Walt Disney
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| Walt Disney |
Walter Elias "Walt" Disney (December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) was an American entrepreneur, cartoonist, animator, voice actor, and film producer. He was a prominent figure within the American animation industry and throughout the world, and is regarded as a cultural icon,known for his influence and contributions to entertainment during the 20th century. As a Hollywood business mogul, he and his brother Roy O. Disney co-founded The Walt Disney Company.
As an animator and entrepreneur, Disney was particularly noted as a filmmaker and a popular showman, as well as an innovator in animation and theme park design. He and his staff created numerous famous fictional characters including Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy. Disney himself was the original voice for Mickey. During his lifetime, he won 22 Academy Awards and received four honorary Academy Awards from a total of 59 nominations, including a record of four in one year,giving him more Oscar 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 US, as well as the international resorts Tokyo Disney Resort, Disneyland Paris, Hong Kong Disneyland, and Shanghai Disney Resort. Disney died from lung cancer on December 15, 1966 in Burbank, California. He left behind a vast legacy, including numerous animated shorts and feature films produced during his lifetime; the company, parks, and animation studio that bear his name; and the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).
Disney was born on December 5, 1901 at 2156 North Tripp Avenue in Chicago's Hermosa community area to Elias Charles Disney, who was Irish-Canadian, and Flora Call Disney, who was of German and English descent.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 d'Isigny, a Frenchman who had travelled to England with William the Conqueror in 1066.The family anglicized the d'Isigny name to "Disney" and settled in the English village now known as Norton Disney, south of the city of Lincoln, in the county of Lincolnshire.
In 1878, Disney's father Elias Charles Disney 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 until 1884. Elias married Flora Call on January 1, 1888 in Acron, Florida, just 40 miles north of where Walt Disney World was later developed.The family moved to Chicago, Illinois in 1890, hometown of Elias' brother Robert, who helped Elias financially for most of Walt's early life.In 1906, when Walt was four, Elias and his family moved to a farm in Marceline, Missouri where his elder brother Roy had recently purchased farmland.In Marceline, Disney developed his love for drawing with one of the family's neighbors, a retired doctor named "Doc" Sherwood, who paid him to draw pictures of Sherwood's horse Rupert.Elias was a subscriber to the Appeal to Reason newspaper and Walt copied the front-page cartoons of Ryan Walker.His interest in trains originated in Marceline, as well. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway passed near the neighbourhood, and Walt and Roy would run to a clearing of high ground when they heard the train whistle. If their uncle Mike Martin was the engineer he would wave and produce a long whistle, followed by two short ones. That functioned as a signal to the brothers.
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.The Disneys remained in Marceline for four years, until having to sell their farm on November 28, 1910. At that time, Walt's elder brothers Herbert and Ray had been fed up with the constant work and little or no spending money, and they ran away in fall 1906.Afterwards, the family moved to Kansas City in 1911, where Walt and 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.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,as well as attending Saturday courses at the Kansas City Art Institute,
On July 1, 1911, Elias purchased a newspaper delivery route for The Kansas City Star. It extended from Twenty-seventh Street to 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, and the number of customers increased with time. Walt woke up at 4:30 AM and worked delivering newspapers until the school bell rang. He resumed working the paper trail at 4PM and continued to supper time. He found the work exhausting and often received poor grades from dozing off in class. He continued his paper routine for more than six years.
In 1917, Elias acquired shares in the O-Zell jelly factory in Chicago and moved his family back to the city.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).He became the cartoonist for the school newspaper, drawing patriotic topics on World War I. Disney dropped out of high school at the age of sixteen with a hope to join the army, but he was rejected for being under-age.Afterwards, Disney and a friend joined the Red Cross.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.
