Disney Company

▪ American corporation

in full  the Walt Disney Company,  formerly (1929–86)  Walt Disney Productions 

 American corporation that was the best-known purveyor of family entertainment in the 20th century.

      Walt Disney (Disney, Walt) began his career in animation with the Kansas City Film Ad Company in Missouri in 1920. In 1922 Disney and his friend Ub Iwerks, a gifted animator (animation), founded the Laugh-O-gram Films studio in Kansas City and began producing a series of cartoons based on fables and fairy tales. Joining Disney and Iwerks in the enterprise were such noted animators as Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising, and Isadore (“Friz”) Freleng (Freleng, Friz). In 1923 Disney produced the short subject Alice in Cartoonland, a film combining both live action and animation that was intended to be the pilot film in a series. Within weeks of its completion, Disney filed for bankruptcy and left Kansas City to establish himself in Hollywood as a cinematographer. Alice in Cartoonland turned out to be a surprise hit, and orders from distributors for more Alice films compelled Disney to reopen shop in Hollywood with the help of his brother Roy—a lifelong business partner. The Kansas City team soon joined the Disneys in California, and the company produced mostly Alice films for the next four years.

      In 1927 Disney began his first series of fully animated films, featuring the character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. When his distributor appropriated the rights to the character, Disney altered Oswald's appearance and created a new character that he named Mortimer Mouse; at the urging of his wife, Disney rechristened him Mickey Mouse. Two silent Mickey Mouse cartoons—Plane Crazy (1928) and Gallopin' Gaucho (1928)—were produced before Disney employed the novelty of sound for the third Mickey production, Steamboat Willie (1928), which was the first Mickey cartoon released. The film was an immediate sensation and led to the studio's dominance in the animated market for many years.

      Throughout the 1930s the company, renamed Walt Disney Productions in 1929, produced cartoons featuring Mickey Mouse and his regular supporting players Donald Duck, Pluto, and Goofy, as well as the Silly Symphonies series—semiabstract cartoons featuring animation set to classical music or to the music of Carl Stalling, the brilliant musician who scored many of the best Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons. The Silly Symphonies entry Flowers and Trees (1932) was the first cartoon produced in the three-colour Technicolor process, as well as the first animated short subject to be honoured with an Academy Award. The most popular of the Silly Symphonies cartoons was The Three Little Pigs (1933), which earned another Oscar.

      The continuing success of the studio emboldened Disney to make his riskiest move in 1934, when he began production on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Although not the first feature-length animated cartoon—that honour probably goes to Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)—it was the first to receive widespread release and publicity. As much of a sensation as Steamboat Willie had been, Snow White revolutionized the industry and proved animation's effectiveness as a vehicle for feature-length stories. Disney advocated a realistic approach to the medium, as opposed to the anarchic style of other animation studios. Scenes in Disney cartoons were composed and framed as they would be for a live-action film, and surreal aspects of the characters were kept to a minimum. Although this approach provoked the criticism that Disney discouraged experimentation and limited animation's possibilities, there is little question of its success in Snow White and the animated features that followed.

      Pinocchio (1940), which features complex characters rendered in painstakingly detailed full-figure animation, is perhaps Disney's grandest achievement. Fantasia (1940) is a series of abstract vignettes set to classical compositions; it remains a controversial work, derided for its portentousness and praised for its stunning visual virtuosity. Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942) also achieved recognition as masterpieces by effectively employing the devices Disney had first brought together in Pinocchio: music, comedy, pathos, adventure, and genuine horror. This last element was a key ingredient in Disney's features, as Disney himself felt that youngsters could tolerate evil antagonists and scenes of unpleasantness, provided that the forces of good triumphed in the end.

      Disney suffered a major setback in 1941 when the studio's animators went on strike for three months. Disney took the action personally, and many of the studio's top animators were compelled to resign. The enthusiastic mood within the studio had been permanently dampened, and the studio produced little on the level of Pinocchio or Dumbo for the next decade, concentrating instead on short cartoons, nature documentaries, and features that combined live action and animation such as The Three Caballeros (1945) and Song of the South (1946). The feature-length cartoons Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), and Peter Pan (1953) were considered fine efforts, but many felt they lacked the panache and dimension of the early '40s features. The Lady and the Tramp (1955) was a return to form, but Disney's attention was by then increasingly devoted to live-action features, television productions, and his new theme park, Disneyland, which opened in 1955 in Anaheim, California. It was also about then that Disney established the distribution company Buena Vista Productions in order to ensure complete control over his films and their marketing.

