Walt Disney

Walter Elias Disney (December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) was an American animator, film producer, voice actor, and businessman. He was a pioneer of the American animation industry, and he helped invent new ways of making cartoons. As a film producer, he holds the record for the most Academy Awards won (22) and nominations (59) by any one person. He also won two Golden Globe Special Achievement Awards and an Emmy Award, along with other honors. Some of his films are part of the National Film Registry, which is kept by the Library of Congress. The American Film Institute has named some of them among the greatest films ever made.

Disney was born in Chicago in 1901 and grew up mostly in Missouri. As a boy he liked drawing and took art classes. At 18, he got a job as a commercial illustrator, making pictures for businesses. In the early 1920s he moved to California and started the Disney Brothers Studio, which is now the Walt Disney Company. He started it with his brother Roy. Working with Ub Iwerks, he created the character Mickey Mouse in 1928. Mickey was his first very popular success. In the early years, Disney also gave Mickey his voice.

As the studio grew, Disney tried new ideas. He introduced synchronized sound, full-color three-strip Technicolor, animated feature films, and improvements to cameras. Films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio and Fantasia (both 1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi (1942) helped move animated film forward. After World War II, the studio made more animated and live-action films. These included Cinderella (1950), Sleeping Beauty (1959), and Mary Poppins (1964), which won five Academy Awards.

In the 1950s, Disney expanded into the theme park business. In July 1955 he opened Disneyland in Anaheim, California. To help pay for it, he made television programs such as Walt Disney's Disneyland and The Mickey Mouse Club. He also helped plan the 1959 Moscow Fair, the 1960 Winter Olympics, and the 1964 New York World's Fair. In 1965 he began work on another theme park, Disney World. Its centre was going to be a new kind of city called the "Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow" (EPCOT). Disney smoked heavily for most of his life. He died of lung cancer in 1966, before either the park or the EPCOT project was finished.

In private, Disney was shy and often unsure of himself, and he was hard on himself. In public, he was warm and friendly. He had high standards for the people he worked with. Some people have accused him of being racist or antisemitic, but many who knew him said these accusations were not true. Today he is widely seen as one of the most influential cultural figures of the 20th century. He remains an important part of the history of animation and the cultural history of the United States. His company has grown into one of the world's largest mass media and entertainment conglomerates.

Early life and education

Walter Elias Disney was born on December 5, 1901, at 1249 N Tripp Avenue in the Hermosa neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, United States. He was the fourth son of Elias Disney, who was born in the Province of Canada to Anglo-Irish parents. His mother was Flora (née Call), an American of German and English descent. His brothers were Herbert, Raymond and Roy. His sister Ruth was born in December 1903. In 1906, when Disney was four, the family moved to a farm in Marceline, Missouri, where his uncle Robert had just bought land. In Marceline, Disney became interested in drawing when he was paid to draw the horse of a retired neighborhood doctor. His father subscribed to the Appeal to Reason newspaper, and Disney practiced drawing by copying the front-page cartoons of Ryan Walker. He also learned to paint with watercolors and crayons. He became fascinated with trains that ran near the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway line. The Disney family were active members of a Congregational church. Disney later said that his childhood in Marceline was one of the happiest and most important times of his life. He drew ideas from the town for several of his later projects.

In 1911, the Disneys moved to Kansas City, Missouri. There, Disney attended the Benton Grammar School, where he met a classmate named Walter Pfeiffer. Walter's family loved theatre and introduced Disney to vaudeville and movies. Before long, Disney was spending more time at the Pfeiffers' house than at home. His father had bought a newspaper delivery route for The Kansas City Star and Kansas City Times. Disney and Roy woke up at 4:30 every morning to deliver the Times before school. After school, they delivered the evening Star. The schedule was tiring, and Disney often got poor grades after falling asleep in class. Even so, he kept the paper route for more than six years. He also went to Saturday classes at the Kansas City Art Institute and took a correspondence course in cartooning. In 1917, his father bought stock in a Chicago jelly company, the O-Zell Company, and the family moved back to Chicago. Disney enrolled at McKinley High School. There he became the cartoonist for the school newspaper and drew patriotic pictures about World War I. In mid-1918, he tried to join the United States Army so he could fight the Germans, but he was turned away for being too young. He changed the date of birth on his birth certificate by forging the date of birth. Then he joined the Red Cross in September 1918 as an ambulance driver. He was sent to France, but he arrived in November, after the armistice. He drew cartoons on the side of his ambulance to decorate it. Some of his drawings were published in the army newspaper Stars and Stripes.

