Steamboat Music, Silly Symphonies, and Fantasias of Sound

The name was eventually changed to The Walt Disney Studios. By the end of 1927, the Disney brothers created a total of 56 Alice comedies, which proved Walt as a producer and built up his animation studio that rivaled others in the business. In 1928, their company took a hit when almost all of their animators jumped ship and went to work for Universal Pictures. It was projected that Walt Disney’s animation career was over, but he kept fighting and it taught him to never give up control of his creations. Though the tale of how he came about isn’t clear, Mickey Mouse debuted on November 18, 1928. From that day, the Walt Disney Studios took off with the creation of Snow White in 1937 and Pinocchio and Fantasia in 1940. However, the studio took a break from movies after Pearl Harbor in order to aid in the war effort by converting the studio into a wartime industrial plant. After the war, Disney reconquered the title of leader of animation and rest is history. With the opening of Disneyland and the premiere of The Mickey Mouse Club in 1955, the company has only flourished. In 1963, there was the first use of audio-animatronics at Disneyland and Walt began the foundation of a project that would lead to Disneyworld. However, he was diagnosed with lung cancer in November 1966 and passed in December; therefore, unable to see his plan play out. Walter Elias Disney was a small-town boy who turned into a

In 1919 Walt completed his service in the Red Cross. He then moved back to Kansas City where he got a job in a Commercial Art Studio. While working in the Studio Walt became friends with Ub Iwerks. He would later become the key animator for the Walt Disney studios. Disney and Iwerks formed a short lived business that Disney took the remaining assets and 15,000 from local investors to create laugh-o-gram films and to move out to LA. Once in LA, Disney called Margaret Winkler, a film distributor, to announce his production of the laugh-o-grams. The laugh-o-grams featured a live girl, Alice who interacted with animated characters. In 1923 Winkler agreed to buy half a dozen Alive in Cartoonland films. Later that

Actually Walt Disney and Roy Disney were two brothers who found the Cartoon Studio in California in 1923. Both brothers made a contract for a film which name was Alice Comedy. This film was

Walt Disney started out by producing short animated films in 1922 and in 1928 introduced Mickey Mouse, the world most famous cartoon character shown in Figure 4 below (Olsson 1996; Kramer 2002). Following this breakthrough, Kramer (2002) found that Disney proceeded innovatively with new film technologies of sound and colour that resulted in the first successful animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937.

He also met, Ub Iwerks, who was a young man his own age who was a more gifted artist than Disney. Walt tried to partner up and start a business with Iwerks, and thus started a long and creative often troubling, relationship between the artist Iwerks and the organizer and incredibly visionary Disney. During this period of partnership, Disney combined a live child actress named Virginia Davis, who was ten years old as the time, with cartoon figures in the short film Alice’s Wonderland in 1923, which led to a popular series named Alice in Cartoonland which ran from 1923 to 1926. Walt had decided to move to Hollywood, California. Over the course of three years, Disney had produced over fifty-six Alice in Cartoonland

Founded in 1923 by Walter Elias Disney, Walt Disney is the pioneer of the animation industry (“The Walt Disney Company”, 2014). The first two cartoons that Disney created were silent films and could not be sold; he then created the third Mickey Mouse cartoon with sound – Steamboat Willie in November of 1928 ("Disney History," n.d.). Disney went on to win the Academy Award ® for Best Cartoon in 1932, which was the first year that this award was offered, for his cartoon Flowers and Trees ("Disney History," n.d.). Shortly after his cartoons were gaining popularity, Disney went into the merchandising industry, when Walt Disney accepted an offer of $300 by a man to put Mickey Mouse on some pencil tablets ("Disney History," n.d.). That was just the beginning for Disney merchandising, which soon included everything from “Mickey Mouse dolls, dishes,

Granted that his artists left him, there was one artists that stayed. Her name was Lillian Bounds and married Walt on July 13, 1925. They had one child named Diane Marie (December 8th,1933) and adopted another named Sharon Mae in 1937 (Stewart 43 & 61). Walt needed a new character that was better than Oswald, so with the help of Lillian they created Mickey Mouse. No one would buy Walt’s cartoons of Mickey, but Walt had an idea of adding sound to his cartoons to make them more exciting. Steamboat Willie was the first cartoon with combined with sound and it was a hit! “Steamboat Willie was by far the best sound cartoon of its time” (Stewart 48). Walt wanted to make a animated movie that would be as long as the cartoons that are played

Soon after coming back from war Walt decided to go work for Pesman-Rubin Commercial Art Studio designing letterhead and advertisements. There he met his longtime friend Iwerks. Walt and Iwerks were so laid off. Later they started to work for Kansas City Film Ad Company, making one-minute advertisements to appear before movies and live action films. Walt thought that he was confined enough to start his own business from what he had learned from Kansas City Film Ad Company. So he started his own company named Laugh-O-Gram Films. While working at Laugh-O-Gram Films Walt products his first popular film Alice in Wonderland, he went on to make the series of film which were then known as Alice comedies. A year later Walt called bankrupt then leads

Walt Disney states, “We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and trying new things, because we are curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”

in Hollywood. If their business were successful, it would be the first studio in the city strictly for producing animation. Walt and Roy got their studio up and moving within a few weeks and hired several animators. They first produced a mini-series called Alice that played in the previews of movie theatres, but they knew it wouldn’t compare to Felix the Cat. Walt felt something was missing at their studio and realized a need for a master animator.

Their company however was a failure and both started to work in animation at the Kansas City Film Ad Company. After learning all about animation, he pursued another start-up with another co-worker Fred Harman. This time he created an animation business and started screening cartoon’s titled “Laugh-O-Grams” in a local theatre. Following their success, Disney acquired Laugh-O-Gram studios, which soon went bankrupt due to Walt’s poor financial management. Later that year, Walt and his Brother Roy opened Disney Brothers’ Studio in Hollywood, California (WDFM, 2012). He then started selling his produced cartoons to a New York distributor that was a huge success. Everything was going well until Disney found out that his client had hired Walt’s animators under contract and took the rights to his most popular animated characters (Gabler, 2006).

Like many entertainers, Walt Disney arrived in California with nothing more than talent and a dream. While still in Kansas City, Disney created a cartoon entitled Alice’s Wonderland. It did not take much time at all for Disney to successfully sell his series, “The Alice Comedies,” to M.J. Winkler, a distributor from New York. October 16, 1923 was the official start date of Disney’s company, originally titled Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio (“A history of the Walt Disney company”). Disney co-founded the company with his brother, Roy, who took care of the financial aspects of running a business (A., 2002).

At the age of 31, Walt Disney and his brother, Roy Disney, founded the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio (currently known as the Walt Disney Company), which became the industry leaders in the creation of cartoons. Gradually, the company expanded to also produce motion pictures and provide entrainment services through cable services or its theme parks.

Founded on October 16, 1923, Disney was known to be one of the largest media and entertainment conglomerates. It had specialized in television, radio, and theme parks & attractions. Walt Disney and his brother Roy produced many short animated films starting with their series of collective films called Alice Comedies and quickly gained their success from there. Within months, the Disney brothers created their own studio and thus the creation of Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Goofy, and the rest of the Disney characters was born.

The Disney brothers began creating countless cartoons (some successful and others not so much), and in 1928, introduced Mickey Mouse to the world in the animated short, Steamboat Willie—widely described as the