Start of animation career: 1920–37
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.Disney made commercials based on cutout animation at the Film Ad company; he became interested in animation and decided to become an animator.The company's owner A.V. Cauger allowed him to borrow a camera from work to experiment with at home. Disney read the Edwin G. Lutz book Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development, then considered cel animation to be much more promising than the cutout animation that he was doing for Cauger. He eventually decided to open his own animation business and recruited Ad Company co-worker Fred Harman as his first employee.Disney and Harman then started creating cartoons called Laugh-O-Grams.Disney studied Aesop's Fables as a model. The first six of the new Laugh-O-Grams were modernized fairy tales.They screened their cartoons at a local theater owned by Frank Newman, who was one of the most popular "showmen" in Kansas City.
Alice Comedies
Disney and Roy needed to find a distributor for Walt's new Alice Comedies, which he had started making while in Kansas City but never got to distribute.Disney sent an unfinished print to New York distributor Margaret Winkler, who promptly wrote back to him that she was keen on a distribution deal for more live-action/animated shorts based upon Alice's Wonderland.Walt did the animation himself and directed the live-action scenes, while Roy took on the unfamiliar role of cameraman, photographing both the animation and the live action. The first of the new Alice Comedies was Alice's Day at Sea, delivered on December 26, 1923, and the Disney Brothers studio received their first earnings of $1,500. The new series Alice Comedies proved reasonably successful. It featured Virginia Davis, with other child actresses assuming the role later.The series lost popularity by the time that it ended in 1927.Historian J.B. Kaufman said that its focus was more on the animated characters (notably Julius the Cat) than on the live-action Alice, while its idea had exhausted itself.
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit
In 1926, producer Charles Mintz ordered a new, all-animated series to be put into production for distribution through Universal Pictures, and signed Disney's studio to produce it.Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was an almost instant success, and was praised as "exceptionally clever" and showing "fine cartoon ingenuity". Its main character was created and drawn by Iwerks and became a popular figure, with high merchandise performance.
In February 1928, Disney went to New York to negotiate a higher fee for producing the Oswald series. He was shocked when Mintz proposed reducing Disney's compensation. Furthermore, most of Disney's animators were under contract to Mintz, including Harman, Ising, Carman Maxwell, and Friz Freleng, and Universal owned the Oswald trademark. Mintz threatened to start his own studio and produce the series himself if Disney refused to accept the reductions. Disney declined Mintz's ultimatum, lost most of his animation staff—except Iwerks, who refused to switch allegiances—and found himself on his own again.
In 2006, the Walt Disney Company finally acquired Oswald the Lucky Rabbit when its subsidiary ESPN purchased rights to the character, along with other properties from NBC Universal, in return for relinquishing the services of longtime ABC sports commentator Al Michaels. "Oswald is definitely worth more than a fourth-round draft choice," quipped Michaels. "I'm going to be a trivia answer someday."
Mickey Mouse
After losing the rights to Oswald, Disney felt the need to develop a new character to replace the rabbit, and he conceived one based on a mouse that he had adopted as a pet while working in his Laugh-O-Gram studio in Kansas City.Iwerks revised the sketches made by Disney to make the character easier to animate, although Mickey's voice and personality were provided by Disney himself until 1947. In the words of one Disney employee, "Ub designed Mickey's physical appearance, but Walt gave him his soul." 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. The mouse was originally named "Mortimer" and later renamed "Mickey" by Lillian Disney, who thought that the name Mortimer did not sound appealing.Mortimer eventually became the name of Mickey's rival for Minnie—taller than his renowned adversary and speaking with a Brooklyn accent.
The first animated short to feature Mickey was Plane Crazy, a silent film like all of Disney's previous works. Disney failed to find a distributor for the short and its follow-up The Gallopin' Gaucho, so he created a Mickey cartoon with sound called Steamboat Willie. A businessperson named Pat Powers provided Disney with both distribution and Cinephone, a sound-synchronization process. Steamboat Willie became an instant success.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 Disney's early sound cartoons.Mickey soon eclipsed Felix the Cat as the world's most popular cartoon character.Mickey's popularity grew rapidly in the early 1930s.
