Biography of Walt Disney:

Despite the efforts of his biographers, a fund of legend is still hovering over the figure of Walt Disney. A rumor repeatedly claims that Disney was a European immigrant, probably Spanish, who arrived in the United States and later for fear of suspicion, misrepresented its origin. They have also mystified the circumstances of his death; many believed that Disney had been frozen with modern techniques of hibernation. Your body still remains so with the vital signs suspended, pending a future that could awaken and new surgical repair your health.

Disney

But the prosaic reality is that Disney's body was cremated at the behest of their families. No wonder, however, all this mixture of fact and fantasy about who made history of Western culture as one of the most prolific and influential farmer's contradictory child's imagination.

Walter Elias Disney was born on December 5, 1901 in Chicago, Illinois. Fourth of five children born to Elias and Flora Disney, his childhood was spent in financial distress and under the severity of his father, a carpenter by profession who tried his hand at every kind of business without ever managed to improve its battered economy. Eternally despised by his father, Walt grew close to his mother, a former teacher of German descent, and his brother Roy eight years his senior.

In 1906, Elias Disney decided to start a new life at a farm near the small town of Marceline Mo, where Walt discovered the nature and animals. Even then did your interest in drawing, which he shared with his younger sister, Ruth. Elias Disney was working so hard for their children in the maintenance of the farm that the two eldest, Herbert and Raymond, decided to leave home to set up shop again in Chicago.

Difficult beginnings

The precarious situation in which the family left with the departure of the two young men got worse in the winter of 1909, when his father contracted typhoid fever and the illness forced him to sell the farm and move to Kansas City, Missouri where he found a job as paperboy, a task in which Roy and Walt to help him. This was a small child, Walt's performance in school, where it was never an outstanding student. After a couple of years Walt occasionally earning some money selling his cartoons he enrolled at the Art Institute of Kansas City where he learned the rudiments of drawing technique. In those years of his adolescence he discovered the film, an invention that passion from the start.

During the war was an ambulance driver

In 1917, five years after Roy Disney also leave the parental home; Elias Disney moved his wife and two young children back to Chicago where he tried his luck riding a small jam factory. In the spring of 1918, Walt with only seventeen falsified her birth certificate and enlisted as a soldier in the Red Cross to fight in the First World War. He arrived in Europe when there was peace but was stationed in France and Germany until September 1919. Once he graduated he went to live with his brother Roy to Kansas City where he sought employment as a draftsman.

His dream was to become an artist of the "Kansas City Star" the newspaper that was distributed in its infancy but found work as an apprentice in an advertising agency the Commercial Pesman-Rubin Art Studio. With a salary of $ 50 a month in that job she met Ubbe Iwerks, a young man of his age and exceptionally gifted in drawing with whom he befriended. When the two being out of work, set up their own company, Iwerks Disney Commercial Artists. The company lasted only a month since Walt chose to accept a secure job, but convinced his new bosses to hire Iwerks. In that work both learned the techniques, still very rudimentary, animation film.

Disney working on Laugh-O-Gram Films (1922)

Restless and innovative by nature Disney asked borrowed a camera and set up a modest studio in the garage of his home where with the help of Iwerks and working through the night produced its first animated film. The film was accepted and got new orders until Disney, which was not yet twenty years old Iwerks convinced them to return to try their luck as entrepreneurs with a company they called Laugh-O-Gram Films. With production based on traditional stories the things they were fine until the bankruptcy of its main client also dragged into bankruptcy.

A Hollywood

In 1923, after trying in vain to trace the slump, Disney moved to Hollywood. The burgeoning film industry in Hollywood had turned a land of promise. Disney believed that his experience as a chamber director would work but no studies have tried their services so decided to start his own company with his brother Roy as a partner. On October 16, 1923, the Disney Brothers Studio signed its first major contract but still insufficient to meet its financial difficulties. Since then, Walt showed what would become a constant in his company; he was able to resort to any ploy to take the business forward. In 1924, he joined Ubbe Iwerks and Walt they could stop working as an entertainer to engage in the area which was always more qualified: the creation of characters and plots and management.

On July 13, 1925, three months after marrying his brother, Roy Disney married Lillian Bounds, a young employee of his study with whom he had two daughters Diane Marie born on December 18, 1933 when marriage and ruled that they could have offspring and Sharon Mae which was adopted in 1936. In the spring of 1926, and after having to change of location because the company grew his brothers and changed the name of his company which was renamed Walt Disney Studio. But the studio suffered a major setback when its main customer remained with the rights of Oswald Rabbit a character created by Disney who had starred in several short films.

The triumph of Mickey Mouse

Determined to eliminate intermediaries hereinafter, Disney conceived during a trip by train from Hollywood to New York to Mortimer a mouse later renamed with the name of Mickey at the suggestion of his wife and who shaped Iwerks. Disney was so but in reality the paternity of Mickey Mouse has been a source of controversy and now tends to attribute his own Iwerks. On October 1928, when Disney is looking for distributors for the films, he had produced with Mickey Mouse as the protagonist was screened the first film of sound cinema. Ahead of other producers who believed that passing innovation, Walt was quick to add sound to a third film of Mickey Willie in the steam boat (1928). Good mimic of voices and accents, Disney made the little mouse and his girlfriend Minnie told to your own voice to cut costs. The film released on November 18, 1928 at a theater in New York scored a resounding success with audiences and critics.

Willie frame in the steamer (1928)

In 1929, with its unique sixth sense for business several companies authorized to reproduce in their products the image of Mickey Mouse who joined white gloves and shoes to keep hands and feet disappear on dark backgrounds. On January 13, 1930 he began publishing a cartoon of the popular character (with Disney and Iwerks as writer and artist) in several U.S. newspapers and in the same year he published a book of drawings of Mickey that was republished on numerous occasions.

Workaholic for stealing a lot of sleep, Disney had a serious health crisis forced him at the end of 1931, when Mickey Mouse Club and had a million members to take a long vacation with his wife. Back in Hollywood, he pointed to a club where he practiced boxing, calisthenics, wrestling and golf. Shortly afterwards he found the horse races and finally the pole which was a fanatic for the rest of his life. A hobby grew with as much passion as his fascination with trains and miniatures.

With Mickey Mouse as the flagship of a company on the rise, Disney believed it should not be complacent or bored doing, only movies of the famous mouse which in 1932 won, he the first of the Oscar would receive during his career. Backed by a team of excellent designers and illustrators, needed all her creative spirit in the first series of his Silly Symphonies (1932). Made in Technicolor, the various films that made this production meant at the time an experiment on the expressive use of color. In November of that year, the Disney studio became the first to have its own school of cartoonists and animators.

A year later on May 27, 1933, silly symphony premiered was number thirty-six and that was to have an unexpected success: The three little pigs. Without meaning to his famous song "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf? it became a song of hope for millions of Americans trying not to be eaten in real life by the Great Depression. In 1934, when his study 187 people, was born Donald Duck an irascible character and wicked who came to join the dog Pluto and Goofy.

Feature

When they had made a name in the Hollywood industry Walt Disney launched a bold and unprecedented initiative: producing the first animated feature film history. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) demonstrated not only that Disney and his team were virtuosos of animation but the cartoon could be an entire film genre. The film earned four million dollars, a record for the season, but left in debt to Disney until 1961 because of amortization of the credits had to ask, since the initial budget of $ 500,000 tripling the movie was over.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was first used the multi-plane camera capable of suggesting depth of field, thanks to an ingenious system of overlay of five films shot in the same plane to simulate distance, and a new system of Technicolor. The film was the first example of the animated film Disney school had a strong narrative procedure, in which the human characters were described from the "gaze " humanized animals or fantastic creatures. It was also clear in the Disney film's taste for the dark and suggests his style rather than open about the terror.

The forties was a period of great activity in the Disney characterized both by consolidation of the style started with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as Walt felt the contradiction between his artistic tendency to innovation and risk and the need meet any given market developments and experiments. Evidence of this was the warm public response to the following films released its "factory" of dreams. Pinocchio (1940), considered one of the masterpieces of animated film by critics and in which it invested $ 2,600,000, was a commercial disaster.

So did Fantasia (1940), which cost $ 2,300,000. Here artists and animators combined developments of cartoon characters with the music of Stravinsky, Dukas, Beethoven, Ravel, Bach and Tchaikovsky. Considered a masterpiece by some and an insulting caricature of the other classical music, Fantasia was not the "total work" that Walt Disney had envisioned and desired. These business failures opened a major economic gap in the business, alleviated shortly after consecutive hits by Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942).

Fantasy (1940)

After the sketch on The Dance of the Hours, Ponchielli, who co-directed with Norman Ferguson in Fantasia using the pseudonym T. Hee Walt Disney left the field for carrying almost exclusively devoted to the task of leading the fledgling film empire in which the company had become so modestly had begun fifteen years earlier. On May 6, 1940 completed construction of its new studios in Burbankb which earned him the nickname "Wizard of Burbank".

Designed by him in order to facilitate the work of their employees those studies had twenty large buildings separated by streets which gave them the name of his characters. The company's workforce was around 2,000 employees which Disney demanded a high level of creativity and production in exchange for very low wages but never noticed the costs when making their films and always personally led a private life without luxury nor ostentatious.

Rabid anti-communist

On November 10, 1940 began working with the FBI after the then director of the federal research agency J. Edgar Hoover had repeatedly tried to recruit the film producer as its agent to provide him any information or detail about the presence of subversives (communists, trade unionists and anarchists) in Hollywood. However the first political ravings Disney had a more progressive look and went back to 1938, when he joined the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers an association of producers and independent filmmakers opposed to the stranglehold of the big Hollywood studios. From that group, which included figures such as Orson Welles or Charlie Chaplin Disney was drifting towards an ideology close to the American Nazi Party and a feeling strongly anti-Marxist.

