HOMAGE TO ARTIST WALTER ELIAS WALT DISNEY (/ˈdɪzni/;[2] December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) is an American business magnate, animator, cartoonist, producer, director, screenwriter, philanthropist, and voice actor. Being a major figure within the American animation industry and throughout the world, he is regarded as a cultural icon,[3] known for his influence and contributions to the field of entertainment during the 20th century. As a Hollywood business mogul, he, along with his brother Roy O. Disney, co-founded Walt Disney Productions, which became one of the major motion picture production companies in the world. The corporation is now known as The Walt Disney Company and had an annual revenue of approximately US$45 billion in the 2013 financial year.[4] As an animator and entrepreneur, Disney was particularly noted as a film producer and a popular showman, as well as an innovator in animation and theme park design. He and his staff created some of the worlds most iconic fictional characters, including Mickey Mouse, whose original voice was provided by Disney himself. During his lifetime, he received four honorary Academy Awards and won 22 Academy Awards from a total of 59 nominations, including a record of four in one year,[5] giving him more awards and nominations than any other individual in history. Disney also won seven Emmy Awards and gave his name to the Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resort theme parks in the U.S., as well as the international resorts like Tokyo Disney Resort, Disneyland Paris, and Hong Kong Disneyland. He died on December 15, 1966, from lung cancer in Burbank, California. A year later, construction of the Walt Disney World Resort began in Florida. His brother, Roy Disney, inaugurated the Magic Kingdom on October 1, 1971. Disney was born on December 5, 1901, at 2156 North Tripp Avenue in Chicagos Hermosa community area to Irish-Canadian father Elias Disney and Flora Call Disney, who was of German and English descent.[6] His great-grandfather, Arundel Elias Disney, had emigrated from Gowran, County Kilkenny, Ireland where he was born in 1801. Arundel Disney was a descendant of Robert dIsigny, a Frenchman who had travelled to England with William the Conqueror in 1066.[7] With the dIsigny name anglicized as Disney, the family settled in a village now known as Norton Disney, south of the city of Lincoln, in the county of Lincolnshire.[8] In 1878 Disneys father Elias had moved from Huron County, Ontario, Canada to the United States, at first seeking gold in California before finally settling down to farm with his parents near Ellis, Kansas,[9][10] until 1884. Elias married Flora Call on January 1, 1888, in Acron, Florida, just 40 miles north of where Walt Disney World would ultimately be developed.[11] The family moved to Chicago, Illinois in 1890,[12] hometown of Elias brother Robert,[12] who helped Elias financially for most of Walts early life.[12] In 1906, when Walt was four, Elias and his family moved to a farm in Marceline, Missouri,[13] where his brother Roy had recently purchased farmland.[13] In Marceline Disney developed his love for drawing[14] with one of the familys neighbors, a retired doctor named Doc Sherwood, paying him to draw pictures of Sherwoods horse, Rupert.[14] Elias was a subscriber to the Appeal to Reason newspaper and Walt copied the front-page cartoons of Ryan Walker.[10] His interest in trains also developed in Marceline, a town that owed its existence to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway which ran through it. Walt would put his ear to the tracks in anticipation of the coming train,[15] then try to spot his uncle, engineer Michael Martin, conducting the train. Walt attended the new Park School of Marceline in fall, 1909. He and his younger sister Ruth started school together. Before that he had no formal schooling.[16] The Disneys remained in Marceline for four years[17] before moving to Kansas City in 1911,[18] where Walt and his younger sister Ruth attended the Benton Grammar School at 3004 Benton Boulevard, close to his new home. Disney had completed the second grade at Marceline but had to repeat the grade at Kansas City.[19] At school he met Walter Pfeiffer, who came from a family of theatre aficionados and introduced Walt to the world of vaudeville and motion pictures. Before long, Walt was spending more time at the Pfeiffers than at home,[20] as well as attending Saturday courses at the Kansas City Art Institute,[21] On July 1, 1911, Elias purchased a newspaper delivery route for The Kansas City Star. It extended from the Twenty-seventh Street to the Thirty-first Street, and from Prospect Avenue to Indiana Avenue. Roy and Walt were put to work delivering the newspapers. The Disneys delivered the morning newspaper Kansas City Times to about 700 customers and the evening and Sunday Star to more than 600. The number of customers they had increased with time.[22] Walt woke up at 4:30 AM and worked delivering newspapers until the school bell rang. He resumed working the paper trail at 16:00 PM and continued to supper time. He found the work exhausting and often dozed in his desk. His grades suffered as a result. He continued working this schedule for more than six years.[22] TEENAGE YEARS In 1917 Elias acquired shares in the O-Zell jelly factory in Chicago and moved his family back to the city.