Walt Disney on Innovation

Ub Iwerks met Disney in 1919 at a Kansas City art studio, animated the Laugh-O-Gram shorts, and followed him to Hollywood, where he drew much of the early Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony output, including Steamboat Willie and The Skeleton Dance, and refined Disney's rough sketch into the recognizable Mickey. A falling out led to his resignation in January 1930 to run his own operation for Pat Powers, where the Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper series failed to rival his old employer. Iwerks returned to Disney in 1940 as head of the Special Processes and Camera department, developed visual effects for Song of the South, Mary Poppins, and Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, adapted the xerography process to photocopy animation pencil drawings onto cels, and contributed technical solutions to WED Enterprises for Disneyland, Walt Disney World, and the 1964 World's Fair attractions. He won two Academy Awards from three nominations, was named a Disney Legend in 1989, and is remembered as one of the greatest animators of all time.

Disney conceived his first feature-length film in 1933, concluding that popular shorts did not deliver enough profit for the studio's growth and that a feature would expand his storytelling possibilities with elaborate plots and character development. After proposed adaptations of Alice in Wonderland and Rip Van Winkle fell through, the success of Three Little Pigs in May 1933 strengthened his resolve. He settled on the Brothers Grimm's Snow White in spring 1934, having loved the story since seeing the 1916 silent film version as a teenager, and announced the project to The New York Times in June 1934 with a budget estimate of two hundred fifty thousand dollars, roughly ten times a typical Silly Symphony. He introduced the idea to his staff through what he called slow infiltration, sharing it individually in casual conversations. On October 30, 1934, with the basic story outline complete, he assembled the animators on the sound stage in the evening and acted out the entire story for three hours, closing with the announcement of the studio's first feature.

Pinocchio premiered at New York's Center Theatre on February 7, 1940, and went into general release on February 23. The film broke new ground in effects animation, lending realistic movement to vehicles, machinery, and natural elements including rain, water, lightning, smoke, and shadow, and it became the first animated feature to win competitive Academy Awards, taking Oscars for its original score and for its original song When You Wish Upon a Star, which later served as the Walt Disney Company's signature song. Critical response was strong, yet the film was initially a commercial failure, mainly because the outbreak of the Second World War closed the European and Asian markets that had accounted for so much of Snow White's earnings. It eventually turned a profit after its 1945 re-release and is now regarded as one of the greatest animated films ever made, holding a perfect critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes and selection for the National Film Registry in 1994.

Fantasia, released in 1940, was an animated anthology of eight segments set to pieces of classical music conducted by Leopold Stokowski, seven performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra, with Deems Taylor as master of ceremonies. The concept grew out of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, an elaborate Silly Symphony planned as a comeback vehicle for Mickey Mouse, whose popularity had declined; when production costs surpassed anything the short could earn, Disney expanded it into a multi-segment feature. The soundtrack was recorded using multiple audio channels and reproduced through Fantasound, a pioneering system developed with RCA that made the film the first commercial release exhibited in stereo and a forerunner of surround sound. RKO roadshowed the film in thirteen cities beginning November 13, 1940, at the Broadway Theatre. Critics acclaimed it, but it failed to make a profit: the war cut off European distribution, production costs were high, and building Fantasound equipment and leasing theaters consumed the margins. Its reputation compounded for decades, ending in National Film Registry selection in 1990.

The concept for Disneyland began when Disney sat in Griffith Park in Los Angeles watching his daughters Diane and Sharon ride the merry-go-round and imagined a place where parents and children could have fun together. The earliest documented draft was a memo to production designer Dick Kelsey on August 31, 1948, describing a Mickey Mouse Park, informed by notes from that month's Chicago Railroad Fair trip with Ward Kimball and a stop at Henry Ford's Museum and Greenfield Village, with its Main Street and steamboat rides. When letters from fans asking to visit the movie studio convinced him that a working studio offered the public little, the idea grew into a play park concept for a sixteen-acre plot across Riverside Drive from the Burbank studio, drawing on Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, Knott's Berry Farm, Colonial Williamsburg, and the world's fairs of 1933 and 1939. The project quickly outgrew every site he could obtain in Burbank, and the search moved outward.