Silly Symphonies
A series of musical shorts were released in 1929 titled Silly Symphonies which followed in the footsteps of Mickey Mouse series. The first was The Skeleton Dance and was entirely drawn and animated by Iwerks, who was also responsible for drawing the majority of cartoons released by Disney in 1928 and 1929. Both series were successful, but the Disney studio thought that it was not receiving its rightful share of profits from Pat Powers.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.
By 1932, Mickey Mouse had become a relatively popular cinema character, but Silly Symphonies was not as successful. The same year also saw competition increase, as Max Fleischer's flapper cartoon character Betty Boop gained popularity among theater audiences.Fleischer was considered Disney's main rival in the 1930s,and was also the father of Richard Fleischer, whom Disney later hired 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.In late 1932, Herbert Kalmus had just completed work on the first three-strip technicolor camera,and he convinced Walt Disney to reshoot the black and white Flowers and Trees in three-strip Technicolor.Flowers and Trees became a phenomenal success and also won 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,a period eventually extended to five years.Through Silly Symphonies, Disney also created his most successful cartoon short of all time: The Three Little Pigs (1933).The cartoon ran in theaters for many months, featuring the hit song that became the anthem of the Great Depression: "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?".One reason that Three Little Pigs was so successful was the strength of its story, in that Disney had realized that the success of animated films depended upon telling emotionally gripping stories that would grab the audience and not let go.This realization led to another of his innovations: a "story department" separate from the animators, with storyboard artists who would be dedicated to working on a "story development" phase of the production pipeline.
On November 18, 1932, Disney received a special Academy Award for the creation of "Mickey Mouse".The series switched to color in 1935, and soon launched spin-offs for supporting characters such as Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto. Donald Duck first teamed up with Mickey in the 1934 cartoon Orphan's Benefit and, of all Mickey's partners, was perhaps the most popular, going on to become Disney's second most successful cartoon character of all time.
Early 1960s successes
By the early 1960s, the Disney empire had become a major success, and Walt Disney Productions had established itself as the world's leading producer of family entertainment. Walt Disney served as the Head of Pageantry for the 1960 Winter Olympics.After decades of pursuit, Disney acquired the rights to P. L. Travers' books about a magical nanny,and released Mary Poppins in 1964. This became the most successful Disney film of the 1960s, featuring a song score written by Disney's favorite composers, the Sherman Brothers.
The same year, Disney debuted a number of exhibits at the 1964 New York World's Fair,including numerous Audio-Animatronic figures in featured attractions such as It's a Small World. He also premiered the first Audio-Animatronic human figure, of Abraham Lincoln (the sixteenth President of the United States), as part of the exhibit Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln. This exhibit was based on Disney's admiration for Lincoln ever since he was a little boy. All of these temporary World's Fair exhibits were later integrated into attractions at Disneyland or a new theme park project which was to be established on the East Coast.
Academy Awards:
- 932: Best Short Subject, Cartoons: Flowers and Trees (1932)
- 1932: Honorary Award for creation of Mickey Mouse
- 1939: Honorary Award for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) The citation read, "For Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, recognized as a significant screen innovation which has charmed millions and pioneered a great new entertainment field." (The award, unique in the history of the Oscars, is one large statuette and seven miniature statuettes.)
- 1941: Honorary Award for Fantasia (1940), shared with: William E. Garity and J.N.A. Hawkins. The citation for the certificate of merit read, "For their outstanding contribution to the advancement of the use of sound in motion pictures through the production of Fantasia."[6]
- 1943: Best Short Subject, Cartoons: Der Fuehrer's Face (1942)
- 1949: Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award (Honorary Award)
- 1951: Best Short Subject, Two-reel: In Beaver Valley (1950)
- 1952: Best Short Subject, Two-reel: Nature's Half Acre (1951)
- 1954: Best Documentary, Features: The Living Desert (1953)
- 1954: Best Short Subject, Cartoons: Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom (1953)
- 1959: Best Short Subject, Live Action Subjects: Grand Canyon (1958)
- 1969: Best Short Subject, Cartoons: Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (1968) (posthumous)
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