Walt Disney: Defense and Discovery of the New

When we see “Walt Disney Presents” appear magically on the hyper-blue movie screen, as we so often do, it’s easy to forget that Walt Disney is the name of a man. Walt Disney once said, “Let us never forget that it all started with a mouse.” However, it did not start with a mouse, but long before a mouse with a man, a man who was once a boy, for while Disney Studios was not signed and running, Walt’s mind was always wildly running. Throughout Walt’s life, how did he become the artist that he did? What made Disney Studios great while Walt was alive? Even after Walt died, Disney Studios went on. Continuing fifty years, Disney changed significantly from the time Walt died. Has Disney fared well since his death? Will animation ever be as brilliant as when he was alive? Surely there will be others ready to step up and make genius film, by both exploring technology for animation and telling stories in a way that they move and excited audiences everywhere.

Walt Disney’s Life


The day Walt Disney was born, animated feature films didn’t exist. By the day Walt Disney died, animated film would never be the same. As a child, Walt was a budding artist, who knew what he wanted to be—and was determined to be it. Embarking on a precarious investment, Walt and his brother began Walt Disney Studios, and created the world-famous Mickey Mouse. Arguably his most genius achievement, Show White revolutionized animated films for years to come. Before Disney, animation was primitive. Attempts at animation date back to 1892 in France when a young experiment used five-hundred pictures in a machine much like the modern projector. By the time Disney was entering the animation business, it had evolved by leaps and bounds, but Walt was yet to make his mark on it. He was a born artist-- an intuitive story teller and an inventive animator.

When Walter Elias Disney arrived in the world on December 5 of 1901, who could say that he would one day be one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century? After living in Chicago until Walt was four, his father, Elias Disney, decided to move his family—his wife Flora, his three sons, and his young daughter—to a farm in Marceline, Missouri. As a young boy, Walt was responsible for taking care of many of the animals on the farm. Walt adored animals. Taking some teasing for his affections, Walt named all of the animals and treated them as friends, even coaxing the biggest hen, Martha, to come when he called and lay an egg right in his hand. Although the family was poor, Walt always found creative and cheap, if sometimes unsatisfactory ways of express his art. Excitedly discovering a barrel of fresh tar by the house, Walt invited his little sister, Ruth, to do some painting with him—their own version of graffiti. Soon one of the house’s outside walls was covered in zigzags and doodles. It surprised Walt immensely to fine that the tar would not come off. After this ordeal, Walt was more careful with his drawing medium, and he stuck to toilet paper and bits of wrapping paper. Together with his love of animals and drawing, Walt determined the thing he wanted to be—a cartoonist. And what a cartoonist he would be! His drawings were always admired—gaining him free haircuts from the barber and sweets money from friends and neighbors. One year, for Ruth’s birthday, he made her a little book of drawings that looked like a moving picture when you turned the pages quickly. Years later, at eighteen, while driving a Red Cross ambulance in Europe in World War II, he still kept drawing, covering his truck with cartoon drawings. One of the only places Walt’s imaginative artistry was not appreciated was at school. When the teacher instructed them to draw a pot of flowers, Walt liberally added faces and bodies to each bud, causing his teacher much dismay. However, Walt stuck close to his drawing—his way. Perhaps not even Walt knew the things he would achieve, but he didn’t have to know—he was drawn to art like a bird to the sky, and he was about to take flight.

Animation caught Walt’s attention and he never caught it back. He watched the cartoons of the day, readily believing he could do better. Reading books on animation, studying different animators, and saving money for his own film equipment, Walt worked tirelessly to start his career. After many failed attempts to make it in Kansas animation studios, he moved west to Hollywood with unfailing hope, even after his failure. Looking back, Walt later said, “I’d failed, but I’d learned a lot out of that. I think it’s important to have a good, hard, failure when you’re young.” Through a series of fortunate events, Walt started his own animation studio with his older brother Roy, who was always his closest friend and companion. Next came the mouse. Only five years later, Walt created Mickey Mouse. Originally, Walt wished to name him Mortimer, but his wife, Lily, objected, suggesting that it sounded too serious. So they named him Mickey. While Mickey’s first two cartoons didn’t cause much stir, this third cartoon, Steam Boat Willie, was an instant hit. This was strongly due to the newly discovered phenomenon of synchronized sound . Silent films were no longer the only option. Scoffing at the new technique, many movie makers believed that this was only an overrated fad, but Walt knew otherwise—he jumped at the new opportunity, recognizing the options it offered for his animation studio. First testing synchronized sound out on the Mickey Mouse cartoon Steam Boat Willie, Walt worked hard to create a fresh exciting new cartoon, even using his own voice for Mickey Mouse. In this achievement, Walt proved his genius by two things, firstly, that he was a great storyteller. He later explained, "I honestly feel that the heart of our organization is the story department. We must have good stories—we must have them well worked out—we must have people in there who can not only think up ideas, but who can carry them through…to completion."

