Walt disney
Walter Elias Disney (Chicago, Illinois, December 5, 1901 - Burbank, California, December 15, 1966) was an American businessman, entertainer, screenwriter, voice actor, and film producer.. A pioneer of the American animation industry, he introduced innovations in cartoon production. As a film producer, Disney holds the record for person with the most Oscars with twenty-two statuettes and fifty-nine nominations. He was also awarded two special Golden Globe Awards and an Emmy Award, among many other recognitions. Several of his films are included in the National Film Registry of the United States Library of Congress.
Walt Disney was born in Chicago in 1901 and soon showed an interest in drawing. He attended art classes as a child and worked as a commercial illustrator from the age of eighteen. He moved to California in the early 1920s and there founded the Disney Brothers Studio with his brother Roy. Together with Ub Iwerks, Walt created the character of Mickey Mouse in 1928, his first great success and to which he himself initially gave voice. With the growth of his animation studio, he introduced advances such as synchronized sound, three-way Technicolor, animated feature films, and technical developments in cameras. The results can be seen in films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio and Fantasia (both 1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942), all of which fostered the development of animated films. After World War II (1939-1945) the Disney studio produced new animated and live-action films, such as successes such as Cinderella (1950) and Mary Poppins (1964), the last of which received five Oscars.
In the 1950s, he expanded his business into amusement parks, and in 1955 he opened Disneyland in Anaheim, California. To finance this huge project, he branched out with TV shows like Walt Disney's Disneyland and The Mickey Mouse Club . Likewise, it was involved in the 1959 Moscow Fair, the 1960 Winter Olympics or the 1964 New York World's Fair. In 1965 development began on a second theme park, Disney World, whose heart was to be a new type of city, the «Experimental Prototype of the City of Tomorrow» (EPCOT). Disney was a chain smoker throughout his life and died of lung cancer in December 1966, before the park or EPCOT project was completed.
In private, Walt Disney was a shy, self-deprecating and insecure man, but he developed a public image as a warm and outgoing character. He was a perfectionist and expected those who worked with him to always give their best. Although he has sometimes been called a racist or anti-Semite, many who knew him have denied it. His reputation changed in the years after his death, and he went from being seen as someone who promoted the patriotic values of his country to a clear representative of US imperialism. However, he remains an important figure in the history of animated film and culture in the United States, where he is considered a national cultural icon. His cinematic creations continue to be seen and adapted, the film studio he founded and which bears his name continues to maintain high standards in its production of popular entertainment, and Disney's fourteen theme parks open in four countries each year receive millions of visitors.
Childhood and youth (1901-1920)
Walt Disney was born on December 5, 1901, at 1249 Tripp Avenue, in the Hermosa neighborhood of Chicago. He was the fourth child of Elias Disney, a native of the United Province of Canada and the son of Irish parents, and Flora (née Call), an American of German and English ancestry. In addition to Walt, Elias and Flora's sons were Herbert, Raymond, and Roy, while in 1903 they had a fifth daughter, Ruth. In 1906, when Disney was four years old, the family moved to a farm in Marceline, Missouri, where his uncle Robert had just bought land. In Marceline, Disney developed his interest in drawing when he was paid money to draw the horse of a retired neighborhood doctor. Elias was a subscriber to the newspaper Appeal to Reason and his son Walt practiced copying cartoons from the cover art created by Ryan Walker. Disney also developed a skill in painting with watercolors and colored pencils. He lived near the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe rail line and thus became fond of trains. He and his little sister Ruth started at Marceline's Park School at the same time in late 1909.
In 1911 the Disney family moved again, this time to Kansas City, Missouri. There Walt enrolled in Benton Elementary School and befriended his classmate Walter Pfeiffer, whose family was theatergoers and introduced to Disney in the world of vaudeville and movies. He began to spend more time at the Pfeiffer house than at his own. Meanwhile, his father Elias had bought a delivery route for The Kansas City Star and Kansas City Times, whereupon Walt and his brother Roy began delivering papers, getting up at 04:30 in the morning to deliver the Times before going to class and repeating the rounds in the afternoon with copies of the Star, after leaving school. That pace was exhausting and had an impact on Disney's poor grades at school, where he would fall asleep during classes. Despite everything, he continued to deliver newspapers for more than six years, attending classes at the Kansas City Institute of Art on Saturdays and also taking a distance course in cartooning.
In 1917 Elias became one of the owners of a Chicago carbonated beverage manufacturer, the O-Zell Company, and thus returned to the city with his family. Walt enrolled at McKinley High School and became the cartoonist for the downtown newspaper, drawing patriotic images about the ongoing World War I; at the same time, he attended evening classes at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. In mid-1918 Disney tried to join the United States Army to fight the Germans, but was rejected because he was still a minor. After forging his birth certificate, he joined the Red Cross in September 1918 as an ambulance driver. He was sent to France, but arrived in Europe in November 1918, after the armistice that ended the war. He decorated the sides of his ambulance with caricatures and even published some of his creations in the army newspaper, the Stars and Stripes. Disney returned to Kansas City in October 1919 and found work as an artist apprentice at the Pesmen-Rubin Commercial Art Studio creating illustrations for advertisements, theater programs, and catalogs. There he also made friends with a fellow artist, Ub Iwerks.
Beginnings in animation (1920-1928)
In January 1920, Disney and Iwerks were fired as a result of the Pesmen-Rubin studio's falling revenue after Christmas. They both opened their own business, Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists. They failed to attract many clients, so it was decided that Disney should temporarily go out of business to make money at the Kansas City Film Ad Company, run by A. V. Cauger. The following month Iwerks, who had not been able to build the business on his own, also joined this new company, which produced advertising using the cut-out animation technique. Disney thus became interested in animation, although he preferred cartoons such as Mutt and Jeff and Koko the Clown. With the help of a borrowed book on animation and a camera, he began experimenting at home and came to the conclusion that animation with semi-transparent paper held more promise than the cut-out method. Because he was unable to convince Cauger As a result of the advantages of this technique, he opened a new business with a colleague from the Film Ad Co, Fred Harman. s Laugh-O-Grams. Disney studied cartoonist Paul Terry's animated shorts Aesop's Fables as a model, so the first six Laugh-O-Grams Grams were modernized fairy tales.
In May 1921, the success of the Laugh-O-Grams led to the creation of the Laugh-O-Gram Studio located on the second floor of the McConahay Building in Missouri, for which Disney hired animators Hugh Harman (brother of his partner Fred Harman), Rudolf Ising and Ub Iwerks. The Laugh-O-Grams cartoons did not, however, generate enough money to make the company solvent, so Disney began production on Alice's Wonderland, based on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, which combined animation with live action footage of actress Virginia Davis as Alice. The result was a 12 1/2-minute short film that was completed too late to save the Laugh-O-Gram Studio, which ended in bankruptcy in 1923.
Walt Disney moved to Hollywood in July 1923. Although New York was then the center of the cartoon industry, he was drawn to Los Angeles because his brother Roy was there convalescing from tuberculosis and he also had a desire to become a live-action film director. Disney's efforts to sell Alice's Wonderland were in vain until he heard of film distributor Margaret J. Winkler, who was losing money at the time. the rights to the drawings Out of the Inkwell and Felix the Cat and for that reason I needed new series. In October they signed a contract for six Alice Comedies, with an option for another two series of six episodes each. Disney and his brother Roy founded the Disney Brothers Studio, the seed of the later The Walt Disney Company, to produce these films. In July 1924, Walt hired his longtime collaborator Ub Iwerks after convincing him to move to Hollywood from Kansas City.
In early 1925, Disney recruited an ink artist, Lillian Bounds. The two were married in July of that year at her brother's home in Lewiston, Idaho. They formed a generally happy marriage, according to Lillian, although according to Disney biographer Neal Gabler she "did not meekly accept Walt's decisions." nor her status unquestionably, apart from admitting that she used to tell people that she was in charge at home". Lillian had little interest in movies or the Hollywood social scene and was, in the words of historian Steven Watts, "happy with running the house and taking care of her husband." The couple had two daughters, Diane (born in December 1933) and Sharon (adopted in December 1936 but born six weeks earlier). Walt concealed that Sharon was adopted. But they did not like outsiders commenting on that information. The Disneys tried to keep their daughters hidden from public view and took measures so that they were not photographed by the press, especially for the kidnapping of Lindbergh's son.
