The story
Founded by Roy O. Disney and Walt Disney on Oct 16, 1923, in Burbank.1
1923–1929: Founding and early years
Kansas City, Missouri, natives Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney founded Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in Los Angeles in 1923 after the bankruptcy of the Laugh-O-Gram Studio. They got their start producing a series of silent Alice Comedies short films, a pioneer of the live-action animated film genre. The Alice Comedies were picked up by Margaret J. Winkler's Winkler Pictures, who handled production and distribution duties of the studio's films. Upon relocating to California, the Disney brothers initially started working in their uncle Robert Disney's garage at 4406 Kingswell Avenue in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, then, in October 1923, formally launched their studio in a small office on the rear side of a real estate agency's office at 4651 Kingswell Avenue. In February 1924, the studio moved next door to office space of its own at 4649 Kingswell Avenue. In 1925, Disney put down a deposit on a new location at 2719 Hyperion Avenue in the nearby Silver Lake neighborhood, which came to be known as the Hyperion Studio to distinguish it from the studio's other locations, and, in January 1926, the studio moved there and took on the name Walt Disney Studio.
The Walt Disney Studio at the time solely handled animation services, while all other aspects of production were handled by Winkler Pictures; Winkler eventually dropped their distribution services and found a distributor in Universal Pictures. The all-animated Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, starting in 1927, was a great success for Universal Pictures, causing the studio's reputation to skyrocket. Charles Mintz wanted to force Disney to accept a lower advance payment for each Oswald short as a cost-cutting measure. Disney refused and, as Universal owned the rights to Oswald rather than Disney, Mintz set up his own animation studio to produce Oswald cartoons. Most of Disney's staff was hired away by Mintz to move over once Disney's Oswald contract expired in mid-1928.
Working in secret while the rest of the staff finished the remaining Oswalds on contract, Disney and his head animator Ub Iwerks led a small handful of loyal staffers in producing cartoons starring a new character named Mickey Mouse, renaming the company Disney Cartoons in the process. The first two Mickey Mouse cartoons, Plane Crazy and The Galloping Gaucho, were previewed in limited engagements during the summer of 1928. For the third Mickey cartoon, however, Disney produced a soundtrack, collaborating with musician Carl Stalling and businessman Pat Powers of Celebrity Productions, who provided Disney with his bootlegged "Cinephone" sound-on-film process. Subsequently, the third Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie, became Disney's first cartoon with synchronized sound and was a major success upon its November 1928 debut at the West 57th Theatre in New York City. The Mickey Mouse series of sound cartoons, distributed by Celebrity Productions, quickly became the most popular cartoon series in the United States.
A second Disney series of sound cartoons, Silly Symphonies, debuted in 1929 with The Skeleton Dance. In total, five different shorts from the Silly Symphonies series were released by the end of 1929. All were scored by Stalling and involved animation by Iwerks.
1929–1940: Reincorporation, Silly Symphonies and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
In 1929, disputes over finances between Disney and Powers led to Disney's animation production company, reincorporated on December 16, 1929, as Walt Disney Productions, signing a new distribution contract with Columbia Pictures. Powers, in return, signed Ub Iwerks' studio, although he would return to Disney in 1940.
Columbia distributed Disney's shorts for two years before the Disney studio entered a new distribution deal with United Artists in 1932. The same year, Disney signed a two-year exclusive deal with Technicolor to utilize its new 3-strip color film process, which allowed for fuller-color reproduction where previous color film processors could not. The result was the Silly Symphony cartoon Flowers and Trees, the first film commercially released in full Technicolor. Flowers and Trees was a major success and all Silly Symphonies were subsequently produced in Technicolor.
By the early 1930s, Walt Disney had realized that the success of animated films depended upon telling emotionally gripping stories that would grab the audience and not let go, and this realization led him to create a separate "story department" with storyboard artists dedicated to story development. With well-developed characters and an interesting story, the 1933 Technicolor Silly Symphony cartoon Three Little Pigs became a major box office and pop culture success, with its theme song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" becoming a popular chart hit.
