CHAPTER 6

Disney

One of the most successful movie studios ever had superstars that never got paid. Not a penny. That’s because they were cartoon characters.

Walt Disney had always loved cartoons. When he was a kid, he practiced copying the pictures in newspaper cartoon strips. When he was older, Walt was the cartoonist for his high-school newspaper.

In 1919, Walt and his friend Ub Iwerks got jobs at a company that made short animated films. Animation—cartoons in action—was new.

Walt was hooked. He would create movies with great characters that moved.

Animation took a lot of time. To make an animated film, cartoonists had to draw hundreds of images for every scene. How did they show a character waving? One picture was drawn with a hand slightly raised. In the next, the hand was moved a tiny bit to one side. The next drawing showed it even a little farther to the side. And so on. It takes 1,400 different pictures to create a minute’s worth of animated action.

In 1923, Walt moved to Hollywood and started Disney Brothers Studio with his brother Roy. It wasn’t long before he was making money from short animated films. In 1928, he released the black-and-white short film Steamboat Willie. It starred a mouse called Mickey. More Mickey Mouse shorts followed. Mickey Mouse was Walt Disney’s first Hollywood superstar. Donald Duck was next. Disney had a monopoly on kids’ movies.

In 1932, Disney made the first full-color animated short film. It was called Flowers and Trees. Then, in 1938, Walt released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which was longer. It was the first full-length animated feature film, and also the first one in color. Snow White was followed by other animated Technicolor hits—Bambi, Dumbo, and Pinocchio.

In the 1950s, Walt started making live-action films—ones with real actors, not animated characters. Once again, he found box office gold with a string of hits: Old Yeller, Treasure Island, Davy Crockett, Kidnapped, Pollyanna, and Swiss Family Robinson.

Elsa from Frozen

Today, the Walt Disney Company is a huge Hollywood business. It owns Marvel, Lucasfilm (which makes the Star Wars films), and the Pixar studio, which has turned out animated superhits like Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Wall-E. And in 2013, Disney released a new “princess” animated movie like the classics it had created in the past. It was called Frozen, with Frozen 2 following in 2019.

Movies in Color

Color was added to black-and-white motion pictures as far back as 1902. However, not until 1932, with the introduction of Technicolor, did producing realistic full-color motion pictures become possible. At first, Technicolor film was used primarily for home movies. Becky Sharp (1935) was the first commercial movie shot in three-strip Technicolor. Four years later, two blockbuster films came out that were noted for their amazing Technicolor images—Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz.