Walter Elias Disney

                                                                         

I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing - that it was all started by a mouse.

Walter Elias Disney, known as Walt Disney was born in Chicago, Illinois on December 5^th, 1901. He died when he was only 65 years old on December 15^th, 1966 in California. He married one of his employees, Lilian Bounds on July 13, 1924 in Lewiston, Idaho. The married couple then had two daughters named, Diane and Sharon.

This famous person is the creator of the Mickey Mouse character and founder of Disneyland and Walt Disney World. He was an American entrepreneur, animator, voice actor, and film producer. He also introduced several developments in the production of cartoons. 

This legend has received over 950 honors and citations from all over the world, including 48 Academy Awards and 7 Emmys in his lifetime. Walt Disney’s personal awards included honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, the University of Southern California and UCLA. He has also won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Brazil’s Order of the Southern Cross and many more.

Walt was raised on a farm near Marceline, Missouri. At a young age, he became very interested in drawing, and he then started selling his sketches to his neighbors when he was only seven years old. He went to McKinley High School in Chicago where he divided his attention between drawing and photography as well as committing to the school’s newspaper. While attending high school, he also attended night classes at the Academy of Fine Arts.

During the fall of 1918, Disney tried to join the military but he was shot down because he was only 16 years old, at the time. He then decided to join the Red Cross and was sent overseas, where he spent a year driving an ambulance and driving Red Cross officials. His ambulance was covered from front to back with drawings and cartoons instead of camouflage.

After the war, Walt returned to his hometown in Kansas City where he began his career as an advertising cartoonist. In 1920, he created and marketed his first original animated cartoons, and later he developed a new method for combining live-action and animation.

In August of 1923, Walt Disney left Kansas City for Hollywood with only a few drawing materials, $40 in his pocket and a completed animated and live-action film. He then met his brother Roy O. Disney in California who already lived there; he then gave $250 to Walt. They borrowed an additional $500 and constructed a camera stand in their uncle’s garage. Later on, they received an order from New York for the first « Alice Comedy » after that the brothers began their production operation near Hollywood in a real estate office two blocks away.

It took some time for Walt to perfect the art of animation. The company Technicolor was introduced to animation during the production of his Silly Symphonies. In 1932, the film entitled Flowers and Trees won Walt the first of his 32 personal Academy Awards. In 1937, he released The Old Mill, the first short subject to utilize the multiplane camera technique.

On December 21 of the year 1937, Snow white and the Seven Dwarfs[1], the first full-length animated musical feature, premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles. The movie was produced at the cost of $1499000 during the depths of the Great Depression. To this day, the film is still accounted as one of the great feats and imperishable monuments of the motion picture industry. During the next five years, Walt completed other full-length animated classics, such as Pinocchio[2], Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi.

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[1] First post on my blog.

[2] Second post on my blog.