Walt Disney

Humor and Respect During Hard Times

Walt’s mother Flora took great delight in the youthful innocence of her children, while his father Elias demanded much more from them. In the most serious of times, everyone could rely on Walt, a prankster, to lighten the mood. “My mother had a terrific sense of humor. My dad was sort of straight-laced and very slow to catch on to a gag, a joke—but when he did, he would laugh until he had tears in his eyes.”

When Walt was in high school, Elias couldn’t understand his son’s ambition to become a cartoonist. But to his credit, he agreed to pay for Walt’s extracurricular art classes at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts.

But when Walt decided to join the war effort, Elias put his foot down and chose not to sign an affidavit to verify his son’s age. “The boy is determined.” Flora said. “I would rather sign this and know where he is than have him run off.”

For Elias, nothing counted more than his family. Underneath it all, Walt knew his father meant well: “But, you know, all of these things that happened. I had a tremendous respect for him, I always did. In spite of his arguments, I worshipped him.”

First quote and third quote: excerpts from Walt Disney: Interview by Pete Martin transcripts. Second quote: excerpt from the book Walt Disney: An American Original.

A Lifetime of Brotherly Love

Ever since Roy got the chore of pushing Walt around in a baby buggy, they had always had a special kinship. Throughout Walt’s childhood, he admired his big brother, and Roy kept a watchful eye on him. They were more than brothers—they were great friends.

When Walt headed to Hollywood for a fresh start, he had one particular goal in mind. “I wanted Roy and I to be partners, that was all. I mean, we just wanted to be partners—I wanted it.” And, with the establishment of the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in 1923, his dearest wish was fulfilled.

“Roy had a faith in me—the same as he did when I was in Kansas City and he’d send me those checks. And I think that Roy has done a lot of things there against his better judgment, because he felt that I wanted to do it.”

As a team, Walt spearheaded the creative aspects, while Roy took care of the business side of things. “My brother Walt and I first went into business together almost a half century ago. And he was really, in my opinion, truly a genius—a creative, with great determination, singleness of purpose, and drive.”

First and second quotes: excerpts from museum website blog In Walt’s Own Words: His Brother Roy. Third quote: excerpt from the book Walt Disney: An American Original.

Darling Husband, Dearest Daddy

Walt swore he would never marry until he reached 25 and had saved $10,000. He tossed out that notion as soon as he met Lillian Bounds, a studio inker. The young couple tied the knot on July 13, 1925.

“I think that Dad was smitten with my mother almost immediately. It was probably mutual. It was a sweet courtship.”—Diane Disney Miller

For some time, Walt and Lilly struggled to start a family, but in December 1933, they were overjoyed with the birth of their first child, Diane Marie.  Three years later, Diane got a little sister, Sharon Mae.

Walt held that a man should never neglect his family for business. True to his beliefs, he rarely brought work home. In fact, he and Lilly tried their best at providing a normal life for their two daughters. Walt was a family man who loved coming home and looked forward to Daddy’s Day on the weekends. He even drove his girls to school every day until they were old enough to drive themselves.

“We weren’t raised with the idea that this is a great man who is doing things that no one else had ever done. He was Daddy. He was a man who went to work every morning and came home every night.”— Sharon Mae Disney

Diane’s quote: excerpt from museum text panel. Sharon’s quote: excerpt from Gallery 10 wall.

The Rocky Road to California

Upon landing his first art job, Walt rushed to tell his beloved Aunt Margaret: “Auntie, they’re paying me to draw!” When he was laid off a month later, his career as a commercial artist was off to a rocky start. Walt started a small business with a fellow artist, Ubbe Iwwerks, later known as Ub Iwerks, but the two brought in little work. Reluctantly, Walt took a job at the Kansas City Film Ad Company—a fortuitous decision, for it was there that he learned about animation.

Walt left his job to form his first animation studio, Laugh-O-gram Films, Inc. Young and inexperienced, he entered into a bad business deal that eventually cost him his company—a huge lesson he would take with him to Hollywood. “The day I got on that Santa Fe California Limited, I was just free and happy. But I’d failed. I think it’s important to have a good hard failure when you’re young.”

