Walt Disney biography

Synopsis

(born December 5, 1901, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died December 15, 1966, Los Angeles, California) American motion-picture and television producer and showman, famous as a pioneer of animated cartoon films and as the creator of such cartoon characters as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. He also planned and built Disneyland, a huge amusement park that opened near Los Angeles in 1955, and before his death he had begun building a second such park, Walt Disney World, near Orlando, Florida. The Disney Company he founded has become one of the world's largest entertainment conglomerates.

Early life

Walter Elias Disney was the fourth son of Elias Disney, a peripatetic carpenter, farmer, and building contractor, and his wife, Flora Call, who had been a public school teacher. When Walt was little more than an infant, the family moved to a farm near Marceline, Missouri, a typical small Midwestern town, which is said to have furnished the inspiration and model for the Main Street, U.S.A., of Disneyland. There Walt began his schooling and first showed a taste and aptitude for drawing and painting with crayons and watercolours.

His restless father soon abandoned his efforts at farming and 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. Walt later said that many of the habits and compulsions of his adult life stemmed from the disciplines and discomforts of helping his father with the paper route. 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. His progress was interrupted by World War I, in which he participated as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in France and Germany.

Returning to Kansas City in 1919, he found occasional employment 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.

First animated 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