How Did Walt Disney Influence The World

Walter Elias Disney is claimed to be the most influential american of the twentieth century, changing the entertainment industry forever. His multifaceted and inspiring ways created an empire that will forever fervently live. Born on December 5, 1901, in Hermosa, Chicago, Illinois, Disney began his artistic career at a young age beginning to draw, paint, and sell pictures to neighbors and family friends in Missouri, his childhood home. His father was Elias Disney, Irish-Canadian, and his mother, Flora Call Disney, who was German-American. He was one of five children; four boys and a girl.
Disney attended McKinley High School in Chicago, where he took drawing and photography classes and was a cartoonist for the school paper. He also took night
courses at the Chicago art institute. At 16 years old, he dropped out of school to serve his country in the army, but got rejected because he was underage; he then joined the Red Cross and was sent to France for a year to drive an ambulance. After France, he pursued his career as a newspaper artist in Kansas City. He got a job at the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio, where he met Ubbe Eert Iwwerks, a cartoonist known as Ub Iwerks. Then he started working at the Kansas City Film Ad Company, making commercials based on cutout animation. It was around this time that Disney started working with a camera, doing animation, and consequently opened his own animation business; Fred Harman was his first employee. Their cartoons, called Laugh-O-Grams, were screened in a local Kansas City theater, and became hugely popular. Disney bought his own studio, also named Laugh-O-Gram. The first series, called Alice in Cartoonland combined both live action and animation, and episodes were seven minutes long. The craze didn’t last long though, because in 1923, Disney was forced to close the studio because of bankruptcy.
Disney realized the answer was Hollywood; he moved there with his brother Roy, and began the Disney Brothers’ Studio, where he began producing Oswald the Rabbit cartoons for Universal Studios.
When his contract ended, the brothers created their own character, Willie, from Steamboat Willie, the first all-sound cartoon. It featured Disney as the voice of a character that was first called “Mortimer Mouse,” but was later changed into today’s phenomenon, Mickey Mouse. Disney gave his entire life to his pictures, insisting on perfection, and his clear talent as a story editor got his projects out there. Characters such as Mickey, Donald Duck, Minnie, and music, fusioned with Disney’s sharp use of music, sound, and edition, made the Disney shorts of the 1930s a global sensation, with a lot of promise and a bright future. These characters were all featured in silly Symphonies, and was a huge success. One of the most popular cartoons, Flowers and Trees, was the first in color and also the first to win an Oscar. In 1933, The Three Little Pigs and its theme song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” became a great distraction for the country during the midst of the horrendous effects of the Great Depression. The great sell-out led to a great expansion of the Disney brand, establishing profitable, Sisney-controlled sidelines in advertising, publishing, and
merchandising.
Disney, eager to grow, quickly expanded his studio operations and included a training school for new emerging artists, developing a whole generation of talented artists who developed and made the first feature-length cartoon, Snow White, possible.
Snow White, premiered in Los Angeles, surprisingly produced $1.499 million, even with the Great Depression going on; an amount that no one would’ve imagined, and continued its streak, winning a total of 8 Oscars. More of this genius productions came behind, with films like Pinocchio, Bambi, Dumbo, and the great musical spectacle, Fantasia. Seal Island brought wildlife films into the picture, becoming an additional source of income. Treasure Island led to a major product, live-action films, which brought a traditional family market. Disney Studios had a rough patch in the 1940s because there was a strike by Disney animators, in 1941, to be exact. It took some years for the company to recover, but came back swinging in 1950, when Cinderella was released, followed by Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping beauty, all in the 1950s, and 101 Dalmatians, in 1961. More than 100 features were produced in his studio. He was one of the first to use television as an entertainment medium, being extremely popular within the young audiences. His last major success was Mary Poppins, a film that mixed live action and animation, which he produced before his disease was found. Disney was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1996, and
passed away that December 15, at the age of 65.
Disney was an innovator, a creator, and a pioneer for the film industry throughout the whole world. He is an example of determination and relentless hard work, giving hope to the american people through tough times like the Great Depression, and never giving up, no matter what came through his way. There is no doubt that he was a virtuoso in what he did, and will leave a legacy that will not die, even though he did. “It's kind of fun to do the impossible,” once said Disney, who did infact, achieve the impossible.