Walt Disney’s entire life was like a roller coaster – the most fruitful periods were followed by tragic slumps. December 5, 1901 in the family of a carpenter and a teacher was born the fourth of five children – Walter Elias. Walt’s father had Irish-Canadian roots and his mother German-American roots. Chicago, where they lived, had by then managed to become not only the largest industrial, but also the most criminal city in the States, and the family moved to the small town of Marceline, Missouri, where they purchased a farm. Walt was 4.
There was no money for pencils and paper, and he wanted to draw
Walt found tar and a stick and drew a house. One of his neighbors paid him 25 cents for drawing his horse on a piece of paper. Disney later believed that it was a successful portrait of Dr. Sherwood’s mare that gave him the idea to become an artist. He started selling his first comic books at the age of 7, took part in the creation of the school newspaper as an artist and photographer, attended the Academy of Fine Arts in the evenings and took a course of newspaper cartoonists. When Walt turned 10, the family moved to Kansas City in search of a living. There was a giant rich mansion behind a high fence, surrounded by a lush garden. All the local kids were anxious to crawl in through some secret crawlspace.
Walt vowed that when he grew up, he would build a huge house with entertainment for the children and a huge garden to play in. Thus was born the dream that 40 years later became Disneyland.
Everyone probably knows the famous fairy tale screensaver of Walt Disney’s cartoons and movies. In the fall of 1918, Walt volunteered for the Red Cross and was sent overseas, where he spent a year working as an ambulance driver. Upon his return, he managed to enroll at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he discovered that his true talents were in the field of comprehension and project coordination. He wanted to get out of that building sooner, and start working on his own. He took a job with a restaurant firm that needed some fun advertising drawings as signage. Walt by then seriously interested in animation, quit unpromising work and with $ 40 in his pocket went to Hollywood.
The idea of creating cartoons became obsessive. Desperate to get a job, he rented his uncle’s garage, placing in it everything necessary. Together with his brother Roy, they create Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, where Walt’s future wife Lillian Bounds soon came to work, and on October 16, 1923, he signed a contract with distributor Margaret Winkler, changing the name. This date is considered the day of the founding of the current Walt Disney Company.
On March 1, 1924, Disney presented its first stunt film, Alice’s Day at Sea, based on the book by Lewis Carroll. Alas, the contract was written so that it was the distributor, not the author, who owned the rights to the cartoon characters. Winkler managed to poach 4 artists studio and planned to produce cartoons about the famous by then famous Oswald the rabbit without the participation of the creator, that is, Walt. It was a bitter, but useful lesson for Disney, who has since closely monitored that the rights to all his creations belonged only to him.
Walt immediately invented a new star – Mickey Mouse and as soon as the sound movie appeared, immediately adopted the experience of colleagues and began to voice cartoons. The third film in the series, already with sound, was released on November 18, 1928 and was the beginning of the era of Mickey Mouse.
In parallel, Walt Disney launched the production of “Silly Symphonies” and it was a cartoon from this series won in 1932 for the studio’s first Oscar as the best drawn film. From then until the end of the pre-war decade, Disney won an Oscar every year!
It turned out that cartoon characters could be a good source of income and portraits of Mickey Mouse and other characters began to appear literally everywhere. This brought good money and promoted promotion. In 1937, the screens came out “Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs”, for a long time becoming the highest-grossing movie of all time, its record was overtaken only by “Gone with the Wind”.
In 1925, Walt married Lillian, in 1933, after two miscarriages, a daughter Diane Merry was born, and in 1937 the couple adopted a girl Sharon May. Diane always claimed that his father was a model family man, but about his affair with actress Dolores del Rio was known to everyone in Hollywood. No reporter dared to ruin his reputation in gratitude for the fact that Disney created a world of happiness for everyone. Meanwhile, Disney was an ardent anti-communist and did not hide it. And in 1938 he was accused of anti-Semitism after he gave Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favorite actress, a tour of his studio.
“The Great Depression” had almost no effect on the work of Disney, money only became more. In 1954, the Disney Company began to produce and television programs, becoming one of the pioneers of first black and white, and then color television in the United States.
In 1953 Disney managed to persuade 17 families to sell him land 50 kilometers south of Los Angeles, and July 17, 1955 was the grand opening of “Disneyland”, its own fairy-tale kingdom, completely original, and unlike anything else, laid on 4 basic principles:
- restore the magical realm of Disney’s cartoons;
- add a variety of tricks;
- exciting rides;
- and a fun theme park for the whole family.
Special attention was paid to safety, courtesy, and cleanliness. It cost $17 million to build, but the entire investment has paid for itself tenfold. Over 200 million people visited the park in the first 25 years of its existence. In 1983 “Disneyland” will appear in Tokyo, and in 1992 – in Paris. The next serious project was the California Institute of the Arts, founded by Disney in 1961, where they studied music, painting, theater, sculpture, cinematography, fashion.
And on December 15, 1966, Walt Disney died of lung cancer, leaving unfulfilled ideas and “city of the future” and “university for creative youth”.
He left his successors many projects and ideas, and their gradual realization allowed the company to keep the leading place in the world entertainment industry won during the founder’s lifetime for another 20 years without any problems!