Disney Company

Disney Company, American corporation best known as a purveyor of family entertainment. During the 20th and early 21st centuries, it became one of the world’s largest media conglomerates, with such holdings as ABC, ESPN, Pixar, Marvel Entertainment, and 20th Century Studios. Disney headquarters are in Burbank, California.

Early years and Mickey Mouse

Walt Disney began his career in animation with the Kansas City Film Ad Company in Missouri in 1920. In 1922 Disney and his friend Ub Iwerks, a gifted animator, founded the Laugh-O-gram Films studio in Kansas City and began producing a series of cartoons based on fables and fairy tales. Joining Disney and Iwerks in the enterprise were such noted animators as Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising, and Isadore (“Friz”) Freleng. In 1923 Disney produced the short subject Alice in Cartoonland, a film combining both live action and animation that was intended to be the pilot film in a series. Within weeks of its completion, Disney filed for bankruptcy and left Kansas City to establish himself in Hollywood as a cinematographer. Alice in Cartoonland turned out to be a surprise hit, and orders from distributors for more Alice films compelled Disney to reopen shop in Hollywood with the help of his brother Roy—a lifelong business partner. The Kansas City team soon joined the Disneys in California, and the company produced mostly Alice films for the next four years.

In 1927 Disney began his first series of fully animated films, featuring the character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. When his distributor appropriated the rights to the character, Disney altered Oswald’s appearance and created a new character that he named Mortimer Mouse; at the urging of his wife, Disney rechristened him Mickey Mouse. Two silent Mickey Mouse cartoons—Plane Crazy (1928) and Gallopin’ Gaucho (1928)—were produced before Disney employed the novelty of sound for the third Mickey production, Steamboat Willie (1928), which was the first Mickey cartoon released. The film was an immediate sensation and led to the studio’s dominance in the animated market for many years.

Throughout the 1930s the company, renamed Walt Disney Productions in 1929, produced cartoons featuring Mickey Mouse and his regular supporting players Donald Duck, Pluto, and Goofy, as well as the Silly Symphonies series—semiabstract cartoons featuring animation set to classical music or to the music of Carl Stalling, the musician who scored many of the best Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons. The Silly Symphonies entry Flowers and Trees (1932) was the first cartoon produced in the three-colour Technicolor process, as well as the first animated short subject to be honoured with an Academy Award. The most popular of the Silly Symphonies cartoons was The Three Little Pigs (1933), which earned another Oscar.

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Animated film classics: Snow White to Lady and the Tramp

The continuing success of the studio emboldened Disney to make his riskiest move in 1934, when he began production on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Although not the first feature-length animated cartoon—that honour probably goes to Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)—it was the first to receive widespread release and publicity. As much of a sensation as Steamboat Willie had been, Snow White revolutionized the industry and proved animation’s effectiveness as a vehicle for feature-length stories. Disney advocated a realistic approach to the medium, as opposed to the anarchic style of other animation studios. Scenes in Disney cartoons were composed and framed as they would be for a live-action film, and surreal aspects of the characters were kept to a minimum. Although this approach provoked the criticism that Disney discouraged experimentation and limited animation’s possibilities, there is little question of its success in Snow White and the animated features that followed.

Pinocchio (1940) features complex characters rendered in painstakingly detailed full-figure animation, and it represented a landmark in Disney’s evolution. Fantasia (1940) is a series of abstract vignettes set to classical compositions; it is derided by some for its portentousness and praised by others for its visual virtuosity. Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942) are also landmark accomplishments in their use of the devices Disney had first brought together in Pinocchio: music, comedy, pathos, adventure, and genuine horror. This last element was a key ingredient in Disney’s features, as Disney himself felt that young people could tolerate evil antagonists and scenes of unpleasantness, provided that the forces of good triumphed in the end.

Meanwhile, Disney’s studio animators were seeking the right to unionize, which Disney saw as a betrayal. After months of organizing and negotiating with Disney, many of the studio’s top animators were fired in 1941, and hundreds of the remaining workers went on strike. Federal mediators eventually brought both sides to an agreement that included many of the workers’ demands. The unique enthusiasm of the studio’s early years had now changed, and for the next decade Disney concentrated on short cartoons, nature documentaries, and features that combined live action and animation such as The Three Caballeros (1945) and Song of the South (1946).

The feature-length cartoons Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), and Peter Pan (1953), created during a period when Mary Blair was an art director, represented a significant new design direction for the company’s animated films. After she left the company in 1953, the more traditionally animated Lady and the Tramp (1955) was released, but Disney’s attention was by then increasingly devoted to live-action features, television productions, and his new theme park, Disneyland, which opened in 1955 in Anaheim, California. It was also about then that Disney established the distribution company Buena Vista Productions in order to ensure complete control over his films and their marketing.