1) Walt Disney was the founder of The Walt Disney Company and one of the greatest influences on the history of animation. It is also regarded as one of the symbols of popular culture around the world and a legend in American culture.
2) Walt Disney was born on December 5, 1901 in Chicago, USA. His parents were poor Irish peasants who immigrated from British Canada.
3) At the age of 10, Walt Disney’s family moved to Marceline, Missouri, due to financial problems. His father sold the farm after a failed farming in Marceline and moved to Kansas City. Although he did not receive much formal education due to money problems, he is said to have liked to draw and was imaginative.
4) Walt Disney wasn’t very good at drawing, so he couldn’t make a lot of money from it, and he did various things to make a living. In 1917, he also worked as a Red Cross truck driver in World War I.
5) After the war, Walt Disney started making cut-outs for an advertising agency in Kansas City, bought celluloid in New York and made Little Red Riding Hood. During this time, he formed a relationship with a friend and genius animator, Irv Ub Iwerks, and founded Laugh-O-Gram in 1922, producing six short animations based on classic fairy tales such as
6) Walt Disney later broke up with Ub Iwerks and made a living as a news film cameraman. He went to Hollywood to become a live-action film director, but when no one accepted him, he decided to focus on animation and opened ‘Disney Brothers Studio’ with his older brother Roy. It was the first successful production of
7) Walt Disney lost the character to Universal Pictures, a distributor, when Oswald Rabbit, which was made for a large-scale film company Universal Pictures in 1927, became unexpectedly popular.[8] In response, Walt promised, ‘I will never subcontract for another company again!’ With the success of Mickey Mouse, he gradually expanded his business and produced animations featuring popular characters such as Donald Duck and Goofy Goof, which was a huge success.
8) However, in 1930, his best friend Ub Iwerks broke up due to a conflict with Walt, and the confrontation with Pat Powers continued. After changing the distribution company, he made a mid-length anime
9) In 1934, he moved to RKO Radio Pictures as a distributor and started making feature films, and by 1937 he began making Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. At the time of production, he heard the sound of ‘Crazy Guy’ and went up to debt, but after the release, the box office performance reached $8 million, clearing the debt and paying arrears. After that, the studio moved to Burbank, where the number of employees increased to about 1,000.
10) In the early 1940s, they made Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi (1942) respectively, but unlike other movie companies, the box office was in the red and labor disputes arose when measures such as layoffs and wage cuts were taken. To overcome this, we stopped producing feature-length animations and produced a war-promotion animation under the Prime Minister’s Office, and some employees were conscripted to the barracks for the US military’s participation in the Pacific and European fronts.
11) During World War II, Walt Disney Productions suffered significant financial hardship due to the loss of overseas markets to export its works, and gradually became an animator or animator as it suffered such hardships as having to lay off half of its staff in the year following the end of the war (1946). It was changed to respect the rights of the staff, including the director.
12) In the early 1950s, freed from the aftermath of the war, animations based on fairy tales such as Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), and Peter Pan (1953) were released one after another. However, Walt himself was not very happy because it was not a work that he checked and directed himself, and in 1953 he established Buena Vista, an independent distributor, and in 1955 created ‘Disneyland’, a theme park that he had envisioned for a long time.
13) Walt Disney regarded Mary Poppins as one of the greatest achievements of his career, and critic Leonard Maltin described the film as “the culmination of an already fantastic Disney career.”
14) During his lifetime, Walt Disney participated as a producer for nearly 700 animations, live-action films, and documentaries, and since 1954, he has appeared as a host/narrator through CBS
15) While making the final Jungle Book, Walt Disney developed lung cancer and was admitted to Burbank St. He survived the surgery, but his recovery was slow because he was a perfectionist who worked day and night without taking care of his body.
16) Despite the constant prayers for a recovery from the Disney Production family, he died on December 15, 1966, at the age of 65, 10 days after his birthday. Before his death, he said in his will, “Please don’t hold a funeral to remember me as if I was alive.”
17) Of course, even Walt Disney has darkness. He subcontracted for horribly low wages, and he promoted himself as a filmmaker when promoting all his works. So even now, people only know the animations made by Walt Disney, but not many people know the film directors or animators of these works.
18) It is also famous for his conflict with his friend Ub Iwerks, who created Disney’s mascot characters, including Mickey Mouse. Erb, who was usually quiet and gentle, argued twice because Walt changed the timing of the anime or insisted that ‘Leave that fairy tale to someone lower’. When the resentful Ub Iwerks became independent, they tried to sabotage it by any means possible. In the end, Ub Iwerks became known mainly for developing animation effects such as multi-plane shooting techniques rather than animation.
19) In addition, several directors, who were unable to tolerate frequent interference with the director at the studio, participated in the 1941 Disney animators strike and eventually created an independent studio called UPA, which satirizes and criticizes Disney. He was described as a money-hungry, dictator-style, meddler and harasser.
20) Rumors abound that Walt Disney was cryopreserved after his death, but this is not true. After his death in December 1966, Disney was cremated and placed in Glendale Forest Lawn Memorial Park. James Bedford, the first frozen human, was frozen in 1967.