By 1926 Winkler's role in syndicating the Alice series had passed to her husband, film producer Charles B. Mintz, with whom Disney had a strained relationship. The series ran until July 1927, when Disney began to tire of it and wanted to move from mixed format to full animation. In response to Mintz's request to create new material for distribution through Universal Pictures, Disney and Iwerks created Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a character that Disney wanted to be "cheerful, alert, cheeky and adventurous". In February 1928 Disney hoped to negotiate a higher fee to create the Oswald series, but found that Mintz wanted the opposite. In addition, Mintz convinced some of the artists involved to work directly for him, including Harman, Ising, Carman Maxwell, and Friz Freleng. Disney also discovered that Universal owned the intellectual property rights to Oswald. Mintz threatened to start up his own studio to push the series forward if Disney rejected the cuts. Walt refused Mintz's ultimatum and thus lost most of his cheerleading squad except for Iwerks, who decided to stick with him.
Mickey Mouse and the first Oscars (1928-1933)
To replace the Oswald character, Disney and Iwerks created Mickey Mouse, possibly inspired by a mouse Walt had adopted as a pet while working at the Laugh-O-Gram studio, although the origins The character's character remains unclear. Disney's first name for his creation was Mortimer Mouse, but his wife Lillian found this too pompous and suggested Mickey instead. Iwerks revised Disney's initial sketches for the character easier to animate. Walt, who had already begun to move away from the animation process, provided his voice for Mickey until 1947. In the words of a Disney employee, "Ub designed Mickey's physical appearance, but Walt gave him his soul."
Mickey Mouse first appeared in the May 1928 short film Plane Crazy, but this and his subsequent appearance in The Gallopin' Gaucho did not find a distributor. After the sensation caused by the premiere in 1927 of the first sound film, The Jazz Singer, Disney used synchronized sound in the third Mickey Mouse short, Steamboat Willie, to create the first sound cartoon. After the animation was completed, Disney signed a contract with a former Universal Pictures executive, Pat Powers, to use his "Powers Cinephone" recording system to distribute Disney's first sound cartoons, which soon gained popularity.
To improve the quality of the music, Disney hired professional composer and arranger Carl Stalling, thanks to whose suggestions the series of Silly Symphonies was born. in which history was at the service of music. The first series, The Skeleton Dance, was drawn and animated entirely by Iwerks. They also then hired local artists, many of whom would remain with the company as expert animators and would later become known as "The Old Nine". In this series, studio characters such as Pluto, Goofy and Donald Duck made their first appearances.. Both Mickey Mouse and the Silly Symphonies series enjoyed great success, but Disney and his brother felt that Pat Powers was not giving them their fair share of the profits. In 1930 Disney tried to cut costs on the process by asking Iwerks to abandon the practice of animating each sheet in favor of the more efficient technique of him drawing only key poses and letting lower-paid assistants sketch the poses in between. Disney asked Powers for a raise, but he refused. In addition, Iwerks accepted Powers' offer to leave Disney and open his own company, the Iwerks Studio. Stalling left the job soon after because he believed that without Iwerks the Disney studio would go out of business. Disney suffered a nervous breakdown in October 1931, which he blamed on Powers's machinations and overwork, so he left to recuperate with his wife Lillian on an extended vacation to Cuba and a cruise to Panama.
With the loss of Powers as distributor, Disney studios signed a contract with Columbia Pictures to distribute the Mickey Mouse stories, which were becoming increasingly popular even internationally. Disney, always eager to incorporate new technology, filmed Trees and Flowers (1932) in full color with Technicolor three-way; he even managed to negotiate an agreement that gave only him the right to use that process until August 31, 1935. All the Later Silly Symphony were in color. Trees and Flowers was well received and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1932. He had previously been nominated in that category for another short, Mickey's Orphans, and also received an honorary Oscar that year for the creation of Mickey.