Career

Disney started out in Kansas City in 1919, working as an artist. He became friends with Ub Iwerks. He became interested in animation and tried making it at home. In 1921 he started Laugh-O-Gram Studio, but the company closed in 1923. He then moved to Hollywood, where he and his brother Roy started the Disney Brothers Studio. Disney and Iwerks created Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. In 1928, Disney lost the character and most of his animators. Disney and Iwerks then created Mickey Mouse, who first appeared in 1928. Disney added sound to the cartoon Steamboat Willie, and the studio's cartoons became very popular. Disney later made the animated movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which many people enjoyed. Later, the studio had money problems, especially when World War II made it harder to earn money from Europe.

After the war, Disney made more live-action movies and worked on other projects. He also started building theme parks. In 1955, Disneyland opened in Anaheim. In 1965, Disney announced plans for another park near Orlando, Florida, called Walt Disney World. The center of this park was going to be the EPCOT community. Disney also made the movie Mary Poppins in 1964. It became one of the most successful Disney movies of the 1960s.

Illness, death and aftermath

Disney had been a heavy smoker since World War I. In early November 1966, he was told he had lung cancer. He was treated with cobalt therapy. He believed the treatment had worked, so he went back to work. On November 30 he felt unwell and was taken by ambulance to St. Joseph Hospital. On December 15, at age 65, he died. His body had stopped working well because of the cancer, which caused circulatory collapse. Two days later his body was cremated, and his ashes were placed at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

After Disney died, his studios kept making live-action films, but their animated films were not as strong. In the late 1980s, The New York Times wrote about a comeback called the "Disney Renaissance." It began with The Little Mermaid in 1989. Disney's plans for a futuristic city called EPCOT never happened. His brother Roy changed the project from a town into an attraction. Epcot Center opened in 1982 as a park that was more like a permanent world's fair. In 2009, the Walt Disney Family Museum opened in the Presidio of San Francisco. It shows thousands of items from Disney's life and career.

Personal life and character

In 1925, Disney hired an ink artist named Lillian Bounds. They married that July at her brother's house in her hometown of Lewiston, Idaho. Lillian was not very interested in movies or Hollywood parties. The couple had two daughters, Diane and Sharon. The Disneys kept their daughters out of the public eye as much as they could, especially after the Lindbergh kidnapping. In 1949, the family moved to Holmby Hills. With help from friends Ward and Betty Kimball, Disney built a small live steam railroad, the Carolwood Pacific Railroad, in his backyard. He named its engine Lilly Belle after his wife.

As he grew older, Disney became more politically conservative. He supported the Democratic Party until the 1940 presidential election. Then he switched to the Republican Party. In 1947, during the Second Red Scare, he spoke to the House Un-American Activities Committee. He named former animators who had led a strike against his studio in 1941 as communist agitators. People who knew Disney said he was shy and modest, even though his public image was very different. He also had very high expectations of his staff, so when he said "That'll work," it was high praise.

Reputation

Opinions about Disney and his work have changed over the decades, and people have very different views. Mark Langer, in the American Dictionary of National Biography, writes that early writers praised Disney as a patriot, a folk artist, and someone who shared culture with many people. More recently, he has been seen as a symbol of American imperialism and intolerance, and as someone who lowered the quality of culture. Steven Watts says some people call Disney "a cynical manipulator of cultural and commercial formulas." PBS notes that critics have pointed to the work's "smooth façade of sentimentality" and its warm but unrealistic telling of American history. Watts argues that many of Disney's films after World War II "legislated a kind of cultural Marshall Plan" and spread a friendly cultural imperialism around the world. Film historian Jay P. Telotte notes that many people see the studio as an "agent of manipulation and repression," even though it has worked to connect its name with fun, family, and fantasy. In 1971, Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart wrote How to Read Donald Duck, arguing that hidden political ideas were behind the innocent image of Disney's world. John Tomlinson disagrees with their argument, because they assume that reading American comics has a direct effect on what children learn.