EPCOT began as Disney's acronym for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, a utopian city he described in 1966 as taking its cue from new ideas and technologies from American industry, never completed, and always introducing, testing, and demonstrating new materials and systems. His Progress City concept would have housed twenty thousand residents as a living laboratory showcasing urban planning, built in a circle with an urban center, community buildings, schools, and recreational complexes ringed by residential and industrial areas, all connected by monorail and PeopleMover lines, with automobile traffic kept underground and pedestrians safe above; the radial plan drew on Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of Tomorrow. Disney petitioned the Florida legislature for the Reedy Creek Improvement District to govern the land, but he could not obtain funding and permission until agreeing to build the Magic Kingdom first. After his death the company declined to run a city without him, and EPCOT Center opened October 1, 1982, at a cost of 1.5 billion dollars as a permanent world's fair of Future World and World Showcase rather than a working city.

Walt Disney formed Walt Disney, Inc. on December 16, 1952, with an engineering division tasked with designing Disneyland, then renamed it WED Enterprises in 1953 after objections from his brother Roy and from potential stockholders to a personal company carrying the Disney name; the initials stood for Walter Elias Disney. Formed to carry the park's design work outside the studio's formal structure, WED became the creative unit where a staff of illustrators, architects, engineers, lighting designers, show writers, and graphic designers planned the park, a group that became known as Imagineers. Headquartered in Glendale, California, the unit grew so integral to operations that Walt Disney Productions purchased it on February 5, 1965, acquiring the WED Enterprises name with it, and it was renamed Walt Disney Imagineering in January 1986. Disney filed for a trademark on the term Imagineering in 1989, claiming first use in 1962. The organization remains the research and development arm that designs and builds every Disney park and attraction worldwide.

Steamboat Willie, a 1928 black-and-white short directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks and released by Pat Powers' Celebrity Productions, is considered the official debut of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, although both characters had already appeared in the test-screened Plane Crazy and the unreleased The Gallopin' Gaucho. It was the third Mickey film produced but the first officially distributed, because Disney, having seen The Jazz Singer, was determined to produce one of the first fully synchronized sound cartoons. Earlier sound cartoons such as the Fleischers' Song Car-Tunes and Paul Terry's Dinner Time had failed to keep sound fully synchronized; Steamboat Willie was produced with a click track that kept the musicians on beat and a fully post-produced soundtrack. Powers convinced Disney to use his Cinephone system, a clone of the Phonofilm process. The result became the most popular cartoon of its time, entered the National Film Registry in 1998, and passed into the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

The Silly Symphonies, seventy-five musical shorts produced between 1929 and 1939, functioned as Disney's research and development laboratory. Composer Carl Stalling, a Kansas City theatre organist, proposed the series while in New York recording sound for the Mickey shorts, and the first entry, The Skeleton Dance, was drawn and animated entirely by Ub Iwerks. The series broke with convention by recording the music and sound before the animated segments were made rather than after, and it became the venue for trying Technicolor, special effects animation, and dramatic storytelling on the road to feature films. After seeing Herbert Kalmus's tests of the new three-strip Technicolor process, Disney signed a contract giving the studio exclusive rights through the end of 1935, scrapped the sixty-percent-complete Flowers and Trees, and redid it in color; it became the first animated film in three-strip Technicolor, a phenomenal success, and winner of the inaugural Academy Award in its category. Seven Silly Symphonies eventually won Oscars, tying the series record held by Tom and Jerry.

The multiplane camera moved multiple layers of artwork past the camera at varying speeds and distances, creating a parallax illusion of depth that flat cel animation lacked; moving background and foreground in opposite directions even produced rotation, as in Snow White's potion-drinking scene. Lotte Reiniger had built an early multiplane design in the 1920s, Ub Iwerks developed a more advanced version in 1933 partly from salvaged Chevrolet parts, and Fleischer Studios built its Stereoptical Camera with miniature sets in 1934. William Garity developed the advanced multiplane camera for the Disney studio for use on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; completed in early 1937 and tested in the Silly Symphony The Old Mill, which won that year's Academy Award for animated short, it carried up to seven layers of artwork painted in oils on glass beneath a vertical, movable camera shooting successive frames in Technicolor. A crew of up to a dozen technicians operated the planes, and future Disney chief Card Walker rose from the multiplane camera department.