And second, he was always fighting to develop technology—trying new things, taking risks, he raised the bar for animation by challenging his artists to do better. This was the basis for Disney Studios—and it gave Walt a new idea a crazy risky idea for a full length, full sound, Technicolor, Cartoon—Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. By 1934, the Disney staff had grown, in six years, from 6 to 187, and Walt Disney was about to make animation history.

Growing tired of only making short cartoons, Walt devised and presented to his team the radical idea of creating a full length animated feature. He knew what story he wanted to make. When Walt was fourteen, he had seen the silent movie of Snow White, starring Marguerite Clark. It was Walt’s first vivid memory of the movies, and he never forgot it. Inviting his animators into the sound studio one night, Walt told the story. Under a bare light bulb with his animators in a semicircle around him, he acted out each part in its turn, Snow White, The evil Queen, and each of the seven comical dwarves. At the end of the storytelling, the animators had tears in their eyes. Walt had instilled in them his excitement for the project and they began without delay. One of the biggest challenges Walt wanted to overcome was to figure out a method of making the cartoons more life-like and fluid.—they had no depth. Gradually, Walt began to develop a new camera called the “multi-plane camera.” A second problem surfaced when Walt realized that an animated feature running an hour-and-a-half would require 300 drawings total—an enormous amount! Walt informed the head of the Disney art school, and soon the studio was bursting with new talent. So much artistic and financial effort went into the film, and everyone wondered what the response would be at its release. Financially, the movie was an enormous endeavor. When Walt had announced his idea to Roy, who was the head of business, Roy was extremely apprehensive that they would have enough money to finish the film. Walt initial budget for the movie was $500,000, an amount that set Roy’s knees to buckling. It turned out that this estimate was absurdly low, and it turned out that the film would cost 3 times the original estimate. Before its release, people called it “Disney’s Folly” and predicted that it would send the studio into bankruptcy. However, Walt and his artists kept their faith in the picture. When it premiered on December 21, 1937, all the Hollywood big-wigs showed up to see the film. At the “Happily Ever After”, the audience stood and cheered. Years later, Walt reminisced,

All the Hollywood brass turned out for my cartoon! That was the thing. And it went way back to when I first came out here and I went to my first premiere. I’d never seen one in my life. I saw all these Hollywood celebrities comin’ in and I just had a funny feeling. I just hoped that someday they’d be going in to a premiere of a cartoon. Because people would depreciate the cartoon. You know, they’d kind of look down.

All their hard work and faith paid off. Audiences everywhere were enthralled. Animated film would never be the same.

Certainly Disney was an extraordinary man. In some ways, though, he started off seemingly ordinary, as a poor hard working creative boy, who drew on toilet paper. Childhood was an important time in Walt’s life as an artist. Another significant point in Walt’s artistic life was the distinct start of his career with Disney studios, bringing the world’s attention to Walt Disney like lightning. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves caused audiences and critics to expect great things from Walt time after time. And for many years, Disney delivered. Most importantly, Walt was willing to risk failure. When he first started off as an animator, he experienced failure repeatedly, but he didn’t let it stop him.He was not a cautious man, and his prerogative to step out into the unexplored was where his genius lay. What would happen to Disney Studios after Walt, the maker himself, died? When Walt Disney died one little boy remembers thinking in horror, “There will be no more Pinocchio!” Surely, he was not alone in this fear. The time between Snow White’s success and Walt’s death was filled with much success, change, and of course, Walt’s brilliant, if crazy, ideas. Expanding their medium, Disney Studios also began making live action films which were much cheaper than animated films. In this way, Disney kept their piggy bank full, at least full enough to supply funding for each next endeavor. One of these endeavors was the design, building, and opening of a completely Disney themed amusement park, Disney Land, which turned out to be a completely unprecedented and unexpected success. As always, Walt knew they could improve on Disney Land, and he began plans for Disney World. Sadly, Walt never saw the park open, before he passed away. It was his last great project. What happened after that? The time after Walt’s death is marked by three distinct periods. The first, lasting a strangling twenty years, was Disney’s decline, when they seem at a loss without they’re determined leader. Thankfully, they found their footing again and made a run of movies marking the Disney Renaissance. Thirdly, though not strictly a period of time, was the birth of Pixar Studios in 1995, the heart of animation moviemaking today.

Disney Studios after Walt Disney’s Death

Continually changing, moving, and growing, Disney studios, powered by Walt’s passion and his team’s enthusiasm and skill, had never slowed down, but had kept making better and better films with each year of artistic discoveries. But then, as in any of the Disney movies, the villain arrived in the form of lung cancer. Struggling with his health for years, Walt finally had to deal with his troubles. The doctors determined to remove the lung immediately when they found a walnut-sized tumor in one of Walt’s lungs. After two weeks recovering from the surgery, Walt was released from the hospital, but with a greatly pessimistic prognosis predicting Walt would live only two years more, perhaps less. Although Walt returned to the Studio the next day, by the end of the month he was back in the hospital. He died on December 16, 1966. But Disney Studios had to continue. In a statement to the public Roy Disney promised: "As President and Chairman of the Board of Walt Disney Productions,I want to assure the public, our stockholders, and each of our more than four thousand employees that we will continue to operate Walt Disney’s company in the way that he has established and guided it."

However, although Roy desired to hold to his brother’s standards and creative genius for animation, without Walt’s drive for the new and greater, Disney declined into a lower vein of movie making. Unfortunately, some of this was due to the new staff at Disney Studios, including Walt’s son in-law, Ron Miller, the new executive producer. Ron Miller was a cautious man, not a suitable trait for a man in the movies, and he began to turn out the same movies year after year. Many of the films were made for the masses, with safe stories and cookie-cutter characters. Trying to fine their footing with their genius leader gone, Disney lost some of Walt’s vigor and philosophy, but they would rise again, if after twenty years.

It wasn’t until 1989 that Disney surfaced, with the exciting, fun, and exotic feature, The Little Mermaid. Interestingly, it was the first Disney fairy tale feature created since Walt’s death. In one way, Disney had returned to home plate with this retelling, and yet they found a way to make this new feature totally unique from the others. Disney knew its audience again. They had changed, but Disney Studios was back on track. Following The Little Mermaid, were a few mediocre films, but it had breathed life back into Disney Studios. It was the beginning of the Disney Renaissance. Following The Little Mermaid were the now-classic Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, The Lion King, Mulan, and Tarzan. Truly one of the best Disney films ever created, Beauty and the Beast was even nominated for Best Picture of the Year at the Academy Awards, the first ever to receive such and honor. Beauty and the Beast also won Academy Awards for “Best Score” and “Original Song”. For years following, Disney became known for their capturing music, which brought these films to life. Monopolizing the Academy Awards for both “Best Score” and “Best Original Song”, Disney won for not only Beauty and the Beast, but also The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, and Pocahontas. After the days of the Disney Renaissance were over, Disney hit another ten year dry spot, returning the predictable formula following films of before. In 2010, Tangled, the tale of Rapunzel was released, recapturing audiences with some the most lovable comical character from Disney in a very long time, and it is certainly in the ranks of the great Disney films. Could this be the return of Disney? Since Walt’s death Disney Studios has had its ups and downs, producing films Walt would have been proud of—Beauty and the Beast, Tangled—and some that would have made him blush—The Black Cauldron, Oliver and Company.