In 1934, Walt Disney gathered several key staff members and announced his plans to make his first animated feature film. Despite derision from most of the film industry, who dubbed the production "Disney's Folly", Disney proceeded undaunted into the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which would become the first animated feature in English and Technicolor. Considerable training and development went into the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the studio greatly expanded, with established animators, artists from other fields and recent college graduates joining the studio to work on the film. The training classes, supervised by head animators such as Les Clark, Norm Ferguson and Art Babbit and taught by Donald W. Graham, an art teacher from the nearby Chouinard Art Institute, had begun at the studio in 1932 and were greatly expanded into orientation training and continuing education classes. In the course of teaching the classes, Graham and the animators created or formalized many of the techniques and processes that became the key tenets and principles of traditional animation. Silly Symphonies such as The Goddess of Spring (1934) and The Old Mill (1937) served as experimentation grounds for new techniques such as the animation of realistic human figures, special effects animation and the use of the multiplane camera, an invention that split animation artwork layers into several planes, allowing the camera to appear to move dimensionally through an animated scene.
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Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs cost Disney a then-expensive sum of $1.4 million to complete (including $100,000 on story development alone) and was an unprecedented success when released in February 1938 by RKO Radio Pictures, which had assumed distribution of Disney product from United Artists in 1937. It was briefly the highest-grossing film of all time before the unprecedented success of Gone with the Wind two years later, grossing over $8 million on its initial release, the equivalent of $182,978,720 in 1999 dollars.
During the production of Snow White, work had continued on the Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies series of shorts. Mickey Mouse switched to Technicolor in 1935, by which time the series had added several major supporting characters, among them Mickey's dog, Pluto, and their friends Donald Duck and Goofy. Donald, Goofy, and Pluto would all be appearing in series of their own by 1940, and the Donald Duck cartoons eclipsed the Mickey Mouse series in popularity. Silly Symphonies, which garnered seven Academy Awards, ceased in 1939, until the shorts returned to theatres with some re-issues and re-releases.
1940–1948: New feature films, strike and World War II
The success of Snow White allowed Disney to build a new, larger studio on Buena Vista Street in Burbank, where the Walt Disney Company remains headquartered to this day. Walt Disney Productions had its initial public offering on April 2, 1940, with Walt Disney as president and Roy Disney as CEO.
The studio launched into the production of new animated features, the first of which was Pinocchio, released in February 1940. Pinocchio was not initially a box-office success. The box office returns from the film's initial release were below both Snow White's unprecedented success and the studio's expectations. Of the film's $2.289 million cost – twice of Snow White – Disney recouped $1 million by late 1940, with studio reports of the film's final original box office take varying between $1.4 million and $1.9 million. However, Pinocchio was a critical success, winning the Academy Award for Best Original Song and Best Original Score, making it the first film of the studio to win not only either Oscar, but both at the same time.
Fantasia, an experimental film produced to an accompanying orchestral arrangement conducted by Leopold Stokowski, was released in November 1940 by Disney itself in a series of limited-seating roadshow engagements. The film cost $2 million to produce and, although the film earned $1.4 million in its roadshow engagements, the high cost ($85,000 per theater) of installing Fantasound placed Fantasia at a greater loss than Pinocchio. RKO assumed distribution of Fantasia in 1941, later reissuing it in severely edited versions over the years. Despite its financial failure, Fantasia was the subject of two Academy Honorary Awards on February 26, 1942 – one for the development of the innovative Fantasound system used to create the film's stereoscopic soundtrack, and the other for Stokowski and his contributions to the film. Fantasia was the final Disney animated film to be completed at the Hyperion Studio of the Walt Disney Studios (Walt Disney Productions) in Los Angeles.
