Walt Disney Essay

Kelly Latham

BDS 102

Walt Disney Essay

April 25, 2012

Walter Elias Disney was born on December 5, 1901 in Chicago to Elias and Flora Disney.  Walt had three older brothers, Herbert, Raymond, and Roy, and a younger sister, Ruth.  In 1906, the Disneys moved to Marceline, Missouri and then to Kansas City in 1910.  Walt enrolled in art classes at the Kansas City Art Institute.  In 1917, the family back to Chicago where Walt started attending McKinley High School, and began to put drawings in the school paper.  After high school, Walt forged his age on an ambulance driver form for WWI and was stationed in France.  

In 1919, Walt returned from the war and moved to Kansas City to pursue  a career as a commercial artist.  He worked for ‘Kansas City Film Ad’, a company creating  animations for movie theater commercials.  After learning about animation, Walt made enough money to start his own animation studio, “Laugh-O-Grams”.  When this animation studio went bankrupt, he left for Hollywood.  Walt and his brother Roy started the Disney Brother’s Studio.  Using what Walt had left from a Kansas City project, the Disney brothers found a distributer in New York that wanted shorts based upon Alice’s Wonderland.  The Alice shorts were a success, but focus shifted from live-action to animation.  The distributor then ordered an animated series from Disney called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.  When Walt asked the distributor for higher pay per short, he ended up loosing most of his staff due to a disagreement and Disney not owning the right to Oswald.  

Walt, needing a new character, created Mickey Mouse.  The Mickey cartoons started to be distributed, and then had soundtracks added.  They were the first animations with sound and took over the animation world.  Following the Mickey Mouse series were less successful musical shorts.  Walt was then offered the option of reshooting an unsuccessful black and white strip in three-strip Technicolor, making it a huge success.  

In 1934, Walt began planning the full-length feature of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.  The project was seen as a downfall for the Disney Studio, but Walt pursued it.  The film went into full production from 1934 to 1937.  Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first animated feature in America made in Technicolor, received a standing ovation at its premier.  Thanks to the success of Snow White, Walt was able to rebuild Disney Studios and create Pinocchio and Fantasia and a series of shorts of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto.  During World War II, the Disney Studio was contracted to create videos for the government, and it also released Bambi.  After the war, Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland and collections of cartoon shorts for before movies were released, but Mickey’s popularity faded.  

In the late 1940s, Disney began sketches of theme parks, and Disneyland officially opened on July 18, 1955.  After Disneyland opened, the studio began working on live-action films such as Treasure Island and The Parent Trap, and Mickey Mouse Club debuted in 1955.   Disney led the way in animation development with Lady and the Tramp, the first animated film in CinemaScope, Sleeping Beauty, the first animated film in Super Technirama 70mm, and One Hundred and One Dalmatians, the first animated features film to use Xerox cels.  In 1964, plans for Disney World developed.  

On December 15, 1966, through a combination of medical problems, Walt Disney collapsed in his home and died at St. Joseph’s Hospital.  After his death, his brother, Roy Disney, continued the plans for Disney World, but renamed it Walt Disney World in honor of his brother.  The final animated film Walt played an active roll in was The Jungle Book, released in 1967.

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Works Cited

Burnes, Brian, Robert W. Butler, and Dan Viets. Walt Disney's Missouri, The Roots of a Creative Genius. Ed. Donna Martin. Kansas City, MO: Kansas City Star, 2002. Walt Disney's Missouri: The Roots of a Creative Genius: Brian Burnes, Dan Viets, Robert W. Butler: 9780971708068: Amazon.com: Books. Web. 05 May 2012. <http://www.amazon.com/Walt-Disneys-Missouri-Creative-Genius/dp/0971708061>.

Finch, Christopher. The Art of Walt Disney: From Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdoms. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1975. Print.

"Topic Page:." Disney, Walt (1901-1966). Web. 05 May 2012. <http://www.credoreference.com/topic/disney_walt_er_1901_1966>.

"Walt Disney." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 05 May 2012. Web. 05 May 2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney>.