Table of Contents
EARLY LIFE
- Disney was born on December 5, 1901, in the Hermosa section of Chicago, Illinois. He lived most of his childhood in Marceline, Missouri, where he began drawing, painting and selling pictures to neighbors and family friends.
- He was the fourth son of Elias Disney. In 1911, his family moved to Kansas City, where Disney developed a love for trains. Later, Disney would work a summer job with the railroad, selling snacks and newspapers to travelers.
EDUCATION
- Disney attended McKinley High School in Chicago, where he took drawing and photography classes and was a contributing cartoonist for the school paper. At night, he took courses at the Art Institute of Chicago.
- When Disney was 16, he dropped out of school to join the Army but was rejected for being underage. Instead, he joined the Red Cross and was sent to France for a year to drive an ambulance. He moved back to the U.S. in 1919.
- He also took night courses at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts.
STRUGGLE
- In 1919, Disney moved to Kansas City to pursue a career as a newspaper artist. His brother Roy got him a job at the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio, where he met cartoonist Ubbe Eert Iwwerks, better known as Ub Iwerks.
- From there, Disney worked at the Kansas City Film Ad Company, where he made commercials based on cutout animation.
- He decided to open his own animation business. From the ad company, he recruited Fred Harman as his first employee.
STRUGGLE
- Disney and Harman made a deal with a local Kansas City theater to screen their cartoons, which they called Laugh-O-Grams.
- The cartoons were hugely popular, and Disney was able to acquire his own studio, upon which he bestowed the same name.
- Laugh-O-Gram hired a number of employees, in. They did a series of seven-minute fairy tales that combined both live action and animation, which they called Alice in Cartoonland. By 1923, however, the studio had become burdened with debt, and Disney was forced to declare bankruptcy.
WALT DISNEY
- Disney and his brother Roy moved to Hollywood with cartoonist Ub Iwerks in 1923, and there the three began the Disney Brothers’ Cartoon Studio. The company soon changed its name to Walt Disney Studios, at Roy’s suggestion.
- The Walt Disney Studios’ first deal was with New York distributor Margaret Winkler, to distribute their Alice cartoons.
- They also invented a character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and contracted the shorts at $1,500 each.
MICKEY MOUSE
- Disney’s first successful film starring Mickey Mouse was a soundand-music-equipped animated short called Steamboat Willie.
- It opened at the Colony Theater in New York November 18, 1928. Sound had just made its way into film, and Disney was the voice of Mickey, a character he had developed and that was drawn by his chief animator, Ub Iwerks. The cartoon was an instant sensation.
- The team had discovered that Disney’s New York distributor, Margaret Winkler, and her husband, Charles Mintz, had stolen the rights to the character Oswald and all of Disney’s animators except for Iwerks.
- In 1929, Disney created Silly Symphonies, featuring Mickey’s newly created friends, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy and Pluto.
MOVIES
- Disney produced more than 100 feature films. His first fulllength animated film was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which premiered in Los Angeles on December 21, 1937. Few other of Disney’s most famous movies include:
- Pinocchio (1940)
- Fantasia (1940)
- Dumbo (1941)
- Bambi (1942)
- Cinderella (1950)
- Treasure Island (1950)
- Alice in Wonderland (1951)
- Peter Pan (1953)
- Lady and the Tramp (1955)
- Sleeping Beauty (1959)
- 101 Dalmatians (1961)
DISNEYLAND
- Disney’s $17 million Disneyland theme park opened on July 17, 1955, in Anaheim, California, on what was once an orange grove. In a very short time, the park had increased its investment tenfold and was entertaining tourists from around the world.
- The original site had attendance ups and downs over the years. Disneyland has expanded its rides over time and branched out globally with Walt Disney World near Orlando, Florida, and parks in Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Sister property California Adventure opened in Los Angeles in 2001.
DISNEYLAND
- In 1925, Disney hired an ink-and-paint artist named Lillian Bounds. After a brief courtship, the couple married.
- Disney and Lillian Bounds had two children. Diane Disney Miller, born in 1933, was the couple’s only biological daughter. They adopted Sharon Disney Lund shortly after her birth in 1936.
- Disney was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1966 and died on December 15, 1966, at the age of 65. Disney was cremated, and his ashes interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.
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