Walt arrived in Hollywood with $40 in his pocket and a coat and a pair of trousers that didn’t match. But in no time, he was back on his feet with a new deal and a new company. The Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio was in high gear with the Alice Comedies.

First quote: excerpt from the book The Man, The Magic, The Memories. Second quote: excerpt from the book Picturing The Walt Disney Museum.

Disney’s Folly

The success of the Silly Symphonies gave Walt the courage to make Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He reasoned, “The short subject was just a filler on any program. So I felt I had to diversify my business. Now if I could crack the feature-length field, I could do things.”

On June 3, 1934, The New York Times announced Walt was in the process of his first feature-length film. Industry insiders sneered at the very thought of it, calling the project Disney’s Folly. “You should have heard the howls of warning!” Walt exclaimed. “It was prophesied that nobody would sit through a cartoon an hour and a half long. But we decided there was only one way we could successfully do it and that was to go for broke—shoot the works.”

As the months turned into years, the budget continued to skyrocket as production fell further behind—and still, there would be no compromise.

On December 21, 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs opened to critical acclaim. Walt’s wild gamble became a box office sensation. “We realized we were in a new business. We had been heavily in debt and within six months, we had millions in the bank.” 

First quote: excerpt from website timeline. Second and third quotes: excerpts from the book  Walt Disney: Famous Quotes.

Built with Determination

By the 1950s, amusement parks had earned a bad reputation for being unkempt and unsafe. Regardless, Walt was determined to pursue his dream of Disneyland.

“I couldn’t get anybody to go along with me. But I kept working on it and I worked on it with my own money.” Walt even hocked his own life insurance. In 1952 he self-funded a private company and used his initials to name it WED Enterprises, Inc., now known as Walt Disney Imagineering.

Still needing to secure investors, Walt turned to one of his studio artists, Herb Ryman, for help. In what would become a 48-hour weekend marathon, Herb illustrated a spectacular rendering of the park while Walt described every aspect of it in precise detail.

“Almost everyone warned us that Disneyland would be a Hollywood spectacular—a spectacular failure. But they were thinking about an amusement park, and we believed in our idea: a family park where parents and children could have fun—together.”

Disneyland opened on July 17, 1955. “The way I see it, Disneyland will never be finished. It’s something we can keep developing and adding to. I’ve always wanted to work on something alive, something that keeps growing. We’ve got that in Disneyland.”

First quote: excerpt from museum text panel. Second quote: excerpt from the book Walt Disney Famous Quotes. Third quote: excerpt from the book Walt Disney: His Life in Pictures.

The Significance of the Silly Symphonies

“By nature, I’m an experimenter. So with the success of Mickey, I was determined to diversify. I had another idea that was plaguing my brain.”—Walt

His idea was the Silly Symphonies: one-reel shorts set to music without standard characters. Throughout the 1930s, they served as his creative testing ground for the advancement of animation.

Walt contracted with Technicolor ^® in 1932 for a two-year cartoon exclusive on its new three-strip color process. Begun in black-and-white but remade entirely in color, Flower and Trees became the first cartoon to win an Academy Award ^®.

In 1933 he turned his focus to strengthening the art of personality animation while making Three Little Pigs. Moving forward, each new character created would exhibit its own unique personality traits.

Walt started to add convincing illusions of depth in his cartoons with the invention of the ingenious Multiplane Camera at his studio in 1937. This breakthrough technology made its debut on The Old Mill.

His successful experiments with the Silly Symphonies for over a decade would give Walt the courage to tackle his first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Quote: excerpt from the book Walt Disney: His Life in Pictures.

The Magic of Mary Poppins

Walt kicked off the ambitious production of Mary Poppins in 1962. For a feature film so unique and grand in scale, he pulled in all his resources—live action, animation, music, special effects—it was all hands on deck at The Walt Disney Studios.

“After a long concentration on live-action and cartoon films, we decided to try something that would employ about every trick we had learned in making films.” —Walt

Premiering in 1964, Mary Poppins became one of the last important projects of Walt’s life and the crowning achievement of his illustrious career as a producer. The celebrated motion picture garnered 12 Academy Award ^® nominations including Best Picture, and five wins including Best Score and Best Original Song for the Sherman Brothers and Best Actress for Julie Andrews—her first role in a motion picture.

