Few can compare to Walt Disney on the impact he made on the 20th century in the entertainment industry and the popular culture. First cartoons with synchronized sound, the first full-length animated feature film and the theme park, were some of the innovations he shared with the world and pushed him to success. However, the way to success wasn’t easy. Nothing would’ve happened without Disney’s perseverance and solid belief in his dreams.
Walter Elias Disney was born in Chicago, Illinois, on December 5, 1901. Walt was one of five children, four boys and a girl. While enrolling at the Benton Grammar School in Kansas City, he met his fellow-student Walter Pfeiffer, who came from a family of theatre fans and introduced Disney to the world of vaudeville and motion pictures. Without them, he might never have become interested in animation and art. His first job was in 1911 when he was nine, Walt and his brother were put into work after his father acquired a newspaper delivery route. Every morning and evening of the year they will deliver newspapers, no matter the weather. Rain, shine, weekends, snow, there was no valid excuse. He did the same job for six years without receiving any money as Elias, his father, would say that it was his responsibility as a member of the family. Walt was ambitious and instead of complaining, he looked for a way so that he could earn his own money. He started making deliveries for a drugstore while on his regular route, and also by ordering extra newspaper directly in the editorial to retail himself behind his father’s back being able to buy his favorite sweets that were not allowed at home.
In fall 1917, in his teenage years, Walter started to attend McKinley High School as a freshman. Also, he attended night courses at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts under the guidance of Louis Frederick, an American figure compositor and portrait artist. Short after he was drawing patriotic topics for the school newspaper during World War I. Later he attempted to be enlisted in the army, but because he was under-age, he wasn’t accepted. Therefore, he volunteered for the Red Cross and was sent to France where he was an ambulance driver for a year. This car became a local landmark as Walt draw cartoons over it before he turned out to be famous.
The dream to become a professional artist prevailed and in 1919, Walt moved again to Kansas City to start his career as an artist. But in spite of having the talent of a graphic designer, he lacked some bitterness and anger that were fundamental to create mocking newspaper cartoons, and for this reason he couldn’t settle in the art department of a provincial newspaper.
Finally, life smiled at Disney when his brother found him a temporary job creating advertisements for newspapers, magazines, and movie theaters for a humble salary of $50 per month. Not long after, he was again unemployed, but despite the short period, he gained experience on how the advertising business worked inside and decided to try doing it himself. In the firm, he met Ubbe Iwerks, a cartoonist, and both started their own commercial business.
In January 1920, Walt and Ubbe founded a short-lived company called Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists. Their first client was a publisher, Restaurant News, that issued flyers. Disney persuaded the company by ensuring that profit could be improved by adding illustrated advertising to it. Convinced by Walt’s words, the publisher let them use a bathroom as a studio. Walter bought the necessary equipment with his savings for $250. Then he launched a broad expansion of printing and publishing houses.
Because of Walt Disney perseverance, their company was successfully growing. They finally had enough money to move into a new office and even visit the local cinema, where they were fascinated by cartoons. One day, Walt ran into a job advertisement of an animator at the Kansas City Film Ad Company. He left temporarily to earn some money, but when the director of the company saw Disney’s illustration, he offered him $40 per week and Walter could not resist and agreed. In February 1920, he left the reins to Ubbe Iwerks while he was designing advertising based on cutout animation. It was then when he became interested in animation technique and decided to be an animator.
To enhance his knowledge, Disney read Edwin G. Lutz’s book Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development. He noticed that celluloid animation was a much more reliable technique than the cutout animation. He quickly stood out among the other animators. And because he never lost time, he used his spare time to work on his next company Laugh-O-Gram Studio.
On May 18, 1922, Walt Disney established Laugh-O-Gram Studio and invited some friends to join his company including Ubbe Iwerks. He raised $15,000 from the sale of shares to several townspeople. He created two animated movies based on fairy tales, but even though both films were really popular, Disney didn’t receive any payment from his sale-agents. He finally achieved recognition, but went bankrupt. He managed to protect from sale only a camera and a copy of his most original work, Alice in Wonderland. Creditors were pursuing him as he was full of debt, but he fell into extreme poverty. He didn’t even have money for clothes or food.