In 1933 Disney produced The Three Little Pigs, a film described by historian Adrian Danks as "the most successful animated short of all time". Best Animated Short Film and its success allowed a new increase in the studio's staff, which reached almost 200 people by the end of the year 1933. Disney realized the importance of telling exciting stories that interested viewers, so he invested in a separate "story department" from the animators, with storyboard artists who would detail the plots of Disney films.
Golden era of American animation (1934-1941)
By 1934 Disney was no longer entirely satisfied with producing animated shorts subject to the same formula and believed that an animated feature film would be more profitable. So his studio began four-year production on Snow White and the seven dwarfs, based on the fairy tale. When news of this project leaked, many in the film industry predicted that it would be the undoing of the company, to the point of dubbing it "Disney's Fool". The film, which would be the first animated feature film in color and with sound, it cost $1.5 million, triple the budget. To ensure the animation was as realistic as possible, Disney sent its animators to take courses at the Chouinard Institute of Art, brought animals into the studio and hired actors for the animators to copy realistic movements. To capture the changing perspective of the backgrounds as the camera moved around the scene, Disney animators invented the multiplane camera, which allowed drawings made on glass to be placed at different distances. of the camera, thus creating an illusion of depth. The glass could be moved to create the impression of a camera traversing a stage. The first work created with this camera was a Silly Symphony titled The Old Mill (1937) which won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film thanks to its impressive visual power. Although Snow White was largely finished by the time that multiplane camera was ready, Disney ordered that some scenes be redrawed to use the new effects.
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Snow White was released in December 1937 to praise from specialized critics and the public. The film was the most successful of 1938, and by May 1939 it had grossed $6.5 million, making it the most successful talkie film to date. Disney won another honorary Oscar, a full-size statuette. and seven miniatures. The success of Snow White was the beginning of one of the most productive stages of the studio, defined by the Walt Disney Family Museum as "The Golden Age of Animation". Production of Snow White, the studio began production on Pinocchio at the beginning of 1938 and on Fantasia in November of that year. Both films were released in 1940 and neither was a box office success, in part because receipts from Europe had fallen after the outbreak of World War II in 1939. The studio lost money on both productions and by the end of February 1941 it was very indebted.
In response to this financial crisis, Disney and his brother Roy launched the company's first public offering in 1940 and were forced to implement significant pay cuts. This latter measure, along with Disney's harsh and callous treatment of its employees at times, led to the 1941 entertainers' strike, which lasted five weeks. While a federal mediator from the National Labor Relations Board was negotiating with On both sides, Disney accepted an offer from the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs for a goodwill trip to South America, ensuring that he was absent during a resolution that he knew would be unfavorable to the studio. As a result of this strike, Disney As well as the company's financial state, several animators left the studio, and Disney's relations with other members of his team were permanently strained. The strike interrupted the studio's next production, Dumbo (1941)., which Disney produced simply and cheaply. Despite everything, the film was liked by both critics and the public.
World War II and later years (1941-1950)
Shortly after Dumbo was released in October 1941, the United States entered World War II. Disney created the "Walt Disney Training Film Unit" within the company to produce instructional films for the military such as Four Methods of Flat Riveting and Aircraft Production Methods Disney also met with Henry Morgenthau, Jr., United States Secretary of the Treasury, with whom they agreed to produce Donald Duck shorts to promote the purchase of war bonds. The company also created several propaganda productions, including The Führer's Face, which won an Oscar, and Victory Through Air Power.
Military films only made enough money to break even and the feature film Bambi, which had been in production since 1937, also failed to make much money when it opened in April 1942, causing losses of $200,000. at the box office. In addition to the low collections of Pinocchio and Fantasia, in 1944 the company had a debt of 4 million contracted with the Bank of America. executives of this bank to discuss the future of the company, the president and founder of the financial institution, Amadeo Giannini, told his executives: "I have been watching Disney movies very carefully because I knew that we were lending them money above of financial risk... They're good this year, they'll be good next year and the next... You've got to relax to give them time to market their product." Disney's production of shorts declined in the late 1940s, coinciding with increasing competition in the market of Warner Bros. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer animation. For financial reasons, Roy Disney suggested combining animation with live action film. Thus, in 1948 Disney began a series of nature documentaries entitled True-Life Adventures, of which Seal Island was the first. This production was awarded the Oscar for Best Short Film.
