Walt Disney

Walter Elias Disney (December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) was an American animator, film producer, voice actor, and entrepreneur. He was a pioneer of the American animation industry, and he introduced several 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 received two Golden Globe Special Achievement Awards and an Emmy Award, along with other honors. Several of his films are part of the National Film Registry kept by the Library of Congress, and 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. He became interested in drawing as a boy and took art classes. At 18, he got a job as a commercial illustrator. In the early 1920s he moved to California and set up the Disney Brothers Studio, now the Walt Disney Company, with his brother Roy. Working with Ub Iwerks, he developed the character Mickey Mouse in 1928, his first very popular success. He also provided Mickey's voice in the early years.

As the studio grew, Disney tried new ideas. He introduced synchronized sound, full-color three-strip Technicolor, animated feature films, and technical developments in cameras. Films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio, 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, including 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, whose centre was to be a new kind of city called the "Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow" (EPCOT). Disney was a heavy smoker throughout his life and died of lung cancer in 1966, before either the park or the EPCOT project was finished.

In private, Disney was a shy and insecure man who was hard on himself, but in public he had a warm and outgoing personality. 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 considered 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, and 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, and Flora (née Call), an American of German and English descent. His brothers were Herbert, Raymond and Roy, and 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 purchased 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 work with watercolors and crayons, and 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 described his childhood in Marceline as one of the happiest and most important periods of his life, and he drew inspiration from the town for several of his future projects.

In 1911, the Disneys moved to Kansas City, Missouri. There, Disney attended the Benton Grammar School, where he met fellow student Walter Pfeiffer. Walter's family loved theatre and introduced Disney to vaudeville and motion pictures. 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, and Disney and Roy woke up at 4:30 every morning to deliver the Times before school. They then repeated the route for the evening Star after school. The schedule was tiring, and Disney often received poor grades after falling asleep in class, but he kept the paper route for more than six years. He also attended 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 producer, the O-Zell Company, and the family moved back to Chicago. Disney enrolled at McKinley High School, where he became the cartoonist of the school newspaper and drew patriotic pictures about World War I. In mid-1918, he tried to join the United States Army to fight the Germans, but he was rejected as too young. After forging the date of birth on his birth certificate, he joined the Red Cross in September 1918 as an ambulance driver. He was sent to France but arrived in November, after the armistice. He drew cartoons on the side of his ambulance for decoration, and some of his work was published in the army newspaper Stars and Stripes.

Career

Disney started out in Kansas City in 1919, working as an artist and becoming friends with Ub Iwerks. He became interested in animation and began experimenting with it at home. In 1921 he set up Laugh-O-Gram Studio, but the company went bankrupt in 1923. He then moved to Hollywood, where he and his brother Roy formed the Disney Brothers Studio. Disney and Iwerks created Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, but in 1928 Disney lost the character and most of his animators. Disney and Iwerks then developed Mickey Mouse, whose first appearance came in 1928. Disney used sound in the cartoon Steamboat Willie, and the studio's cartoons became very popular. Disney later made the animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which was successful with audiences. The studio then faced money problems, especially when World War II hurt its earnings from Europe.

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

Illness, death and aftermath

Disney had been a heavy smoker since World War I. In early November 1966, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and treated with cobalt therapy. Believing the treatment had worked, he returned to work. On November 30 he felt unwell and was taken by ambulance to St. Joseph Hospital. There, on December 15, at age 65, he died of circulatory collapse caused by the cancer. Two days later his remains were cremated, and his ashes were placed at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

After Disney's death, his studios kept making live-action films, but the quality of their animated films declined. In the late 1980s, The New York Times described a turn around, the "Disney Renaissance," which began with The Little Mermaid in 1989. Disney's plans for the futuristic city of EPCOT never happened. His brother Roy changed the project from a town into an attraction, and Epcot Center opened in 1982 as a park more like a permanent world's fair. In 2009, the Walt Disney Family Museum opened in the Presidio of San Francisco, displaying thousands of artifacts 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 films or Hollywood social life. The couple had two daughters, Diane and Sharon, and 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.

Disney became more politically conservative as he grew older. He supported the Democratic Party until the 1940 presidential election, when he switched to the Republican Party. In 1947, during the Second Red Scare, he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and named former animators who had led a 1941 strike against his studio as communist agitators. People who knew Disney described him as shy and self-deprecating, 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

Views of Disney and his work have changed over the decades, and people have very different opinions. Mark Langer, in the American Dictionary of National Biography, writes that earlier writers praised Disney as a patriot, folk artist, and popularizer of culture, but 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 call Disney "a cynical manipulator of cultural and commercial formulas," and PBS notes that critics have pointed to the work's "smooth façade of sentimentality" and its feel-good rewriting of American history. Watts argues that many of Disney's post-World War II films "legislated a kind of cultural Marshall Plan" and spread a friendly cultural imperialism across the world. Film historian Jay P. Telotte notes that many see the studio as an "agent of manipulation and repression," although it has worked to link its name with fun, family, and fantasy. In 1971, Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart wrote How to Read Donald Duck, arguing that imperialist values were hidden behind the innocent image of Disney's world. John Tomlinson sees their argument as flawed, because they assume that reading American comics has a direct teaching effect.

Disney was accused of antisemitism because he gave Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl a tour of 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, to recover over 135,000 Reichsmarks owed by his German film distributor. 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 highly unlikely. Gabler describes Disney as apolitical during the 1930s. During World War II, Disney made propaganda 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 ethnic stereotypes, but that Disney gave regularly 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, and Robert B. Sherman and his brother Richard recalled that Disney fired a lawyer who made antisemitic remarks 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 racially insensitive material. The film Song of the South was criticized by the NAACP for its black stereotypes, but Disney became close friends with its star, James Baskett, and campaigned for an Honorary Academy Award for him, making Baskett the first black actor so honored. 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 fictional work about Disney's later years, which Philip Glass adapted into the opera The Perfect American. Several 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 industrialists 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, which are both records. He was nominated for three Golden Globe Awards but did not win them. He was given two Special Achievement Awards, for Bambi (1942) and The Living Desert (1953), and the Cecil B. DeMille Award. He received four Emmy Award nominations and won once, for Best Producer for the Disneyland television series. Several of his films were named by the Library of Congress to the United States National Film Registry as culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. In 1998, the American Film Institute published a list of the 100 greatest American films, based on the opinions of industry experts. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was number 49 on that list, and Fantasia was number 58.

In February 1960, Disney was honored with two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for movies and one for television. He was also inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1986 and the California Hall of Fame in 2006. In 2014 he was the first person to receive a star on the Anaheim walk of stars, and in 2023 he was part of the first class of the Orange County Hall of Fame. The Walt Disney Family Museum says that he, along with his staff, received more than 950 honors from around the world. He was made a Chevalier in France's Légion d'honneur in 1935. Other national awards 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 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1968, after his death. In 1955, the National Audubon Society gave him its highest honor for promoting an understanding of 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.