Much of the character animation on these productions and all subsequent features until the late 1970s was supervised by a brain-trust of animators Walt Disney dubbed the "Nine Old Men", many of whom also served as directors and later producers on the Disney features: Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, Woolie Reitherman, Les Clark, Ward Kimball, Eric Larson, John Lounsbery, Milt Kahl, and Marc Davis. Other head animators at Disney during this period included Norm Ferguson, Bill Tytla and Fred Moore. The development of the feature animation department created a caste system at the Disney studio: lesser animators (and feature animators in-between assignments) were assigned to work on the short subjects, while animators higher in status such as the Nine Old Men worked on the features. Concern over Walt Disney accepting credit for the artists' work as well as debates over compensation led to many of the newer and lower-ranked animators seeking to unionize the Disney studio.
A bitter union strike began in May 1941, which was resolved without the angered Walt Disney's involvement in July and August of that year. As Walt Disney Productions was being set up as a union shop, Walt Disney and several studio employees were sent by the U.S. government on a Good Neighbor policy trip to Central and South America. The Disney strike and its aftermath led to an exodus of several animation professionals from the studio, from top-level animators such as Art Babbitt and Bill Tytla to artists better known for their work outside the Disney studio such as Frank Tashlin, Maurice Noble, Walt Kelly, Bill Melendez, and John Hubley. Hubley, along with several other Disney strikers, went on to found the United Productions of America studio, Disney's key animation rival in the 1950s.
Dumbo, in production during the midst of the animators' strike, premiered in October 1941 and proved to be a financial success. The film cost $950,000 to produce, half the cost of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, less than a third of the cost of Pinocchio, and two-fifths of the cost of Fantasia. Dumbo eventually grossed $1.6 million during its original release. Dumbo was the first Disney animated film to be completed at the original Animation Building of the Walt Disney Studios (Walt Disney Productions) in Burbank, California. In August 1942, Bambi was released and, as with Pinocchio and Fantasia, did not perform well at the box office. Out of its $1.7 million budget, it grossed $1.64 million.
Production of full-length animated features was temporarily suspended after the release of Bambi. Given the financial failures of some of the recent features and World War II cutting off much of the overseas cinema market, the studio's financiers at the Bank of America would only loan the studio working capital if it temporarily restricted itself to shorts production. Features then in production such as Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland and Lady and the Tramp were therefore put on hold until after the war. Following the United States' entry into World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the studio housed over 500 U.S. Army soldiers who were responsible for protecting nearby aircraft factories from enemy bombers. In addition, several Disney animators were drafted to fight in the war and the studio was contracted on producing wartime content for every branch of the U.S. military, particularly military training, and civilian propaganda films. From 1942 to 1943, 95 percent of the studio's animation output was for the military. During the war, Disney produced the live-action/animated military propaganda feature Victory Through Air Power (1943), and a series of Latin culture-themed shorts resulting from the 1941 Good Neighbor trip were compiled into two films, Saludos Amigos (1942) and The Three Caballeros (1944).
Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros set the template for several other 1940s Disney releases of anthology films: low-budget films composed of animated short subjects with animated or live-action bridging material. These films were Make Mine Music (1946), Fun and Fancy Free (1947), Melody Time (1948) and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949). The studio also produced two features, Song of the South (1946) and So Dear to My Heart (1948), which used more expansive live-action stories which still included animated sequences and sequences combining live-action and animated characters. Song of the South received significant controversy for its depiction of racial stereotypes. Shorts production continued during this period as well, with Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto cartoons being the main output accompanied by cartoons starring Mickey Mouse, Figaro and, in the 1950s, Chip 'n' Dale and Humphrey the Bear.
In addition, Disney began reissuing the previous features, beginning with re-releases of Snow White in 1944, Pinocchio in 1945, and Fantasia in 1946. This led to a tradition of reissuing the Disney films every seven years, which lasted into the 1990s before being translated into the studio's handling of home video releases. Song of the South was never re-released theatrically by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures through the Walt Disney Pictures banner (from 2007 onwards) or distributed through home media platforms by Walt Disney Telecommunications and Non-Theatrical Company (WDTNT) (from 1980 to 1987), Buena Vista Home Entertainment (from 1987 to 2024) and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (from 2024 onwards), due to the film's controversial legacy.