Walt Disney veered his political views toward conservatism over the years. He supported the Democratic Party until the 1940 United States presidential election, then switched allegiance to the Republican Party, and in 1944 donated a generous amount of money to the candidacy of Thomas E. Dewey. In 1946 he was one of the founding members of the Film Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, an organization that "liked and stood up for the American Way of Life... We find ourselves in a strong revolt against a rising tide of communism, fascism, and related beliefs, seeking for subversive means to undermine and change this way of life." union organizers, as communist agitators; claimed that the 1941 strike they led was part of an organized communist effort to gain influence in Hollywood. In 1993 The New York Times reported that Disney had been passing secret information to the FBI since 1940 until his death in 1966, obtaining in exchange from its director J. Edgar Hoover permission to film at the FBI headquarters in Washington. Disney was considered by this agency as a "special agent" in 1954.
In 1949 Disney and his family moved into a new home in the Holmby Hills district of Los Angeles. With the help of his friends Ward and Betty Kimball, who already had their own backyard railroad, Disney made plans and immediately set to work creating a miniature steam railway on his land. The name of this railroad, Carolwood Pacific Railroad, came from the location of the house on Carolwood Drive. The perfectly functional miniature locomotive was built by a Disney Studios engineer, Roger E. Broggie, and christened Lilly Belle by Disney after his wife, three years later Disney put the locomotive on hold due to several accidents with his guests.
Amusement parks, television and other projects (1950-1966)
In the early 1950s, Disney released Cinderella, the studio's first animated feature film in eight years. Critics and audiences liked it, and having cost $2.2 million to produce, it grossed $8 million in its first year. Disney was less involved in this production than usual because it had focused on a live-action feature film, The Island of Treasure (1950), which was shot in the UK as was The King's Archers (1952). Other live-action films followed, many of them patriotic, as well as new animated feature films such as Alice in Wonderland (1951) and Peter Pan (1953). In the first half of the 1950s, Disney began paying less attention to the animation department, delegating almost all of its operations to trusted animators, The Nine Elders, although it was still present at story meetings. Instead, he began to turn his attention to other business ventures.
Disneyland
For years Walt Disney was considering building an amusement park. When he visited Griffith Park in Los Angeles with his daughters, he thought that it would be ideal for it to be a clean and spotless place, where both children and their parents could have fun. He visited Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, Denmark, and was greatly impressed by line clearance and park layout. In March 1952, he received zoning permission to build a theme park in Burbank, near the Disney studios. That site was too small, so he bought a larger piece of land in Anaheim, 56 km south of the studio. To establish a clear difference with the studio and thus avoid criticism from shareholders, Disney formed WED Enterprises—now Walt Disney Imagineering—and used his own money to pay a group of designers and animators to work on the plans; they they would be known as the "Imagineers" (a union of the words imagination and engineering in English). After obtaining the necessary financing, he invited new shareholders: American Broadcasting-Paramount Theaters—part of the American Broadcasting Company (ABC)—and Western Printing and Lithographing Company. In mid-1954 Disney sent his "Imagineers" to visit all the amusement parks in the United States to analyze their virtues and defects, or the problems of their locations, in order to incorporate the findings into their design.
Construction work began in July 1954 and Disneyland opened its doors in July 1955. The opening ceremony was broadcast on ABC television and was watched by 70 million viewers. The park was designed with a series of themed areas connected to a main avenue, Main Street, U.S.A., which is a replica of the main street in Disney's hometown of Marceline, Missouri. The connected theme areas were originally Adventureland, Frontierland, Fantasyland and Tomorrowland. The park also had the Disneyland Railroad railway connecting those areas; around the entire entertainment complex a berm - an earthen wall - prevented seeing its interior. An editorial in the newspaper The New York Times considered that Disney "had tastefully combined some of the nice things of yesterday with the fantasy and dreams of tomorrow." Although there were some minor problems during the opening of the park, it was a complete success because a month after opening its doors Disneyland received 20,000 daily visitors and at the end of its first year it 3.6 million people had watched.