Disney was accused of antisemitism because he welcomed Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl to his studio a month after Kristallnacht. The visit was arranged by painter and ballet dancer Hurbert "Jay" Stowitts, a close friend of Riefenstahl and a former colleague of Leopold Stokowski, who was working with Disney on Fantasia at the time. A Disney spokesperson told the New York Daily News that Riefenstahl "crashed the gate." Animation historian Jim Korkis suggested Disney may also have met her for money reasons, because his German film distributor owed him a large sum of Reichsmarks. Art Babbitt, who organized the 1941 strike at the studio, later claimed he saw Disney attend German American Bund meetings, but Disney biographer Neal Gabler says this was very unlikely. Gabler describes Disney as apolitical during the 1930s. During World War II, Disney made films against the Nazis, such as Der Fuehrer's Face and Education for Death, and training films for the United States Government and the United States Armed Forces. The Walt Disney Family Museum notes that some early cartoons included unfair ethnic stereotypes, but that Disney often gave money to Jewish charities and was named 1955 "Man of the Year" by the B'nai B'rith chapter in Beverly Hills. Jewish story man Joe Grant said there was no evidence of antisemitism. Robert B. Sherman and his brother Richard recalled that Disney fired a lawyer who made unkind remarks about Jewish people toward them. Gabler concludes that the reputation came from Disney's link to the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, an anti-Communist group.

Disney has also been accused of racism because some of his productions contain material that many people find hurtful toward races. The film Song of the South was criticized by the NAACP for its black stereotypes. However, Disney became close friends with its star, James Baskett, and worked to get an Honorary Academy Award for him, making Baskett the first black actor to receive it. Floyd Norman, the studio's first black animator, said he never saw the racist behavior Disney was often accused of. Disney's daughter Diane Disney-Miller also recalled that her father supported her sister's relationship with a Jewish boyfriend.

Disney has appeared in many fictional works. H. G. Wells mentions him in The Holy Terror (1938), and Len Cariou and Tom Hanks played him in a 1995 TV film and in Saving Mr. Banks (2013). Peter Stephan Jungk wrote a made-up story about Disney's later years, which Philip Glass turned into the opera The Perfect American. Many commentators have called Disney a cultural icon. The Times described his films as "wholesome, warm-hearted and entertaining," Bosley Crowther compared his success to the most successful business leaders in history, and Alistair Cooke called him a "folk-hero." In December 2021, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened a three-month special exhibit in his honor called "Inspiring Walt Disney."

Awards and honors

See also: List of Academy Awards for Walt Disney

Disney received 59 Academy Award nominations and won 22 awards. These are both record numbers. He was nominated for three Golden Globe Awards, but he did not win them. He received two Special Achievement Awards, one for Bambi (1942) and one for The Living Desert (1953). He also received the Cecil B. DeMille Award. He was nominated for four Emmy Award and won one, for Best Producer of the Disneyland television series. The Library of Congress named several of his films to the United States National Film Registry. These films were chosen because they are important to American culture, history, or art. In 1998, the American Film Institute made a list of the 100 greatest American films, based on the opinions of experts in the film industry. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was number 49 on that list, and Fantasia was number 58.

In February 1960, Disney received two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for movies and one for television. He was also added to the Television Hall of Fame in 1986 and the California Hall of Fame in 2006. In 2014, he became the first person to receive a star on the Anaheim walk of stars. In 2023, he was part of the first group honored by the Orange County Hall of Fame. The Walt Disney Family Museum says that he and his staff received more than 950 honors from around the world. In 1935, he was made a Chevalier in France's Légion d'honneur. He also received other national awards. These included Thailand's Order of the Crown, Germany's Order of Merit, Brazil's Order of the Southern Cross, and Mexico's Order of the Aztec Eagle. In the United States, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. He received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1968, after he had died. In 1955, the National Audubon Society gave him its highest honor. This was for helping people understand nature through his True-Life Adventures films. An asteroid discovered by astronomer Lyudmila Karachkina in 1980 was named 4017 Disneya in his honor. He also received honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, the University of Southern California, and the University of California, Los Angeles.