1948–1966: Return of feature films, Buena Vista, end of shorts, layoffs and Walt's final years
In 1948, Disney returned to the production of full-length features with Cinderella, a feature film based on the fairy tale by Charles Perrault. At a cost of nearly $3 million, the future of the studio depended upon the success of this film. Upon its release in 1950, Cinderella proved to be a box-office success, with the profits from the film's release allowing Disney to carry on producing animated features throughout the 1950s. Following its success, production on the in-limbo features Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and Lady and the Tramp was resumed. In addition, an ambitious new project, an adaptation of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale "Sleeping Beauty" set to Tchaikovsky's classic score, was begun but took much of the rest of the decade to complete.
Alice in Wonderland, released in 1951, met with a lukewarm response at the box office and was a sharp critical disappointment in its initial release. Peter Pan, released in 1953, on the other hand, was a commercial success and the fifth highest-grossing film of the year. In 1955, Lady and the Tramp was released to higher box-office success than any other Disney animated feature since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, earning an estimated $6.5 million in rentals at the North American box office in 1955. Lady and the Tramp is significant as Disney's first widescreen animated feature, produced in the CinemaScope process, and was the first Disney animated feature to be released by Disney's own distribution company, Buena Vista Distribution.
By the mid-1950s, with Walt Disney's attention primarily set on new endeavours such as live-action films, television and the Disneyland theme park, production of the animated films was left primarily in the hands of the "Nine Old Men" trust of head animators and directors. This led to several delays in approvals during the production of Sleeping Beauty, which was finally released in 1959. At $6 million, it was Disney's most expensive film to date, produced in a heavily stylised art style devised by artist Eyvind Earle and presented in large-format Super Technirama 70 with six-track stereophonic sound. However, despite being the studio's highest-grossing animated feature since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the film's large production costs and the box-office underperformance of Disney's other 1959 output resulted in the studio posting its first annual loss in a decade for fiscal year 1960, leading to massive layoffs throughout the studio.
By the end of the decade, the Disney short subjects were no longer being produced on a regular basis, with many of the shorts divisions' personnel either leaving the company or being reassigned to work on Disney television programs such as The Mickey Mouse Club and Disneyland. While the Silly Symphonies shorts had dominated the Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoons) during the 1930s, the studio's reign over the most awards had been ended by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio's Tom and Jerry cartoons, Warner Bros. Cartoons' Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, and the works of United Productions of America (UPA), whose flat art style and stylized animation techniques were lauded as more modern alternatives to the older Disney style. During the 1950s, only one Disney short, the stylized Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom, won the Best Short Subject (Cartoons) Oscar.
The Mickey Mouse, Pluto and Goofy shorts had all ceased regular production by 1953, with Donald Duck and Humphrey continuing and converting to widescreen CinemaScope before the shorts division was shut down in 1956. After that, all future shorts were produced by the feature films division until 1969. The last Disney short of the golden age of American animation was It's Tough to Be a Bird. Disney shorts would only be produced on a sporadic basis from this point on, with notable later shorts including Runaway Brain (1995, starring Mickey Mouse) and Paperman (2012).
Despite the 1959 layoffs and competition for Walt Disney's attention from the company's expanded live-action film, TV and theme park departments, production continued on feature animation productions at a reduced level.
In 1961, the studio released One Hundred and One Dalmatians, an animated feature that popularized the use of xerography during the process of inking and painting traditional animation cels. Using xerography, animation drawings could be photochemically transferred rather than traced from paper drawings to the clear acetate sheets ("cels") used in final animation production. The resulting art style – a scratchier line which revealed the construction lines in the animators' drawings – typified Disney films into the 1980s. The film was a success, being the tenth highest-grossing film of 1961 with rentals of $6.4 million.
From Wikipedia’s article on Walt Disney Animation Studios, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4