American film producer
printPrint
Please select which sections you would like to print:
verifiedCite
While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies.Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.
Select Citation Style
Feedback
Thank you for your feedback
Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.
External Websites
Britannica Websites
Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students.
- Walt Disney - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
- Walt Disney - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
Also known as: Walter Elias Disney
Written by
Bosley Crowther
Fact-checked by
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Last Updated: •Article History
Quick Facts
- In full:
- Walter Elias Disney
- Born:
- December 5, 1901, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
- Died:
- December 15, 1966, Burbank, California (aged 65)
- Also Known As:
- Walter Elias Disney
- Founder:
- Disneyland
- Walt Disney World Resort
- Awards And Honors:
- Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award (1942)
- Academy Award (1942)
See all related content
Top Questions
Powered by Britannica AI
-
Who was Walt Disney?
-
What is Walt Disney best known for?
-
When and where was Walt Disney born?
-
How did Walt Disney start his career in animation?
-
What was the first successful cartoon character created by Walt Disney?
-
How did Walt Disney contribute to the development of animated films?
-
What are some of the most famous movies produced by Walt Disney?
-
How did Walt Disney's work impact the entertainment industry?
-
What is the legacy of Walt Disney in today's world?
-
How has Walt Disney's influence extended beyond film production?
News •
'No truth in claim that Walt Disney was an anti-Semite'• Nov. 17, 2024, 7:24 AM ET (Jerusalem Post)
Walt Disney forms business unit to coordinate use of AI, augmented reality• Nov. 2, 2024, 6:54 AM ET (The Hindu)
Walt Disney (born December 5, 1901, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died December 15, 1966, Burbank, California) was an American motion-picture and television producer and showman, famous as a pioneer of animated cartoon films and as the creator of such cartoon characters as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. He also planned and built Disneyland, a huge amusement park that opened near Los Angeles in 1955, and before his death he had begun building a second such park, Walt Disney World, near Orlando, Florida. The Disney Company he founded has become one of the world’s largest entertainment conglomerates.
Early life
Walter Elias Disney was the fourth son of Elias Disney, a peripatetic carpenter, farmer, and building contractor, and his wife, Flora Call, who had been a public school teacher. When Walt was little more than an infant, the family moved to a farm near Marceline, Missouri, a typical small Midwestern town, which is said to have furnished the inspiration and model for the Main Street, U.S.A., of Disneyland. There Walt began his schooling and first showed a taste and aptitude for drawing and painting with crayons and watercolours.
His restless father soon abandoned his efforts at farming and moved the family to Kansas City, Missouri, where he bought a morning newspaper route and compelled his young sons to assist him in delivering papers. Walt later said that many of the habits and compulsions of his adult life stemmed from the disciplines and discomforts of helping his father with the paper route. In Kansas City the young Walt began to study cartooning with a correspondence school and later took classes at the Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design.
In 1917 the Disneys moved back to Chicago, and Walt entered McKinley High School, where he took photographs, made drawings for the school paper, and studied cartooning on the side, for he was hopeful of eventually achieving a job as a newspaper cartoonist. His progress was interrupted by World War I, in which he participated as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in France and Germany.
Returning to Kansas City in 1919, he found occasional employment as a draftsman and inker in commercial art studios, where he met Ub Iwerks, a young artist whose talents contributed greatly to Walt’s early success.
Britannica QuizOscar-Worthy Movie TriviaFirst animated cartoons
Dissatisfied with their progress, Disney and Iwerks started a small studio of their own in 1922 and acquired a secondhand movie camera with which they made one and two-minute animated advertising films for distribution to local movie theatres. They also did a series of animated cartoon sketches called Laugh-O-grams and the pilot film for a series of seven-minute fairy tales that combined both live action and animation, Alice in Cartoonland. A New York film distributor cheated the young producers, and Disney was forced to file for bankruptcy in 1923. He moved to California to pursue a career as a cinematographer, but the surprise success of the first Alice film compelled Disney and his brother Roy—a lifelong business partner—to reopen shop in Hollywood.
With Roy as business manager, Disney resumed the Alice series, persuading Iwerks to join him and assist with the drawing of the cartoons. They invented a character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, contracted for distribution of the films at $1,500 each, and propitiously launched their small enterprise. In 1927, just before the transition to sound in motion pictures, Disney and Iwerks experimented with a new character—a cheerful, energetic, and mischievous mouse called Mickey. They had planned two shorts, called Plane Crazy and Gallopin’ Gaucho, that were to introduce Mickey Mouse when The Jazz Singer, a motion picture with the popular singer Al Jolson, brought the novelty of sound to the movies. Fully recognizing the possibilities for sound in animated-cartoon films, Disney quickly produced a third Mickey Mouse cartoon equipped with voices and music, entitled Steamboat Willie, and cast aside the other two soundless cartoon films. When it appeared in 1928, Steamboat Willie was a sensation.
Get Unlimited Access
Try Britannica Premium for free and discover more.
Subscribe
The following year Disney started a new series called Silly Symphonies with a picture entitled The Skeleton Dance, in which a skeleton rises from the graveyard and does a grotesque, clattering dance set to music based on classical themes. Original and briskly syncopated, the film ensured popular acclaim for the series, but, with costs mounting because of the more complicated drawing and technical work, Disney’s operation was continually in peril.
The growing popularity of Mickey Mouse and his girlfriend, Minnie, however, attested to the public’s taste for the fantasy of little creatures with the speech, skills, and personality traits of human beings. (Disney himself provided the voice for Mickey until 1947.) This popularity led to the invention of other animal characters, such as Donald Duck and the dogs Pluto and Goofy. In 1933 Disney produced a short, The Three Little Pigs, which arrived in the midst of the Great Depression and took the country by storm. Its treatment of the fairy tale of the little pig who works hard and builds his house of brick against the huffing and puffing of a threatening wolf suited the need for fortitude in the face of economic disaster, and its song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”was a happy taunting of adversity. It was in this period of economic hard times in the early 1930s that Disney fully endeared himself and his cartoons to audiences all over the world, and his operation began making money in spite of the Depression.
Disney had by that time gathered a staff of creative young people, who were headed by Iwerks. Colour was introduced in the Academy Award-winning Silly Symphonies film Flowers and Trees (1932), while other animal characters came and went in films such as The Grasshopper and the Ants (1934) and The Tortoise and the Hare (1935). Roy franchised tie-in sales with the cartoons of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck—watches, dolls, shirts, and tops—and reaped more wealth for the company.