Walt recalled in amusement, “I never saw a sad face around the entire studio. The horrible thought struck me—suppose the staff had finally conceded that I knew what I was doing.”

First quote: excerpt from the book The Quotable Walt Disney. Second quote: excerpt from museum text panel.

Envisioning Epcot

By the late 1950s, Walt had conquered the world of family entertainment with motion pictures, television shows, and his grand amusement park Disneyland.

Upon completion of the redesign of the park’s Tomorrowland, Walt realized he could do more to make people happy beyond entertainment. He envisioned building a real land of tomorrow, an urban experiment to enrich the quality of everyday life. The Experiment Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT, would become his most ambitious project yet.

In 1964 Walt and his brother Roy kicked off the development of The Florida Project in Orlando, and EPCOT was at the heart of it. As Walt described it, EPCOT is “like the city of tomorrow ought to be. A city that caters to the people as a service function. It will be a planned, controlled community, a showcase for American industry and research, schools, cultural, and educational opportunities.”

Walt passed away unexpectedly two years later. Roy announced that the official name of The Florida Project would be Walt Disney World. And although Walt’s city of tomorrow was never realized, the concept took shape as World Showcase and Future World. Today, it is simply known as Epcot.

Quote: excerpt from the book The Quotable Walt Disney.

Having a Ball with Synchronized Sound

In the summer of 1928 Walt made a bold move to join the talking-picture revolution by producing the first cartoon to successfully match sound with action. Though not released, two silent Mickey Mouse shorts had already been produced, when he met the challenge with the third Mickey short, Steamboat Willie. In this animation Walt came up with the ingenious idea of printing a bouncing ball on the film for the orchestra to follow, just like a metronome. 

“In those days you couldn’t do what we call ‘dubbing’ today, so we used to have to do everything at one time. And we used to have to run the cartoon, we’d have the fellas with the sound effects, we had the people with the voices, we had the orchestra going, and everybody had to synchronize that thing right on the button.”—Walt

By keeping in rhythm with the bouncing ball, the players stayed in perfect unison throughout the entire picture. The delightful musical escapade was a big hit and synchronized sound animation became another triumphant first for Walt and his studio. 

Quote: excerpt from museum text panel.

Looking Through the Multiplane Camera

The year was 1937—17 years since Walt first started experimenting with animation on a flat camera table.

“I felt like I had to get a certain feeling of depth; I couldn’t just have flatness. So I did an experimental cartoon called The Old Mill that would give me a chance to develop a way of getting depth into my paintings.”—Walt

At a towering height of 12 feet, the Multiplane Camera crane was designed to shoot downward at five levels of foreground and background art, made of paintings in oils on glass. Walt’s artists could control how quickly or slowly each plane moved to or away from the camera lens. “They went wild with it, panning over rooftops and down streets, turning corners,” Walt recalled. With his studio’s invention, he could finally capture the convincing illusion of depth he always wanted to see in his animated films.

On the same day Walt won an Academy Award ^® for The Old Mill, the creators of the Multiplane Camera were honored with a special scientific and technical Academy Award ^®.

Quotes: excerpts from museum text panels.

The Imagineering of Audio-Animatronics®

Led by Walt, WED Imagineers developed four ambitious attractions for the 1964/65 New York World’s Fair. It was the electronic age and his attractions showcased the use of a new high-tech method to make three-dimensional figures come to life.

“Just as we had to learn to make our animated cartoons talk, we had to find a way to make these characters talk, too. Now to accomplish this, we created a new type of animation. So new that we had to invent a new name for it.”—Walt 

The name Audio-Animatronics was cleverly derived from the process of using sound and animation through electronics. First, human movements were recorded as electronic signals onto magnetic tape. Then, the signals were programmed into the figures to mimic the moves. Similarly, action sequences were recorded to manipulate smaller figures.

For Walt, Audio-Animatronics was “just another dimension in the animation we have been doing all our life.” 

First quote: excerpt from museum exhibit video. Second quote: excerpt from the book The Quotable Walt Disney, page 205.