Although Disney did make a comeback with some great films, the studio today who is truly upholding Walt’s philosophy of movie making, is Pixar Studios. Leaving animation job at Disney in 1984, John Lasseter joined George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, in his special effects computer group, which would later become Pixar. Over the next ten years, Pixar made commercials and short films much like the way Walt Disney had started. Their first feature film, Toy Story, released in 1995, was altogether groundbreaking—the first fully computer animated feature film. Pixar Studios pushed the envelope of art in technology and storytelling, which were the two things Walt Disney himself strived towards. Unforgettably, the characters of Toy Story were ones that children of the generation would come to call an important part of their childhood. It was pure genius, creating a film about characters that each child and adult knew well, Mrs. Potato Head, a Piggy Bank, a plastic Dinosaur, a space ranger, a cowboy doll, and one-hundred plastic, green, army men. With each successive film, Pixar has driven to get better and better—and they’ve done it. Pixar is also known for their clever short films. Before each of their feature films, a new animated short is played. In 2006, when Pixar had already released six fantastic films, the Walt Disney Company bought the studio. Telling the story of a grumpy old man flying his house to Paradise Falls by balloons, Up took its place as Pixar’s tenth animated feature, and was nominated for Best Picture of the year at the Academy Awards, only the second after Beauty and the Beast ever to be chosen. Significantly making its mark on movie making over the last sixteen years, Pixar would certainly have made Walt proud by their incentive to push their films to their best. They are the best story tellers in the movie making business, the most determined technologists in animation, and if Walt Disney were alive today he would be working right alongside them.

Although its founder, Walt Disney died, Disney Studios “kept moving forward” as they say in Disney’s Meet the Robinsons. After twenty years of uninspired movies after Walt’s Death, they found their footing again. The Disney Renaissance truly contained a few unforgettable movies, which spurred animation on in their technology and their stories. Undoubtedly , however, Pixar studios, the animation rookie, has not only held their own with Disney’s best movies, but have surpassed Disney Studios, in only ten years, by changing the way animation is produced and telling stories, as well as any Studio in history. Making their mark, as two distinctly important times, Disney Studios experienced failure and fortune after Walt’s death. Although the failure seemed to teach them and help them recreate a fresh feeling to their movies again, Disney Studios sadly slid back into a predictable method again, leaning on the cautious and sellable. Most significantly, since Walt Disney’s death, is the work of Pixar, who, like Walt Disney, have forced art farther, pushing, driving, and refining their work until it is gleaming gold. The thread of genius that Walt Disney Studios started may have dulled, but in art there’s always someone, like Pixar, to step up and creating things like never before—trying new techniques, taking new risks, and telling important truthful stories.

Surely, Walt Disney established a new medium during his life time, determining to make movies that young and old could both enjoy. The work he did during his life was novel and brilliant, partly because he was the first to take animation to the level that he did. Since then, Disney has always been the animation to which all other animation is measured. During his lifetime, Disney was primarily the mastermind behind the work, but after Disney died the Studio and the animators still went on. When Walt Disney died, it seemed that the first epoch of animation had ended. Thinking that they had the animation equation down, Disney studios attempted to copy what Walt had always done, but they failed because Walt had always been trying new things, experimenting, and testing the waters. He had never tried to do the same thing twice, unless to improve upon it. However, great movies did come from Disney Studios after Walt’s death--many mediocre movies, but a couple of gems. Presently, animation is at its zenith with Disney’s Pixar Studios, who hasn’t had a flop yet. One crucial thing that Walt Disney understood about animation was that it was an important medium that could do things that other art forms couldn’t—it wasn’t a lower form of moviemaking—or simple and cheap for children, as some might think. An animated film requires an enormous amount of people and a significant amount of money, as Walt discovered on his first feature, Snow White. Proof to this was the very first premiere of an animated movie, when an audience of adults cried at Snow White’s death and stood cheering at her victory. And recently, in the Pixar films Up and Toy Story 3, audiences everywhere laughed and cried time after time. Adults who watched Up cried when Mr. Fredrickson arrives in Paradise Falls in his house of flying balloons, and when Woody and Buzz wave goodbye to Andy at the end of Toy Story 3—there was a similar jolt in every stomach. Because it’s certainly not just a kid’s story—not just an animated cartoon. These scenes in these two movies could never have been done so effectively in any other style of moviemaking. Walt understood this, and from the beginning animated movies were a risky business, but he saw something invaluable in them. More than once he risked bankruptcy in the defense and discovery of the new, and mostly importantly, Walt believed that the Story Department was the Heart of his studio, and by combining great stories and technically exceptional animation, Disney is one of the most brilliant movie studios of all time.

Bibliography

Ford, Barbara. Walt Disney. New York: Walker and Company, 1989.

Simon, Charnan. Walt Disney: Creator of Magical Worlds. New York: Children’s Press, 1999.Thomas, Bob. Walt Disney: An American Original. New York: The Walt Disney Company, 1994.

“Synchronized Sound.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 2 Jan.2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sync_sound