Television
The ABC television network's money depended on Disney television shows. The film and animation studio had been involved in a successful television special on Christmas Day 1950 about the making of Alice in Wonderland. Wonderland. Roy thought that this show had later grossed millions at the box office, so in March 1951 he wrote in a letter to shareholders that "television may be the greatest boost in our sales, as well as a source of profit. It will probably be on this premise that we go into television." and other material from the studio's library. The show was successful in terms of viewers and profits, with an audience share of over 50%. ABC was pleased with the ratings and launched Disney's first daily show, The Mickey Mouse Club, with different entertainment spaces for children. The program was accompanied by related objects launched by various companies, such as Western Printing that has been selling coloring books and comics for twenty years, in addition to other related objects. One of the segments of Disneyland consisted of the five-episode miniseries Davy Crockett which, according to biographer Neal Gabler, "became an overnight sensation". The series musical, "The Ballad of Davy Crockett", became internationally famous and sold ten million copies. As a result, Disney created his own production and distribution record label, Disneyland Records.
Other projects
In addition to building Disneyland, Disney worked on other projects outside of the studio. He acted as a consultant to the 1959 American National Exposition in Moscow, to which Disney Studios also contributed the 19-minute film America the Beautiful, which was shown at the 360 Circarama theater ° and was one of the most popular attractions. The following year he served as chairman of the Entertainment Committee for the 1960 Winter Olympics held in Squaw Valley, California, for which he designed the opening, closing, and medal ceremonies.
Despite requests to take on projects outside the studio, Disney continued to work on film and television projects. In 1955 he was involved in an episode of the series Disneyland entitled "Man in Space", which was made in collaboration with NASA rocket designer Wernher von Braun. He also supervised some aspects of the feature films Lady and the Tramp (first animated film in Cinemascope) in 1955, Sleeping Beauty (first animated film in Technirama on 70mm film) in 1959, 101 Dalmatians in 1961 and The Sword in the Stone in 1963.
In 1964 Disney produced Mary Poppins, based on a series of books by writer P. L. Travers and for which the rights had been sought since the 1940s. It became the most successful film of the studio in the 1960s, although Travers deeply disliked the film and said she was very sorry for selling the rights. That same year Disney was involved in drawing up plans to expand the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and hired an architect to draw up the plans for the new building.
Disney provided four shows for the 1964 New York World's Fair, for which it secured funding from selected corporate sponsors. For PepsiCo, a company that wanted to honor UNICEF, Disney created It's a Small World, a boat ride among animatronic dolls that symbolized the children of the world; Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln featured a realistic, also animatronic figure of President Abraham Lincoln delivering excerpts from his speeches; the Carousel of Progress promoted the importance of electricity; and Ford's Magic Skyway portrayed the progress of mankind. Some concepts and technology from these four shows were later reinstated at Disneyland.
During the first half of the 1960s, Disney drew up plans for a ski resort at Mineral King, a glacial valley in California's Sierra Nevada. He hired experts such as renowned Olympic ski coach and slope designer Willy Schaeffler, but the project was ultimately canceled due to protests from environmental organizations. With Disneyland's revenues steadily increasing, Disney continued to search for locations for new parks. of attractions. Thus, at the end of 1965, he announced his plans to develop a new park that was to be called Disney World -now Walt Disney World-, several kilometers south of Orlando (Florida). Disney World was to include "The Magic Kingdom," a larger and more elaborate version of Disneyland, as well as golf courses and hotel complexes. The heart of Disney World was to be the "Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow" (EPCOT), which he described as:
"An experimental community prototype of tomorrow will be inspired by new ideas and technologies that are now emerging from the creative centers of the American industry. It will be a morning community never complete, but it will always be introducing and testing new materials and systems. And EPCOT will always be a showcase for the world of the wit and imagination of the American free enterprise."
During 1966 Disney explored companies willing to sponsor EPCOT. He also increased his involvement in the studio's films and was heavily involved in the development of the Jungle Book story, the live-action musical film The Happiest Millionaire (both 1967) and the animated short Winnie the Pooh in the Enchanted Forest.
