featuring Donald Duck to help the government sell war bonds. But the military films did not make a profit for the studio, and the company’s debt began to climb as the few feature films it did produce likewise did not make much money. In the late 1940’s after the war ended, Disney found that the competition for cartoons had increased dramatically in other major studios, and resultingly he dialed back his own production of them. But the banks stuck with him, and then in the early 1950’s he produced Cinderella that became another smashing box office success. He also fazed into making full length non-animated feature films such as Treasure Island, Davy Crockett, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
The Theme Park Entrepreneur: As the studio grew Disney began to delegate more movie production to underlings and direct his energies more into live action films and other projects. In 1955 he opened Disneyland in Anaheim, California, and pioneered a weekly hour long, prime time TV show on a major network featuring his work, named Walt Disney’s Disneyland. The show was another huge success and led to other shows such as The Mickey Mouse Club that featured actors and dancers dressed up in costumes made famous by his cartoon characters. During this era that extended into the early 1960’s he also served as the chief designer for 1960 Winter Olympics. He developed four exhibits for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, all reinstalled in Disneyland. He announced plans for another theme park, Disney World in Florida. And of course he made dozens of widely acclaimed, full-length, feature films.
The Imprint of the Future: By the mid 1960’s the efforts and anxieties of his entire life’s work started to catch up with him. He was a heavy cigarette smoker owing to the many stresses of his level of creativity and his running a large business. In November, 1966, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. Treatment began immediately, but it was too late. He passed away on December 15, 1966, at the age of 65. But his work went on, and the Walt Disney Company today runs five theme parks, a cruise line, a major television network, a major sports TV network, and still makes top-quality, full-length, feature films. Keeping up with the times, the company is into streaming its products on the internet to even wider audiences than Walt could ever have imagined. For the 2023 fiscal year, the Walt Disney Company made $2.3 billion on Revenues of $88.9 billion, and had assets totaling $205.6 billion.
Conclusions: Disney received a record 59 Academy Award nominations and won the award a record 22 times. He was also nominated for three Golden Globe Awards and four Emmy Awards winning one Emmy. He won no fewer than six national awards from European and Latin American countries. The post mortem accolades sang virtually nothing but praises about Disney’s work and how it favorably impacted cultures in many parts of the world. His life experiences in the entertainment industry show how difficult it was in the earlier years for even highly talented entrepreneurs to become a success. I’ll always remember reading the headlines of my local newspaper in December, 16, 1966, that said “Walt Disney Dies, Entertained the World.” I was a young adult at the time, and reminisced at all the Disney entertainment I had enjoyed. It was the longest time I ever spent looking at a headline and pondering all that it meant.
Sources: Wikipedia, Walt Disney.