Walt Disney: The Never-Ending Journey…

Walter Elias Disney was born on December 5, 1901, in Chicago, Illinois, US. He was the producer of motion pictures and a thorough showman. Walter has been regarded as the pioneer in the field of animated cartoon films.

He is credited with creating some of the most iconic cartoon characters like Mickey mouse and Donald duck. Not only that, his ambitions led him to design as well as build “Disneyland” in Los Angeles in the year 1955. Disney company has become one of the largest in the entertainment industry. 

His Early Life

Walter’s father Elias Disney, was a farmer, carpenter and building contractor. His job required him to move to different regions quite frequently. Walter’s mother, Flora Call was a Public School teacher. When Walter was still a child, his family decided to move to a farm near Marceline, Missouri. It was there that Walt(Walter) showed his liking for drawing and painting. His restless father soon abandoned his efforts at farming. He moved the family to Kansas City, Missouri, where he bought a morning newspaper route and compelled his young sons to assist him in delivering papers. 

In Kansas City, the young Walt began to study cartooning with a correspondence school and later took classes at the Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design. In 1917 the Disneys moved back to Chicago, and Walt entered McKinley High School, where he took photographs, made drawings for the school paper, and studied cartooning on the side, for he was hopeful of eventually achieving a job as a newspaper cartoonist.

He was interrupted during World War I since he participated in the war as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in France and Germany. Returning to Kansas City in 1919, he worked as a draftsman and inker in commercial art studios, where he met Ub Iwerks, a young artist whose talents contributed greatly to Walt’s early success.

Cartoons

Disney and Iwerks started a small studio of their own in 1922. They used a second-hand camera to record two-minute advertising films for distribution to local movie theatres. They also made Laugh-O-grams, which was a series of animated cartoon sketches and the pilot film for a series of seven-minute fairy tales that combined both live-action and animation, Alice in Cartoonland. 

The young producers hit a low when a New York-based film distributor cheated them, forcing Disney to file for bankruptcy in 1923. Disney consequently decided to move to California and become a successful cinematographer, but the success of his Alice films made compelled him and his brother Roy, to reopen a shop in Hollywood.  

Major Films and Television Productions

Along with his brother Roy, Iwerks joined Disney as well. Iwerks would assist with the drawing of the cartoons. They invented a character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, contracted for distribution of the films at $1,500 each, and propitiously launched their small enterprise. In 1927, just before the transition to sound in motion pictures, Disney and Iwerks experimented with a new character—a cheerful, energetic, and mischievous mouse called Mickey.

Over time mickey the mouse and his girlfriend Minnie grew immensely popular among the audience. Hence, This popularity led to the invention of other animal characters, such as Donald Duck and the dog's Pluto and Goofy. 

In 1933 Disney produced a short, The Three Little Pigs, which arrived amid the Great Depression and took the country by storm. Its treatment of the fairy tale of the little pig who works hard and builds his house of brick against the huffing and puffing of a threatening wolf suited the need for fortitude in the face of economic disaster, and its song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” was a happy taunting of adversity. In 1934 he began work on a version of the classic fairy tale Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), a project that required great organization

Disney’s way into films for the federal government during World War II helped the studio perfect methods of combining live-action and animation; the studio’s commercial films using this hybrid technique include The Reluctant Dragon (1941), Saludos Amigos (1942), The Three Caballeros (1945), Make Mine Music (1946), and Song of the South (1946).

Conclusion 

The Disney studio by that time had been established into a big business franchise. It foresaw the potential of the television industry as a medium to entertain the masses. A huge credit for what the studio has created over so many years goes undoubtedly to Disney himself. He was a man with young cheerful energy, not afraid to play with different characters.

His cartoons were a joy to “children of all ages”. His taste in whimsical humour led him to give birth to cartoon or movie characters that are now a part of so many childhood stories, being retold with such compassion and joy over generations. Disney was just doing what he loved, and yet, unknowingly he touched so many lives with his work. 

Written by: Vishakha Baisoya