[23] In the fall Disney began his freshman year at McKinley High School and took night courses at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts under the tutelage of artist and educator Louis Grell (1887–1960).[24] He became the cartoonist for the school newspaper, drawing patriotic topics on World War I. With a hope to join the army, Disney dropped out of high school at the age of sixteen, but was rejected for being underage.[25] After his rejection by the army, Disney and a friend decided to join the Red Cross.[26] He was soon sent to France for a year, where he drove an ambulance, but only after the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918.[27] Hoping to find work outside the Chicago O-Zell factory,[28] Walt moved back to Kansas City in 1919 to begin his artistic career.[29] He considered a career as an actor but decided he wanted to draw political caricatures or comic strips for a newspaper. When nobody wanted to hire him as either an artist or as an ambulance driver, his brother Roy, then working in a local bank, got Walt a temporary job through a bank colleague at the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio,[29] where he created advertisements for newspapers, magazines, and movie theaters.[30] At Pesmen-Rubin he met cartoonist Ubbe Iwerks[31] and, when their time at the studio expired, they decided to start their own commercial company together.[32] In January 1920, Disney and Iwerks formed a short-lived company called Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists. However, following a rough start, Disney left temporarily to earn money at the Kansas City Film Ad Company. He was soon joined by Iwerks, who was not able to run their business alone.[33] While working for the company, where he made commercials based on cutout animation, Disney became interested in animation and decided to become an animator.[34] The owner of the Ad Company, A.V. Cauger, allowed him to borrow a camera from work to experiment with at home. After reading the Edwin G. Lutz book Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development, Disney considered cel animation to be much more promising than the cutout animation he was doing for Cauger. He eventually decided to open his own animation business and recruited a fellow co-worker at the Ad Company, Fred Harman, as his first employee.[35] Disney and Harman then start creating cartoons called Laugh-O-Grams. They screened their cartoons at a local theater owned by Frank Newman, who was one of the most popular showman in Kansas City.[36] LAUGH-O-GRAM STUDIO Presented as Newman Laugh-O-Grams,[36] Disneys cartoons became widely popular in the Kansas City area.[37] Through their success, he was able to acquire his own studio, also called Laugh-O-Gram,[38] for which he hired a number of additional animators, including Fred Harmans brother Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising, and his close friend Ubbe Iwerks.[39] It was opened on May 18, 1922.[40] Unfortunately, studio profits were insufficient to cover the high salaries paid to employees. Unable to successfully manage money,[41] Disneys studio became loaded with debt and wound up bankrupt,[41][42] whereupon he decided to set up a studio in the movie industrys capital city, Hollywood, California.[43] FILM AND BUSINESS CAREER IN HOLLYWOOD Two months after their arrival in October, 1923,[44] Disney and his brother Roy pooled their money and set up a cartoon studio in Hollywood.[45] Virginia Davis, the live-action star of Alices Wonderland, and her family relocated from Kansas City to Hollywood at Disneys request, as did Iwerks and his family. This was the beginning of the Disney Brothers Studio, located on Hyperion Avenue in the Silver Lake district, where it remained until 1939. In 1925 Disney hired a young woman named Lillian Bounds to ink and paint celluloid. After a brief courtship, the pair married that same year, on July 25, 1925.[46] OSWALD THE LUCKY RABBIT By 1927 Charles Mintz had married Margaret Winkler and assumed control of her business. He then ordered a new, all-animated series to be put into production for distribution through Universal Pictures. The new series, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, was an almost instant success. Its main character, Oswald—drawn and created by Iwerks—became a popular figure. The Disney studio expanded and Walt re-hired Harman, Rudolph Ising, Carman Maxwell, and Friz Freleng from Kansas City. Disney went to New York in February 1928 to negotiate a higher fee per short. He was shocked when Mintz told him that not only did he want to reduce the fee he paid Disney per short but also that he had most of his main animators, including Harman, Ising, Maxwell, and Freleng—but not Iwerks, who refused to leave Disney—under contract and would start his own studio if Disney did not accept the reduced production budgets. Universal, not Disney, owned the Oswald trademark and could make the films without Walt. Disney declined Mintzs offer and as a result lost most of his animation staff, whereupon he found himself on his own again.[48] It subsequently took his company 78 years to get back the rights to the Oswald character when in 2006 the Walt Disney Company reacquired the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit from NBC Universal through a trade for longtime ABC sports commentator Al Michaels.