Walt Disney

Walter Elias Disney was born in Chicago on December 5, 1901, and became one of the most influential cultural figures of the 20th century. He was an American animator, film producer, voice actor, and entrepreneur, a pioneer in the American animation industry who helped change how cartoons were made and seen. His career reached from early commercial illustration to feature-length animated films, television, and theme parks. As a producer, he won 22 Academy Awards and received 59 nominations, the most by any individual, along with two Golden Globe Special Achievement Awards and an Emmy Award.

Disney’s imagination was shaped early by drawing, work, and movement. His family moved from Chicago to a farm in Marceline, Missouri, when he was four, and he later described his childhood there as one of the happiest and most formative periods of his life. In Marceline, he was paid to draw the horse of a retired neighborhood doctor, copied newspaper cartoons, worked with watercolors and crayons, and became fascinated by trains while living near the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway line. After the family moved to Kansas City, he met Walter Pfeiffer, whose family introduced him to vaudeville and motion pictures. He also delivered newspapers with his brother Roy before and after school, an exhausting routine he kept up for more than six years.

By his teens, Disney was already looking for ways to draw for a living. He took Saturday courses at the Kansas City Art Institute, a correspondence course in cartooning, night courses at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, and became the cartoonist for his high school newspaper. In 1918, after being rejected by the United States Army as too young, he joined the Red Cross by altering the date on his birth certificate and went to France as an ambulance driver after the armistice. He decorated his ambulance with cartoons and had some work published in the army newspaper Stars and Stripes.

After returning to Kansas City in 1919, Disney worked as an apprentice artist at the Pesmen-Rubin Commercial Art Studio, where he met Ub Iwerks. In the early 1920s he moved to California and founded the Disney Brothers Studio with his brother Roy. With Iwerks, he developed Mickey Mouse in 1928, his first highly popular success, and Disney supplied Mickey’s voice in the early years. As the studio grew, he pushed into synchronized sound, full-color three-strip Technicolor, feature-length cartoons, and technical advances in cameras. The results included Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, Pinocchio and Fantasia in 1940, Dumbo in 1941, and Bambi in 1942.

After World War II, Disney’s company continued with animated and live-action films such as Cinderella in 1950, Sleeping Beauty in 1959, and Mary Poppins in 1964, which received five Academy Awards. In the 1950s, he entered the theme park industry, opening Disneyland in Anaheim, California, in July 1955. To fund it, he moved into television with programs including Walt Disney’s Disneyland and The Mickey Mouse Club. He was also involved in planning the 1959 Moscow Fair, the 1960 Winter Olympics, and the 1964 New York World’s Fair. In 1965, he began developing Disney World, with the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT, at its heart, but he died of lung cancer on December 15, 1966, before either project was completed.

In private, Disney was described as shy, self-deprecating, and insecure, while in public he adopted a warm and outgoing manner. He had high standards and high expectations for the people who worked with him, a quality that fits the directness of one of his sayings: “Whatever you do, do it well.” His films continue to be shown and adapted, his theme parks have grown in size and number around the world, and the company he began with Roy became one of the world’s largest mass media and entertainment conglomerates. His words still resonate because they sound like the working rules behind the work itself: start, improve, and do the best job you can.