Resources
Animators
Walt Disney Studios
This company was so successful from the 1930s to the 1960s that its product and style dominated animation - or at least the animated cartoon - and virtually defined what the medium could be. Not surprisingly, many other animators considered Disney's concept restrictive. Nevertheless, most people still immediately associate animation with Disney - a remarkable example of market dominance, four decades after the death of the company's founder.
Walter Elias Disney (1901-1966) started work at the Kansas City Film Ad Company in 1920. Two years later, he established his first company, Laugh-O-Gram Films, but in 1923 filed for bankruptcy and moved to Hollywood where he set up again with his brother Roy. He gradually achieved success with a series of films based on his character Alice and on his creation, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. But it was in 1928 that Disney created the character that became the company's trademark - Mickey Mouse, who appeared in the studio's first sound cartoon Steamboat Willie. The character was drawn by his colleague Ub Iwerks, who had worked alongside Disney in his Kansas days. Sound was transforming cinema at this time and Disney worked with composer Carl Stalling to develop the relationship between music and animation, which resulted in the Silly Symphonies series and ultimately Fantasia (1940). Always fascinated by technical developments, Disney produced the first Technicolor animation Flowers and Trees (1932), which won him his first Oscar.
With the success of Mickey, Disney's studio grew fast. In 1928 he employed just six people; by 1934 he had a staff of 187 and six years later more than 1,600 people worked for him. The Disney studio became an animation factory, training its own brand of animators who worked in specialised departments. In that time of enormous growth, Disney took a huge artistic and financial gamble - he embarked on his first colour feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). It took three years to make and cost nearly $1.5 million. The gamble paid off: the film was a huge artistic and financial success.
Disney went on to produce a range of features alongside the animated shorts, moved into live action and nature films and in 1955 opened its first amusement park, Disneyland, in California. Following Walt Disney's death in 1966, Disney continued to be a major production, distribution and leisure facilities company though its fortunes fluctuated in the 1970s and 1980s. The commercial failure of its early venture into computer-animation, Tron (1982) made it wary of embracing the new medium. However, its production deal with Pixar in the 1990s resulted in highly successful films ranging from Toy Story (1995) to Finding Nemo (2002).
Further reading
John Canemaker Before the Animation Begins: The Art and Lives of Disney Inspirational Sketch Artists (Hyperion Books, US, 1996)
Donald Crafton Before Mickey - The Animated Film, 1892-1928 (MIT Press, US, 1982; 2nd, revised edition, University of Chicago Press, US, 1993)
Christopher and Charles S. Finch The Art of Walt Disney: from Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdoms (Harry N Abrams, US, 1995)
Richard Hollis and Brian Sibley The Disney Studio Story (Octopus, UK, 1988)
Richard Schickel The Disney Version (Michael Joseph, UK, 1986)
Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life (Orbis, UK, 1984)
Selected films
Steamboat Willie (1928)
The Three Pigs (1933)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Fantasia (1940)
Pinocchio (1940)
Dumbo (1941)
Bambi (1942)
Cinderella (1950)
Lady and the Tramp (1955)
Our Friend the Atom (1958)
One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961)
Mary Poppins (1964)
The Jungle Book (1967)