      The Disney Company continued to flourish during the 1950s and '60s. It produced hit television shows such as The Mickey Mouse Club, Zorro, and Walt Disney Presents, which, under various titles (such as Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color and The Wonderful World of Disney) and despite periodic hiatuses, was still in production at the beginning of the 21st century. Quality animated features such as Sleeping Beauty (1959), 101 Dalmatians (1961), and Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (1965) were still produced, and well-received live-action vehicles included 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), Old Yeller (1957), Darby O'Gill and the Little People (1959), The Absent-Minded Professor (1961), and The Incredible Journey (1963). Disney's finest live-action film, Mary Poppins (1964), was heralded as the studio's greatest achievement in more than 20 years. The film won five Academy Awards, including a best actress Oscar for Julie Andrews (Andrews, Dame Julie), and was nominated in seven additional categories.

      Walt Disney was never a rich man by Hollywood standards, largely because he valued perfection more than profits. “I don't make movies to make money,” he once said, “I make money so I can make more movies.” The company was in financial disarray when he died on December 15, 1966, but enterprises he had planned before his death assured the company's future. In 1965 he purchased 43 acres of barren land in central Florida for his most ambitious project, the Walt Disney World Resort. Roy Disney assumed supervision of the project, and the park opened in 1971 to great success; in 1982 the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or Epcot Center (Epcot), later known as Epcot, was incorporated into the park and immediately became one of its main attractions. Epcot was the last project Walt Disney himself envisioned during his lifetime, and by the turn of the 21st century it was attracting more than 10 million visitors annually.

      During the 1970s and '80s the company produced few films of note and realized its greatest profits from the distribution of old films and from Disney World, which had become one of the world's leading tourist destinations. Top animators such as Don Bluth, Gary Goldman, and John Pomeroy defected from the company in 1977, and Disney's subsequent efforts, such as the animated feature The Fox and the Hound (1981), failed to capture the magic of the studio's glory days.

      Ron Miller, Disney's son-in-law, is credited with initiating the company's astounding resurgence. In the early 1980s Miller broadened the company's product line and founded Touchstone Pictures, a subsidiary devoted to producing films for adult audiences. Touchstone produced some of the most financially and critically successful films of the 1980s and '90s, including Splash (1984), The Color of Money (1986), Three Men and a Baby (1987), Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Dead Poets Society (1989), Pretty Woman (1990), Father of the Bride (1991), Ed Wood (1994), and The Horse Whisperer (1998). In order to maintain its image as a purveyor of family entertainment, Disney does not use its name on any Touchstone production.

      During a bitter board of directors' dispute in 1984, Michael Eisner wrested power from Miller and, as chairman of the board and company CEO, began a further expansion of the Disney empire. The company added two more film subsidiaries with the establishment in 1989 of Hollywood Pictures (devoted to producing films for teenagers and young adults) and with the acquisition of Miramax Films in 1993 (producer of films such as Pulp Fiction [1994], Good Will Hunting [1997], and Shakespeare in Love [1998]).

      The 1990s were the Disney Company's most financially successful decade in history. The revival was heralded by the release of The Little Mermaid (1989), an animated feature regarded as Disney's best such effort in more than 40 years. More animated blockbusters followed, including Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), and Fantasia 2000 (1999). The company had experimented with computerized animation for the live-action feature Tron (1982) and realized the technology's potential with the enormously successful Toy Story (1995) and Toy Story 2 (1999). Live-action features also found success, especially 101 Dalmatians (1996), a remake of Disney's own 1961 animated feature.

      Although films continue to be a major component of the Disney Company, they constitute but one of many successful ventures of recent years. New Disney theme parks were opened in Paris, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, and DisneyQuests—indoor theme parks featuring interactive virtual-reality (virtual reality) arcades—debuted in Orlando, Florida, and in Chicago. In the early 21st century more than 115 million people visited Disney attractions annually worldwide. The Disney Magic, the first ship in the Disney Cruise Line, was launched on July 30, 1998, and offered vacation packages to the Caribbean islands. In addition to the long-running Disney Channel cable network, broadcasting interests were expanded to include the ABC network, the ESPN sports cable network, and Radio Disney. The company's most visible and noteworthy enterprise of the 1990s was its foray into Broadway musicals. Stage adaptations of the animated features Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, both visually resplendent and long-running successes, premiered in 1994 and 1997, respectively. The company purchased Broadway's New Amsterdam Theatre in 1997 and has been credited with many civic improvements in the Broadway area. Disney's most ambitious stage production is a modern version of Aida (2000), with a score by the Lion King composing team of Elton John (John, Sir Elton) and Tim Rice. At the end of the 20th century the Walt Disney Company was one of the world's largest entertainment conglomerates, and it consistently ranked among America's top 50 corporations.

Additional Reading

Christopher Finch, The Art of Walt Disney: From Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdom (1973); Jack Kinney, Walt Disney and Assorted Other Characters—An Unauthorized Account of the Early Years at Disney's (1988); Bob Thomas, Disney's Art of Animation: From Mickey Mouse to Beauty and the Beast (1991).

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