Death
Disney had been a chain smoker since World War I. He smoked unfiltered cigarettes and had also smoked a pipe as a youth. In November 1966 he was diagnosed with lung cancer and cobalt therapy was applied. On November 30, he felt unwell and was admitted to Saint Joseph's Hospital in Burbank, where on December 15, 10 days after his 65th birthday, he died of circulatory failure caused by lung cancer. His body He was cremated two days later and his ashes interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.
The theatrical releases of The Jungle Book and The Happiest Millionaire in 1967 brought the total number of films Disney had been involved in to 81. Winnie the Pooh in the Enchanted Forest premiered in 1968 and was awarded an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film which was awarded to Disney posthumously. After Disney's death his studies continued a prolific production of live-action films and largely abandoned animated cinema until the late 1980s, after which there was what The New York Times described as the Disney Renaissance, which began with the release of The Little Mermaid in 1989. The Walt Disney Company continues to produce highly successful entertainment and is the world's largest media conglomerate.
Disney's plans for the futuristic EPCOT city fell through. Upon his death, his brother Roy deferred his retirement to take full control of the Disney companies and shifted the focus of Disney World from a city to a new attraction. At its opening in 1971, Roy dedicated Walt Disney World to his brother.. This amusement park was expanded in 1982 with the opening of Epcot Center, which took the form of a permanent Universal Exposition. In 2009, the Walt Disney Family Museum, designed by the daughter, opened in the Presidio Real park in San Francisco of Disney, Diane and her son Walter E. D. Miller to display thousands of artifacts from Disney's life and career. In 2014, Disney theme parks around the world welcomed about 134 million visitors.
Walt Disney has been portrayed numerous times in works of fiction. H. G. Wells makes a reference to Disney in his 1938 novel The Holy Terror, in which the world's dictator Rud fears that Donald Duck intends to ridicule him. Disney was played by Len Cariou in the 1995 telefilm Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes: The Annette Funicello Story, and by Tom Hanks in the 2013 film Saving Mr. Banks. In 2001 the German writer Peter Stephan Jungk published the novel Der König von Amerika (entitled in Spanish The Perfect American), a work of fiction about the last years of Disney that imagines him as a power hungry racist. Composer Philip Glass later adapted the book into the opera The Perfect American (2013).
Honors
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Walt Disney received fifty-nine Oscar nominations and won twenty-two statuettes; both totals are records in film history. He was nominated for three Golden Globe Awards but, although he did not win any, he was awarded two special achievement awards, one for Bambi (1942) and the other for for The Living Desert (1953), in addition to the Cecil B. DeMille Award. He was also nominated four times for the Emmy Awards, of which he won one for Best Producer for the television series Disneyland. Several of his films are included in the National Film Registry maintained by the United States Library of Congress because they are "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant": Steamboat Willie, The Three Little Pigs, Snow White, Fantasy, Pinocchio, Bambi, Dumbo and Mary Poppins. In 1998 the American Film Institute published a list of the 100 greatest American films, according to industry experts, and included Snow White (position 49) and Fantasy (pu this 58).
In February 1960, Disney was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame with two stars, one for his motion pictures and one for his television productions. Mickey Mouse had already received his star in 1978 in recognition of his films Disney was also inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1986, the California Hall of Fame in 2006, and was awarded the inaugural star on the Anaheim Walk of Stars in 2014.
The Walt Disney Family Museum recalls that "along with the members of his team, he received more than 950 honors and commendations from around the world." Among them, he was made a Knight of the prestigious Legion of Honor in 1935 and in 1952 he was awarded the most important artistic decoration of this country, the Officer d'Academie. Other national awards were the Order of the Crown of Thailand (1960), the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (1956), the Order of the Southern Cross of Brazil (1941) and the Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle (1943). In his native country he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Liberty in 1964 and the United States Congressional Gold Medal posthumously in 1968. He received the World's Showman Award from the National Association of Theater Owners and in 1955 the Audubon Medal, the most distinguished honor from the National Audubon Society, for promoting "the appreciation and understanding of nature" through its pe films True-Life Adventures. A minor planet discovered in 1980 by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Karachkina was named "4017 Disneya". To all this is added that prestigious universities such as Yale, Harvard, the University of Southern California and the University of California at Los Angeles awarded him honorary degrees.
