Hollywood's preeminent personality in the world of film animation. Though a mediocre artist, Walt Disney was a visionary creative force as an animator, producer, and businessman. He turned animation into an art form and gave birth to a variety of characters whose names are known to hundreds of millions of people the world over. He built theme parks based on the power and appeal of his film creations, found a niche in Hollywood as the provider of family entertainment, and ultimately established a strong enough base so that others could eventually follow in his footsteps and turn the Disney Studio into the most financially successful film company of the late 1980s.
Born to a middle-class family, Walt Disney became interested in drawing at an early age. He began to study his craft at the Kansas City Art Institute when he was 14 years old. After a stint as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in France at the end of World War I, Walt Disney worked as a commercial artist back in Kansas City. He entered the infant world of animation when he and his new friend and collaborator, Ub Iwerks, began to make crude animated commercials for the Kansas City Film Ad Company. Together, Walt Disney and Iwerks created Laugh-O-Grams, animated shorts for local Kansas City theaters, but the company they formed went bust. Walt Disney went off to Hollywood and pursued his calling (Iwerks would eventually follow and contribute greatly to his friend's success), starting a new company in 1923 with his brother, Roy, and creating a combination of live action and animation shorts called Alice in Cartoonland. The pair hardly set the world on fire, but Walt Disney remained in business long enough to try again in 1927 with an Oswald the Rabbit cartoon series. These fared slightly better, but Walt Disney's big breakthrough came in 1928 when he and Iwerks created Plane Crazy starring a new animated character, Mickey Mouse.
Plane Crazy and the next Mickey Mouse cartoon, Gallopin' Gaucho, were both silent shorts. In an effort to stay ahead of the animated competition, he quickly turned to sound and made what became his watershed cartoon starring Mickey Mouse, Steamboat Willie (1929), with Walt Disney, himself, providing the little rodent's squeaky voice. As shown in Steamboat Willie, music and animation made a winning combination, and Walt Disney proceeded to create a series of shorts called Silly Symphonies, the most famous of which was The Three Little Pigs (1933), which introduced the hit tune, "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" In addition to turning his shorts into minimusicals, Walt Disney also experimented with color, working hand-in-hand with TECHNICOLOR to implement their new three-color process in his animated short, Flowers and Trees (1933). It was a huge success and soon Walt Disney's Technicolor Silly Symphonies were outgrossing his black-and-white Mickey Mouse films, which were later made in Technicolor as well.
Ever the innovator, Walt Disney created not only new characters, such as Donald Duck, Minnie Mouse, Dippy Dawg (later changed to Goofy), and Pluto, but he also improved the technology of animation, incorporating the use of Ub Iwerks's multiplane camera, a device that allowed for greater clarity, depth, and detail in animated filmmaking. Not content to remain in the relative backwater of short subjects, Walt Disney decided to test the appeal of animation in the feature-length format. Putting his newfound prosperity on the line, he plunged into the making of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). His gamble paid off in a critical and commercial success, followed by yet another hit, Pinocchio (1940). In the hopes of expanding his audience and gaining ever-greater prestige, Walt Disney then joined with conductor Leopold Stokowski to create an animated feature built around classical music. The result was Fantasia (1940), a hugely ambitious work that flopped in its initial release, scorned by the music elite and ignored by children who found it rather boring. It was only later, when reissued, that a more sophisticated audience than young children discovered the film and its startling beauty. It has since become one of Walt Disney's most profitable early features.
In his lifetime, Walt Disney's films earned 29 Oscars, though, curiously, all of them were for his short subjects (except for several special Academy Awards); none of his feature films brought home a statuette. The early 1940s, after Fantasia, were a difficult time for Walt Disney. The company was rocked by labor unrest that finally resulted in mass resignations and the formation of a new competitive company, UPA, by those who quit. Undaunted, Walt Disney continued making animated features, but with generally lesser ambition as the years rolled on. His more memorable efforts were in the 1940s and early 1950s with films such as Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942), Peter Pan (1953), and The Lady and the Tramp (1956). Among his later animated features only The Jungle Book (1967) had any particular flair. For the most part, his animated films became too sweet and simple for anyone but the very young child.
Meanwhile, however, Walt Disney began to diversify out of animation, putting out live-action films beginning with Treasure Island (1950). Among his many memorable liveaction family entertainment features were 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), Old Yeller (1957), and Tonka (1958). Also during the 1950s Walt Disney produced his highly acclaimed nature movie series, True-Life Adventures, including The Living Desert (1953), White Wilderness (1958), and The Jungle Cat (1960). Though he had done so in the past, in the 1960s Walt Disney began to combine live action and animation as never before, most memorably in Mary Poppins (1964), one of the biggest hits of his last decade. He also went heavily into special effects in the making of such light fare as The Absent-Minded Professor (1961) and Son of Flubber (1963).
Walt Disney was more than a moviemaker. His Sunday evening television show, The Wonderful World of Color (which he hosted), made him known to tens of millions of children. His daring development of Disneyland in Anaheim, California, and DisneyWorld in Orlando, Florida, resulted in monstrous money-makers that perpetuated the magic he created in his films. Following Walt Disney's death after lung surgery, the empire continued to thrive by merely feeding off of its founder's original formula for success. But soon the company entered a period of paralysis during the 1970s when profits dwindled and the studio's efforts centered more on real estate than on filmmaking.
The company was close to being taken over and dismantled in the early 1980s when a shake-up brought in Michael Eisner as chairman in 1984. He revitalized the Disney Studio by encouraging the recently established "adult" filmmaking subsidiary of the company, Touchstone Pictures, that had already made Splash (1984), the first Disney hit since The Love Bug (1969). A constant stream of Touchstone hits under the Eisner team soon followed, including Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986), Ruthless People (1986), Outrageous Fortune (1987), Stakeout (1987), Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), and Three Men and a Baby (1988).
After being long dormant in the field of animated features, Disney made its grand return with Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), a film coproduced by STEVEN SPIELBERG. Roger Rabbit combined live action and computer animation with startling visual results. It was a box-office bonanza, which Disney followed with the wholly animated movies Oliver and Company (1988) and The Little Mermaid (1989). The Disney company plans to produce one animated feature every year, putting it once again in the forefront of family entertainment. As a corporate entity, Disney continues to grow in many directions, including television, theme parks (there is a third Disneyland in Tokyo and a fourth opened near Paris, France, in 1992), licensing, real estate, and the number and variety of movies that they make.
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1. Robert Aldrich produced many social and political movies
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