To find a site, Disney hired C. V. Wood and Harrison Price of the Stanford Research Institute, whose analysis of future population growth pointed to a 160-acre parcel of orange groves and walnut trees in Anaheim, southeast of Los Angeles in Orange County. Roy Disney hired Wood away from SRI as executive vice president to build the park, and Wood introduced Disney to his friend Joe Fowler, a retired United States Navy rear admiral who became construction boss charged with turning Walt's ideas into engineering realities in a single year. Construction began July 16, 1954, and the park cost seventeen million dollars to complete, opening one year and one day later; two extra lanes were added to U.S. Route 101 in preparation for the traffic Disneyland was expected to bring. The park's design revolutionized the theme park industry, pioneering strict dedication to theming and cleanliness, an earthen berm walling off the outside world, a hub-and-spoke layout, and visual landmarks pulling guests deeper into the park.

Returning to Kansas City in October 1919 after Red Cross ambulance service in France, Disney apprenticed at the Pesmen-Rubin Commercial Art Studio, where he befriended Ub Iwerks. Laid off in January 1920 when revenues fell after Christmas, the two briefly ran their own firm, Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists, before both joined the Kansas City Film Ad Company, which produced commercials using cutout animation. Experimenting at home with a borrowed book and a borrowed camera, Disney concluded that cel animation was more promising than the cutout method. Unable to persuade his employer to switch techniques, he opened a business with coworker Fred Harman producing shorts for the local Newman Theater, sold as Newman's Laugh-O-Grams, and studied Paul Terry's Aesop's Fables as a model. The first six were modernized fairy tales, and their local success in 1921 led directly to the founding of the Laugh-O-Gram Studio.

To replace Oswald, Disney and Iwerks developed Mickey Mouse, possibly inspired by a tame mouse Disney had kept at his desk in the Laugh-O-Gram studio, although the character's origins remain unclear. Disney's original choice, Mortimer Mouse, was rejected by his wife Lillian as too pompous in favor of Mickey. Iwerks revised Disney's provisional sketches to make the character easier to animate, and Disney, increasingly removed from the drawing board, provided Mickey's voice until 1947; one employee later described the division of labor as Iwerks designing the body while Walt supplied the soul. Mickey first appeared in a May 1928 test screening of Plane Crazy, but it and The Gallopin' Gaucho failed to find a distributor. After seeing The Jazz Singer, Disney bet on synchronized sound for the third short, Steamboat Willie, creating the first post-produced sound cartoon and launching the character who became the company's icon.

With Columbia Pictures distributing, the Mickey Mouse cartoons grew increasingly popular, including internationally, and the studio introduced new characters: Pluto in 1930, Goofy in 1932, and Donald Duck in 1934. Encouraged by a new contract with United Artists, Disney filmed Flowers and Trees in full-color three-strip Technicolor and negotiated a deal giving him sole rights to the three-strip process until August 31, 1935, locking rival studios out of color animation during the critical early years. Flowers and Trees won the inaugural Academy Award for animated short subject, and Disney received an honorary award for creating Mickey. The Three Little Pigs followed in 1933, described by media historian Adrian Danks as the most successful short animation of all time, and the staff approached two hundred by year end. Disney had learned that emotionally gripping stories, not gags, sustained audiences, and he invested in a dedicated story department with storyboard artists detailing every plot.

In 1964 Disney produced Mary Poppins, the rights to which he had pursued since the 1940s; it became the studio's most successful film of the 1960s, although author P. L. Travers disliked the adaptation intensely and regretted selling the rights. The same year he delivered four exhibits for the 1964 New York World's Fair, funded by selected corporate sponsors: It's a Small World, a boat ride of audio-animatronic children built for PepsiCo's tribute to UNICEF; Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, an animatronic Abraham Lincoln delivering excerpts from his speeches; the electricity-themed Carousel of Progress; and Ford's Magic Skyway portraying the progress of mankind. The fair functioned as a proving ground for audio-animatronics and ride systems, and elements of all four exhibits were reinstalled at Disneyland, with It's a Small World closest to its original form. Disney had effectively converted other companies' marketing budgets into research and development for his own park.

In late 1965 Disney announced Disney World, a resort a few miles southwest of Orlando that would contain a larger and more elaborate Magic Kingdom, golf courses, resort hotels, and, at its heart, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. He described EPCOT as a community that would never be completed but would always be introducing, testing, and demonstrating new materials and systems, and a permanent showcase for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise. Through 1966 he cultivated corporations willing to sponsor EPCOT while remaining heavily involved in studio story development, including The Jungle Book. A heavy smoker of unfiltered cigarettes since the First World War, he was diagnosed with lung cancer in early November 1966, underwent cobalt therapy, and returned to work believing himself cured. On November 30 he was taken by ambulance to St. Joseph Hospital, where he died of circulatory collapse on December 15, 1966, at sixty-five.