Walt Disney

Walter Elias Disney

At a time in American history when jobs were scarce and money was hard to come by, one mouse and his group of animated friends, with their comical antics brought smiles to the faces of children and adults alike. The mouse’s name was Mickey, and with his creation came the birth of a multibillion dollar corporate empire, all because of one man’s dream.

Walt Disney was born in Chicago, Illinois on December 5, 1901, and was brought up on a small farm in a town called Marceline, Missouri, but later moved to Kansas City.

It was in Kansas City that Walt first began experimenting with his artistic capabilities on

Saturday mornings when he would go to a local museum and take drawing classes. The instruction was not exactly great, but it was a beginning. At the age of seventeen, Disney dropped out of school to become an ambulance driver overseas in W.W.I, but returned to

America in 1919, when he applied his desire for art to a lucrative career. He became an apprentice as a commercial illustrator, creating advertising cartoons. By 1922, Walt had joined forces with Ub Iwirks, and they began their own commercial advertising firm. It didn’t last long however, by 1923, Disney backed out of the business. Although the venture was a failure, Iwirk’s talent was one of the main reasons for Disney’s later success. (Gale Group)

Walt, now living in Hollywood, began production immediately on his first animation, Steamboat Willy, which featured a cheeky little mouse named, “Mortimer,” voiced by Walt. The mouse however was later renamed by Disney’s wife, Lillian, to,

“Mickey.” The production was the first ever to synchronize audio and visual effects. Walt looked at animation as a new way of telling stories through a medium that had no boundaries. This initial success led Walt to invest his own profits into newer and better productions featuring Mickey’s new gang of wacky characters; Goofy, Donald Duck,

Pluto, and Minnie. The productions were an overnight worldwide success, which led

Disney and his, at the time, small team to go even further, expanding their studios and payroll, and releasing the first-ever full-length fully-animated feature presentation in 1937 entitled, Snow White. With the country still trying to recover from the economic disasters of the Great Depression,...

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...to truly have quality fun. He brought parents and children together, through storybooks, around the television, in front of movie screens, and in his own lands of dream and wonder. Even through the Great Depression he managed to entertain the most depressed people there were, but there was one thing that Walt Disney always wanted everyone to remember, “I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing-that it was all started by a mouse.”

Bibliography

1. Peet, Bill. Bill Peet: An Autobiography. USA: Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company,

1989.

2. Dunlop, Beth. Building a Dream. USA: Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated, 1996.

3. Hahn, Don. Animation Magic. USA: Disney Press, 1996.

4. Imagineers, The. Walt Disney Imagineering: A Behind the Dreams Look at Making the

Magic Real. USA: Hyperion, 1995.

5. Gale Group. Disney, (Walter Elias) Walt. 2002. http://search.biography.com/print_record.pl?id=14265. February 24, 2002.

6. Walt Disney World - Parks and More. 2002. http://disneyworld.disney.go.com/waltdisneyworld/parksandmore/. February 24,

2002.