Personality and reputation
Disney's public persona was very different from his true personality. Playwright Robert E. Sherwood described him as "almost painfully shy and self-deprecating". According to his biographer Richard Schickel, Disney hid his shy and insecure personality behind his public identity. Animator Ward Kimball argued that he "played a role of a timid tycoon embarrassing himself in public" and knew he was doing it. Disney acknowledged that he was putting on that facade, telling a friend that "I'm not Walt Disney. I do a lot of things that Walt Disney wouldn't do. Walt Disney doesn't smoke. I smoke. Walt Disney doesn't drink. I drink." Critic Otis Ferguson, in The New Republic, called private Disney: "common and everyday, not inaccessible, didn't speak another language, not repressed or sold out or whatever. Only Disney". Many of those who worked with him agreed that he gave his workers few incentives considering how much he demanded of everyone, he prohibited them from growing a mustache or beard, he did not raise their salaries or even the names of some of their employees. they were omitted in the final credits by express decision of Disney, which caused a strike in 1941. Floyd Norman, also an animator, recalls that when Disney said "That will work", it was high praise because instead of giving direct approval, Disney gave financial benefits to his close associates, or recommended certain people, hoping that this would show his praise.
Opinions of Disney and its films have varied over the decades, and opinions have been polarized. Mark Langer writes in the American Dictionary of National Biography that "early assessments of Disney exalted as a patriot, a people's artist, a popularizer of culture. More recently, Disney has been spoken of as a paradigm of American imperialism and intolerance, as well as a devastater of culture". Steven Watts wrote that some denounced Disney as "a cynical manipulator of cultural and commercial formulas". His studio's films have been highly praised by critics and audiences, in addition to being enormously popular for a long time, they have also been criticized with adjectives such as vulgar or badly written, also superficial compared to their literary sources.
He has also been accused of anti-Semitism, though none of his employees—not even Art Babbitt, who despised him—ever mentioned that he insulted or mocked Judaism. Neal Gabler, first writer to have unrestricted access to Disney files, concludes that there is no evidence to support the charges of anti-Semitism. Disney has also been accused of other forms of racism for the racially insensitive content of its pre-1950 films, in the case of Song of the South (1946) and his stereotypes about blacks. Once again, Gabler refutes this: "Walt Disney was not a racist. He never said, either in public or in private, anything derogatory about blacks. However, like many Americans of his generation, he was racially insensitive." Floyd Norman, his studio's first black animator, states that "I never once observed a hint of the racist behavior of which Walt Disney was often accused after the death of him."
Historian Steven Watts argues that many of Disney's post-World War II films "legislated as a kind of cultural Marshall Plan. They fed a brilliant cultural imperialism that magically invaded the rest of the world with the values, expectations and assets of a prosperous middle class in the United States". Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart published the book To read Donald Duck, in which they argue that "there are imperialist values hidden behind the innocent facade of the world of Disney." The sociologist John Tomlinson does not share this argument because he believes that its authors "simply assume that reading American comics, watching advertising or movies of the Yankee lifestyle, these have a direct pedagogical effect."
Some have seen Disney as a cultural icon. Professor Ralph S. Izard said after Disney's death that the values of his films are those "considered valuable in American Christian society", and include "individualism, decency, love for one's neighbour, fair play and tolerance". a moving beauty." Journalist Bosley Crowther argues that "Disney's achievements as a creator of entertainment for an almost unlimited audience and as an effective marketer of its products can be compared with those of the most successful industrialists in history." Neal Gabler considers that Disney "reshaped American culture and consciousness".. Far from the scams, far from the purely commercial sights, thinking of a public that not only aspires to be but is more intelligent every day". Mark Langer concludes in the American National Biography :
Disney remains the central figure in animation history. Through technological innovations and alliances with governments and corporations, it transformed a smaller study of a marginal form of communication into a multinational giant of the leisure industry. Despite its critics, its vision of a modern and business utopia as an extension of the traditional values of the United States may have gained greater popularity in the years after its death.
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