Walt Disney�s Cartoons

Dissatisfied with their progress, Disney and Iwerks started a small studio of their own in 1922 and acquired a secondhand movie camera with which they made one and two-minute animated advertising films for distribution to local movie theatres. They also did a series of animated cartoon sketches called Laugh-O-grams and the pilot film for a series of seven-minute fairy tales that combined both live action and animation, Alice in Cartoonland. A New York film distributor cheated the young producers, and Disney was forced to file for bankruptcy in 1923. He moved to California to pursue a career as a cinematographer, but the surprise success of the first Alice film compelled Disney and his brother Roy a lifelong business partner to reopen shop in Hollywood.

With Roy as business manager, Disney resumed the Alice series, persuading Iwerks to join him and 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. They had planned two shorts, called Plane Crazy and Gallopin� Gaucho, that were to introduce Mickey Mouse when The Jazz Singer, a motion picture with the popular singer Al Jolson, brought the novelty of sound to the movies. Fully recognizing the possibilities for sound in animated-cartoon films, Disney quickly produced a third Mickey Mouse cartoon equipped with voices and music, entitled Steamboat Willie, and cast aside the other two soundless cartoon films. When it appeared in 1928, Steamboat Willie was a sensation.

The following year Disney started a new series called Silly Symphonies with a picture entitled The Skeleton Dance, in which a skeleton rises from the graveyard and does a grotesque, clattering dance set to music based on classical themes. Original and briskly syncopated, the film ensured popular acclaim for the series, but, with costs mounting because of the more complicated drawing and technical work, Disney�s operation was continually in peril.

The growing popularity of Mickey Mouse and his girlfriend, Minnie, however, attested to the public�s taste for the fantasy of little creatures with the speech, skills, and personality traits of human beings. (Disney himself provided the voice for Mickey until 1947.) This popularity led to the invention of other animal characters, such as Donald Duck and the dogs Pluto and Goofy. In 1933 Disney produced a short, The Three Little Pigs, which arrived in the midst of 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. It was in this period of economic hard times in the early 1930s that Disney fully endeared himself and his cartoons to audiences all over the world, and his operation began making money in spite of the Depression

Disney had by that time gathered a staff of creative young people, who were headed by Iwerks. Colour was introduced in the Academy Award winning Silly Symphonies film Flowers and Trees (1932), while other animal characters came and went in films such as The Grasshopper and the Ants (1934) and The Tortoise and the Hare (1935). Roy franchised tie-in sales with the cartoons of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck like watches, dolls, shirts, and tops and reaped more wealth for the company.

In 1929, Disney created Silly Symphonies, which featured Mickey's newly created friends, including Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy and Pluto. One of the most popular cartoons, Flowers and Trees, was the first to be produced in color and to win an Oscar. In 1933, The Three Little Pigs and its title song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" became a theme for the country in the midst of the Great Depression.

On December 21, 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length animated film, premiered in Los Angeles. It produced an unimaginable $1.499 million, in spite of the Depression, and won a total of eight Oscars. During the next five years, Walt Disney Studios completed another string of full-length animated films, Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942).

In December 1939, a new campus for Walt Disney Studios was opened in Burbank. A setback for the company occurred in 1941, however, when there was a strike by Disney animators. Many of them resigned, and it would be years before the company fully recovered. During the mid-1940s, Disney created "packaged features," groups of shorts strung together to run at feature length, but by 1950, he was once again focusing on animated features. Cinderella was released in 1950, followed by a live-action film called Treasure Island (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955), Sleeping Beauty (1959) and 101 Dalmatians (1961). In all, more than 100 features were produced by his studio.

Disney was also among the first to use television as an entertainment medium. The Zorro and Davy Crockett series were extremely popular with children, as was The Mickey Mouse Club, a variety show featuring a cast of teenagers known as the Mouseketeers. Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color was a popular Sunday night show, which Disney used to begin promoting his new theme park. Disney's last major success that he produced himself was the motion picture Mary Poppins (1964), which mixed live action and animation.

Golden are of animation: 1934�1941

Walt Disney introduces each of the seven dwarfs in a scene from the original 1937 Snow White theatrical trailer. By 1934, Disney had become dissatisfied with producing formulaic cartoon shorts, and began a four-year production of a feature-length cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, based on the fairy tale. When news leaked out about the project, many in the film industry predicted it would bankrupt the company; industry insiders nicknamed it "Disney's Folly".The film, which was the first animated feature made in full color and sound, cost $1.5 million to produce�three times over budget. To ensure the animation was as realistic as possible, Disney sent his animators on courses at the Chouinard Art Institute; he brought animals into the studio and hired actors so that the animators could study realistic movement. To portray the changing perspective of the background as a camera moved through a scene, Disney's animators developed a multiplane camera which allowed drawings on pieces of glass to be set at various distances from the camera, creating an illusion of depth. The glass could be moved to create the impressio n of a camera passing through the scene. The first work created on the camera,a Silly Symphony called The Old Mill (1937),won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film because of its impressive visual power. Although Snow White had been largely finished by the time the multiplane camera had been completed, Disney ordered some scenes be re-drawn to use the new effects.

Snow White premiered in December 1937 to high praise from critics and audiences. The film became the most successful motion picture of 1938 and by May 1939 its total gross of $6.5 million made it the most successful sound film made to that date. Disney won another Honorary Academy Award, which consisted of one full-sized and seven miniature Oscar statuettes. The success of Snow White heralded one of the most productive eras for the studio; the Walt Disney Family Museum calls the following years "the 'Golden Age of Animation'?". With work on Snow White finished, the studio began producing Pinocchioin early 1938 and Fantasia in November of the same year. Both films were released in 1940, and neither performed well at the box office, partly because revenues from Europe had dropped following the start of World War II in 1939. The studio made a loss on both pictures and was deeply in debt by the end of February 1941.

In response to the financial crisis, Disney and his brother Roy started the company's first public stock offering in 1940, and implemented heavy salary cuts. The latter measure, and Disney's sometimes high-handed and insensitive manner of dealing with staff, led to a 1941 animators' strike which lasted five weeks. While a federal mediator from the National Labor Relations Board negotiated with the two sides, Disney accepted an offer from the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs to make a goodwill trip to South America, ensuring he was absent during a resolution he knew would be unfavorable to the studio. As a result of the strike and the financial state of the company, several animators left the studio, and Disney's relationship with other members of staff was permanently strained as a result. The strike temporarily interrupted the studio's next production, Dumbo(1941), which Disney produced in a simple and inexpensive manner; the film received a positive reaction from audiences and critics al ike.

World War II and beyond: 1941�1950

Shortly after the release of Dumbo in October 1941, the U.S. entered World War II. Disney formed the Walt Disney Training Films Unit within the company to produce instruction films for the military such as Four Methods of Flush Riveting and Aircraft Production Methods. Disney also met with Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the Secretary of the Treasury, and agreed to produce short Donald Duck cartoons to promote war bonds. Disney also produced several propaganda productions, including shorts such as Der Fuehrer's Face,which won an Academy Award and the 1943 feature film Victory Through Air Power.

The military films generated only enough revenue to cover costs, and the feature film Bambi,which had been in production since 1937 underperformed on its release in April 1942, and lost $200,000 at the box office. On top of the low earnings from Pinocchio and Fantasia, the company had debts of $4 million with the Bank of America in 1944. At a meeting with Bank of America executives to discuss the future of the company, the bank's chairman and founder, Amadeo Giannini, told his executives, "I've been watching the Disneys' pictures quite closely because I knew we were lending them money far above the financial risk. ... They're good this year, they're good next year, and they're good the year after. ... You have to relax and give them time to market their product." Disney's production of short films decreased in the late 1940s, coinciding with increasing competition in the animation market from Warner Bros. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Roy Disney, for financial reasons, suggested more combined animation and live-a ction productions. In 1948, Disney initiated a series of popular live-action nature films, titled True-Life Adventures, with Seal Island the first; the film won the Academy Award in the Best Short Subject (Two-Reel) category.

Disney grew more politically conservative as he got older. A Democratic Party supporter until the 1940 presidential election, when he switched allegiance to the Republicans, he became a generous donor to Thomas E. Dewey's 1944 bid for the presidency. In 1946 he was a founding member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, an organization who stated they "believed in, and like, the American Way of Life ... we find ourselves in sharp revolt against a rising tide of Communism, Fascism and kindred beliefs, that seek by subversive means to undermine and change this way of life". In 1947, during the Second Red Scare, Disney testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where he branded Herbert Sorrell, David Hilberman and William Pomerance, former animators and labor union organizers, as communist agitators; Disney stated that the 1941 strike led by them was part of an organized communist effort to gain influence in Hollywood.

In 1949, Disney and his family moved to a new home in the Holmby Hills district of Los Angeles. With the help of his friends Ward and Betty Kimball, who already had their own backyard railroad, Disney developed blueprints and immediately set to work on creating a miniature live steam railroad for his backyard. The name of the railroad, Carolwood Pacific Railroad, came from his home's location on Carolwood Drive. The miniature working steam locomotive was built by Disney Studios engineer Roger E. Broggie, and Disney named it Lilly Belle after his wife after three years Disney ordered it into storage due to a series of accidents involving his guests.