One day, Walt was offered to do a little promotional video about dental health. However, he shyly declined the offer because he had no shoes to walk out. The dentist helped Walt get back his shoes by paying the $1.5 he owed to the cobbler and paying him $500 for making the video. That wasn’t enough to pay off his debts. He produced the video and the client was completely satisfied, so a few years later, he was asked to do another one for the same dentist Dr. McCrum.
After raisin some money from the video project and advertising photography for local newspapers, Disney decided to move to Hollywood to set up a cartoon studio. Before leaving Kansas City, he finished working on the live-action/animation Alice’s Wonderland and took the final reel with himself. He arrived in Hollywood, which had already become the center of the world cinema, in July 1923. The first days he would walk around film sets all day, paying detailed attention to the process of making movies. It was there where he achieved to make his real career, despite having only $40 in his pocket and a single shirt in his suitcase.
Walt and Roy, his brother, rented a small garage from their uncle, invited an American child actor, hired two employees who ink and painted the celluloid, also rented a shabby shooting camera driven by Roy and Walt was responsible for the animation. On October, 1923, Walt and Roy Disney founded Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio. They were filming Alice Comedies and found a cartoon distributor that agreed to deliver 12 of them. They got paid $1,500 for the first comedy series, Alice’s Day at the Sea.
Enthusiastically, he started working on live-action/animation, Alice in Wonderland. They finally moved to a real new office and hired an animator, invited his old friend Ubbe Iwerks and his family to join The Disney Bros. Cartoon Studio. His key focus became film scenarios, so he left the animation work to Ubbe.
Later in 1924, Walt hired Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising (who later would create Warner Bros. and Matro-Goldwyn Mayer animation studios). Alice Comedies lost popularity among the audience and ended in 1927. Fortunatelly, in 1926, the studio received an offer to create an animated character and all animated cartoon series for Universal Pictures. Ubbe created and drew the Oswald Rabbit, which ended up becoming quite popular and highly demanded.
However, in February1928, Walt flew to New York to renegotiate a higher fee Universal Studios was paying them, but it didn’t go well. Disney’s hands were tied because the Oswald Rabbit trademark belonged to Universal Pictures and such animators as Hugh Harman, Rudy Ising and others, were working under the terms of the contract signed. Most of their animators were hired away except Ubbe, who helped Disney create the most famous character, Mickey Mouse, bringing success for Walt Disney and his studio. Like this, Ubbe animated Mickey Mouse, and Walt gave it a soul being Mickey’s voice until 1947.
The Disney team, first featured Mickey Mouse in a test screening of a short cartoon, but the audience was not impressed. They gave it another try, but didn’t succeed. Not willing to give up, on November 1928, Mickey appeared in Steamboat Willie, a short animated film with sound co-directed by Disney and Iwerks. This time they did found a distributor that sold also Disney Cinephone sound system that allowed to release Steamboat Willie with soundtracks that drove Walt Disney to success. Later on, the two first attempts, The Plane Crazy and The Galloping Gaucho were re-released with soundtracks as well.
In 1930, Columbia Pictures accepted to distribute Silly Symphony series. And by 1932, Mickey was a favorite cartoon character. Nevertheless, competition increased with the arrival of Betty Boop, considered the most famous sex symbols of animation. By the end of 1932, Herbert Thomas Kalmus, an American scientist and engineer, met with Walt Disney and suggested him to re-release the black and white Flowers and Trees through Technicolor camera. The colored Flowers and Trees brought Disney incredible success and the first Academy Award (Oscar) for the Best Short Subject: Cartoons. From that moment on, everything they produced, was released in color.
The Walt Disney Productions invested $22,000 in the animated short film The Three Little Pigs and earned $250,000 being a hit for many months in theaters. Also won the second Oscar for Best Animated Short film in 1934.
Disney production was quickly growing, so Disney was looking for more artists, but just 10 out of 6000 applicants made it into the studio. Because there were few animators with professional skill, Walt educated them himself.
The real deal was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs that was the world’s first full-length animated cartoon. At first, when Roy Disney calculated the expected cost, he was horrified. Half a million dollars was almost double cost of the entire annual production of the studio. They couldn’t afford it so they asked for a loan, and after three years of work on the film, it was finally released. They invested around $1.5 million, and brought them a profit of $8million ($132 million in today’s money). That film made him a millionaire, but all financial matter was secondary for him. He would see money as a working tool.