Creative words of wisdom series #5
Walt Disney
"We keep moving forward…
and doing new things,
because we’re curious…"
Twenty-two year old Walt Elias Disney traveled from Kansas City to California in 1923 with forty-four dollars in his pocket, and built what is today a billion dollar multi-media corporation. Theme parks, film studios, film companies, record labels, cruise lines, hotels and licensing agencies, logos and images make up the vast holdings. All of this was built on Disney’s gift for designing innovative approaches to problems and his ability to imagine new ways of doing things. “We keep moving forward,” said Disney, “opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious…and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
Disney was a visionary in the area of graphic arts and film. He integrated music and talk with his 1928 cartoon “Steamboat Willie”. He was the first person to make this application. He also led the field in the use of Technicolor with animation when he produced “Flowers and Trees” in 1932. Disney’s “Snow White” in 1937 was the first feature length cartoon. He was also the first artist to set a cartoon to classical music (“Fantasia”, 1940) and the first to combine footage of real animals with sound tracks of human voices (“Sea Island”, 1948). His vision was bigger than his studio, however. He foresaw, designed and built the first theme park. Disneyland opened in 1955. This same kind of expansive thinking led him to endow an entire school for the innovative and experimental study of the arts in 1961. Today Cal Arts offers concentrations in film/videos, art, music, theatre, dance and critical studies for nearly 1,300 students.
Walt Disney was born in Chicago on December 5, 1901 to Elias Disney and Flora Call Disney. He was one of five children. The Disney family moved to a farm in Marceline, Missouri when he was four years old. It was there that young Disney first began to draw. In 1911, the family moved to Kansas City where Walt continued to enjoy drawing and spent many hours creating his own versions of popular comic strips.
A move to Chicago placed Walt at McKinley High School where he drew patriotic cartoons for the high school newspaper and attended informal art classes at the Chicago Institute of Arts. By 1919, he had moved back to Kansas City with his family and was working for a commercial art studio. He sketched horses and pigs for farm equipment catalogues. When he was laid off, he started his own cartoon company in the family garage, which eventually went bankrupt. After several new businesses, followed by more bankruptcies, he moved to California and established the Disney Brothers Studio with his older brother Roy. They finally succeeded with the Alice’s Wonderland cartoons and went on to create the character of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
Unfortunately, Oswald was not very lucky for Disney. It was stolen from him by a distributor leaving Disney with nothing. But, he was not discouraged. Within hours after realizing that he had lost the legal right to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit he dreamed up a new cartoon character – Mortimer Mouse. He soon became convinced that Mortimer was not a friendly name. In 1927 Mickey Mouse was born!
