Walt Disney

Walter Elias Disney was born on December 5, 1901, in Chicago, Illinois, the fourth son of Elias Disney, a carpenter and building contractor of Irish-Canadian descent, and Flora Call Disney, a former schoolteacher ^[1]. In 1906 the family moved to a farm near Marceline, Missouri, a small railroad town that Walt later described as the happiest setting of his childhood. He began drawing there, sketching farm animals and selling small pictures to neighbors ^[2].

After the farm failed, the Disneys relocated to Kansas City in 1911, where Elias bought a newspaper delivery route. Walt and his brother Roy rose before dawn to deliver papers, a grind that Walt recalled with little fondness. He took Saturday classes at the Kansas City Art Institute and, after the family moved back to Chicago in 1917, studied cartooning at night while attending McKinley High School, where he drew for the school paper ^[1].

Too young for military service in the First World War, the sixteen-year-old altered his birth certificate to join the American Red Cross Ambulance Corps. He arrived in France after the armistice and spent most of 1919 driving trucks and decorating them with cartoons before returning home determined to make a living from art ^[2].

Back in Kansas City, Disney worked briefly at a commercial art studio, where he met the Dutch-born artist Ub Iwerks, a draftsman whose technical gifts would prove essential to his career. The two joined the Kansas City Film Ad Company, making crude animated advertisements, and Disney soon started his own venture, Laugh-O-gram Films, producing short animated fairy tales ^[3]. The company went bankrupt in 1923, and Disney left for Hollywood with a reel of film and little money.

In California he partnered with his brother Roy O. Disney, who managed finances for the rest of Walt's life. Their Disney Brothers Studio, later renamed the Walt Disney Studio, found steady work with the Alice Comedies, shorts combining a live-action girl with animated characters. A follow-up series starring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit succeeded until 1928, when distributor Charles Mintz seized the character's rights and hired away most of Disney's animators ^[3].

The loss of Oswald forced a reinvention. Working with Iwerks, Disney developed a new character, a cheerful mouse eventually named Mickey Mouse. Two silent Mickey shorts failed to find a distributor, but the third, Steamboat Willie, opened in New York on November 18, 1928, with synchronized sound, and it made the character an immediate sensation ^[4]. Disney himself supplied Mickey's voice for nearly two decades.

Among the most consequential Walt Disney achievements was his insistence on treating animation as an art capable of carrying a full evening's entertainment. Through the Silly Symphonies series of the 1930s his studio pioneered the use of three-strip Technicolor in cartoons, beginning with Flowers and Trees in 1932, which won the first Academy Award ever given for an animated short ^[4]. That same ceremony brought Disney an honorary Oscar for creating Mickey Mouse.

Hollywood insiders called his next gamble folly. Disney spent roughly four years and well over a million dollars, an enormous sum during the Depression, producing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. When it premiered in December 1937, the first feature-length cel-animated film made in the United States became a critical and commercial triumph, earning more than any American film released to that point in the sound era ^[5]. Its profits financed a new studio campus in Burbank and a run of ambitious features: Pinocchio and Fantasia in 1940, Dumbo in 1941, and Bambi in 1942.

The war years brought strain, including a bitter animators' strike in 1941 and the studio's conversion to producing training and propaganda films for the United States government ^[3]. Recovery came slowly, then decisively, with Cinderella in 1950, the studio's first fully live-action feature, Treasure Island, that same year, and a bold move into television. By the time of his death, Disney had won 22 competitive Academy Awards from 59 nominations, a record no individual has matched ^[1].

His most personal project opened on July 17, 1955, in Anaheim, California. Disneyland, financed partly through a television deal with the ABC network, replaced the seedy amusement parks Disney disliked with a clean, themed environment organized around storytelling. It drew a million visitors within seven weeks and created an entirely new industry ^[5].

In July 1925 Disney married Lillian Bounds, an ink artist at his studio, in Lewiston, Idaho, her home state. The couple had a daughter, Diane, born in 1933, and adopted a second daughter, Sharon, in 1936 ^[2]. Lillian later recalled talking her husband out of naming his new mouse character Mortimer, suggesting Mickey instead.

Disney's private enthusiasms often fed his professional work. He was a devoted railroad hobbyist who built the Carolwood Pacific, a rideable one-eighth scale railroad, in the backyard of his Holmby Hills home; historians of the parks trace part of Disneyland's inspiration to that miniature line ^[6]. He was also a heavy smoker for most of his adult life, a habit his family and colleagues noted with concern.

Colleagues described a driven, sometimes exacting boss who reserved his warmth for storytelling sessions, where he acted out entire plots for his animators. He testified as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, a decision that has drawn scrutiny from later biographers examining his politics ^[3].

The 1960s brought some of the studio's biggest successes. Mary Poppins, released in 1964, blended live action with animation, earned thirteen Academy Award nominations, and won five, including Best Actress for Julie Andrews ^[5]. At the 1964-65 New York World's Fair, Disney's designers, whom he called Imagineers, introduced Audio-Animatronics figures in attractions such as Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln and It's a Small World, technology soon transplanted to Disneyland ^[6].

Disney's final obsession was a vast tract of central Florida swampland his company quietly assembled near Orlando, more than 27,000 acres in all. He announced the Florida Project in November 1965, envisioning not just a larger park but an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, a planned city he intended to build and continually update ^[6].

He never saw it built. In November 1966 doctors removed a cancerous tumor along with his left lung, and his health collapsed quickly. Walt Disney died of complications from lung cancer at St. Joseph Hospital in Burbank on December 15, 1966, ten days after his sixty-fifth birthday ^[1]. Roy Disney postponed retirement to complete the Florida resort, which opened in 1971 as Walt Disney World.

Few careers in entertainment cast a longer shadow. The company Disney co-founded with his brother grew into one of the largest media enterprises on earth, and characters he introduced remain commercially active nearly a century later. Basic Walt Disney facts still astonish: a record haul of Academy Awards, the first American animated feature, the first modern theme park, and an early, shrewd embrace of television when other film executives feared it ^[1].

His reputation has been debated as vigorously as it has been celebrated. Biographers such as Neal Gabler have weighed the charge that Disney took public credit for the work of hundreds of artists against the evidence of his genuine editorial gifts as a story editor and producer who rarely animated after the 1920s ^[3]. Persistent myths, including the tale that his body was cryogenically frozen, have no factual basis; he was cremated and interred at Forest Lawn in Glendale ^[2].

Institutions keep his memory in active circulation. The Walt Disney Family Museum, opened by his heirs in San Francisco's Presidio in 2009, documents his life with original artwork and artifacts ^[7]. The California Institute of the Arts, which he helped establish and endow, continues to train animators, and the vocabulary he introduced, from feature animation to themed design, remains the grammar of popular entertainment worldwide.