[49] MICKEY MOUSE After losing the rights to Oswald, Disney felt the need to develop a new character to replace him, which was based on a mouse he had adopted as a pet while working in his Laugh-O-Gram studio in Kansas City.[50] Iwerks reworked the sketches made by Disney to make the character easier to animate, although Mickeys voice and personality were provided by Disney himself until 1947. In the words of one Disney employee, Ub designed Mickeys physical appearance, but Walt gave him his soul.[50] Besides Oswald and Mickey, a similar mouse-character is seen in the Alice Comedies, which featured Ike the Mouse. Moreover, the first Flip the Frog cartoon called Fiddlesticks showed a Mickey Mouse look-alike playing fiddle. The initial films were animated by Iwerks, with his name prominently featured on the title cards. Originally named Mortimer, the mouse was later renamed Mickey by Lillian Disney, who thought that the name Mortimer did not sound appealing.[51][52] Mortimer eventually became the name of Mickeys rival for Minnie—taller than his renowned adversary and speaking with a Brooklyn accent.[53] The first animated short to feature Mickey, Plane Crazy, was a silent film like all of Disneys previous works. After failing to find a distributor for the short and its follow-up, The Gallopin Gaucho, Disney created a Mickey cartoon with sound called Steamboat Willie. A businessman named Pat Powers provided Disney with both distribution and Cinephone, a sound-synchronization process. Steamboat Willie became an instant success.[54] Plane Crazy, The Galloping Gaucho, and all subsequent Mickey cartoons were released with soundtracks. After the release of Steamboat Willie, Disney successfully used sound in all of his subsequent cartoons, and Cinephone also became the new distributor for Disneys early sound cartoons.[55] Mickey soon eclipsed Felix the Cat as the worlds most popular cartoon character.[50] Mickeys popularity grew rapidly in the early 1930s.[50] SILLY SYMPHONIES Following in the footsteps of Mickey Mouse series, a series of musical shorts titled, Silly Symphonies, were released in 1929. The first, The Skeleton Dance, was entirely drawn and animated by Iwerks, who was also responsible for drawing the majority of cartoons released by Disney in 1928 and 1929. Although both series were successful, the Disney studio thought it was not receiving its rightful share of profits from Pat Powers.[56] In 1930 Disney signed a new distribution deal with Columbia Pictures. The original basis of the cartoons was their musical novelty, with the first Silly Symphony cartoons featuring scores by Carl Stalling.[57] Iwerks was soon lured by Powers into opening his own studio with an exclusive contract, while Stalling left Disney to join Iwerks.[58] Iwerks launched his Flip the Frog series with the first voiced color cartoon Fiddlesticks, filmed in two-strip Technicolor. Iwerks also created two other cartoon series, Willie Whopper and the Comicolor. In 1936 Iwerks shut down his studio in order to work on various projects dealing with animation technology. He returned to Disney in 1940 and go on to pioneer a number of film processes and specialized animation technologies in the studios research and development department. By 1932, although Mickey Mouse had become a relatively popular cinema character, Silly Symphonies was not as successful. The same year also saw competition increase as Max Fleischers flapper cartoon character, Betty Boop, gained popularity among theater audiences.[59] Fleischer, considered Disneys main rival in the 1930s,[60] was also the father of Richard Fleischer, whom Disney would later hire to direct his 1954 film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Meanwhile, on April 13, 1931, Columbia Pictures dropped the distribution of Disney cartoons to be replaced by United Artists.[61] In late 1932, Herbert Kalmus, who had just completed work on the first three-strip technicolor camera,[62] approached Walt and convinced him to reshoot the black and white Flowers and Trees in three-strip Technicolor.[63] Flowers and Trees would go on to be a phenomenal success and would also win the first Academy Award for Best Short Subject: Cartoons in 1932. After the release of Flowers and Trees, all subsequent Silly Symphony cartoons were in color. Disney was also able to negotiate a two-year deal with Technicolor, giving him the sole right to use their three-strip process,[64][65] a period eventually extended to five years.[57] Through Silly Symphonies, Disney also created his most successful cartoon short of all time, The Three Little Pigs (1933).[66] The cartoon ran in theaters for many months, featuring the hit song that became the anthem of the Great Depression, Whos Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf.[67] FIRST ACADEMY AWARD AND SUBSEQUENT SPIN-OFFS On November 18, 1932, Disney received a special Academy Award for the creation of Mickey Mouse.[68] The series, which switched to color in 1935, soon launched spin-offs for supporting characters such as Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto. Of all Mickeys partners, Donald Duck, who first teamed up with Mickey in the 1934 cartoon, Orphans Benefit, was arguably the most popular, going on to become Disneys second most successful cartoon character of all time.[69 HOPE YOU LIKE IT ... ALL BEST DARIO
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