In 1941, a newly formed union of illustrators in the company threatened to "Wizard of Burbank" to go on strike to demand better wages. Disney tried to avoid the conflict personally directing a speech to his employees, but these to his amazement and he conceived the company as one big family not let him spend the first few sentences. On 29 May of that year the Disney studios were almost paralyzed by a strike which involved most of the workers and that lasted a whole year. The conflict ended when the company agreed that workers could choose their union, including the leftist Screen Cartoonists Guild.

Walt Disney in 1941

The agreements led to the end of the strike were signed by Roy Disney and Walt was on a visit to several South American countries. In the long journey out several films designed primarily for the Latin American audience. Among them Cheers Friends (1943) and The Three Caballeros (1945), which combined animation and actors in the flesh . In 1943, much of the best artists he left to found the UPA (United Productions of America), where born among others the nearsighted Mister Magoo character.

After the Second World War in which Disney had agreed to shoot for the U.S. government propaganda films left the presidency of his company ceding the position to his brother Roy but only stayed a few months that decision in late 1945 and again to occupy the presidential chair. Nothing back fired more than 400 employees stating that the company went through a crisis and had to fulfill the agreement with the Screen Cartoonists Guild of granting a wage increase of 25% to the illustrators.

Reaffirmed his anti-Marxism and contributor to the FBI until his death, Disney agreed to abort any factors jeopardizing the American nation at the meeting held on 24 and 25 November 1947 at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, culminating in Call Waldorf Declaration, in which many film producers are committed to working with the Committee on Un-American Activities in the "witch hunt".

In August 1948 he traveled with his daughter Sharon to shoot pictures in Alaska, and the material made the short film series titled Adventures in real life. His brother Roy was opposed to the project (by then were already so far apart that only looked after appointment to their respective offices) and predicted an uncertain fate in this kind of documentaries. He was wrong, because the first one, entitled The Island of Seals (1948), was not only profitable, but was awarded an Oscar in the category of short films.

Almost finished forties Disney received an interesting offer from Howard Hughes: interest-free credit of one million dollars in exchange for his help in a plot (the film industry) that the Texas billionaire and knew not where I wanted invest. With that money Disney launched 18 new projects, including Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951) and Peter Pan (1953). After a costly foray into the futuristic film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), returned to cheaper projects that will connect with the pride of being American. By then, his company was no longer the queen of cartoons. The Warner Brothers began to make serious competition with the star of its series Looney Tunes, Bugs Bunny. One rabbit was the counterpoint to the naive, apolitical and asexual Mickey Mouse who in the early fifties lived his lowest moments of popularity, but remained the favorite Disney character and the emblem of his empire.

Disneyland

In 1953, after winning another Oscar for best documentary with The Living Desert, began talks with the ABC television network to transfer the issue of their films to the new invention. Unlike other Hollywood producers who considered a threat Disney believed that television was an excellent way to promote their products. A year later began the making of films specifically for television part of his artistic production more reviled by critics. Reviews will also rain down years later with Mary Poppins (1964), his first feature film with real actors only. But Disney did not care because those movies gave him the money he needed to realize a project that had long cherished: build a huge amusement park based on its characters.

Disney and von Braun (1954)

Dictate to work and perfectionist film producer designed every detail of Disneyland which opened its doors on July 17, 1955 in Anaheim California. This park covering an area of 120 hectares cost 17 million dollars and Main Street USA, the main street along which hundreds of costumed characters recreated to perfection the main street of Marceline the town where she spent her childhood Disney that summer of 1955 and was the grandfather of the first of which took ten grandchildren.

Billionaire and twenty-nine Oscars awarded in the sixties had become one of the best known and loved around the world but his health faltered and his whole empire went into a struggle for succession. Heavy smoker and alcohol enthusiast died on December 15, 1966 in Los Angeles, California, a victim of lung cancer having overseen the outline of Disney World theme park Disneyland-style but more focused towards adults, opened its doors in 1971 in Orlando Florida (in 1983, the company opened Tokyo Disneyland in Japan and in 1992 opened its doors on Euro Disney in Paris).

The Wizard of Burbank had died without seeing finished The Jungle Book (1967), the second most commercial film since the days of Disney Snow White and directed Wolfgang Reitherman, who took over the production of animation long Disneyana until 1981. After years of great production and a few notable successes, the Disney Studios are again the kings of the genre of animation with Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992) and The Lion King (1994). With the demise of Disney entered the legend one of the key names of twentieth century popular culture. With varying fortunes try to replace such disparate figures as his Brother Roy O. Disney's nephew Roy E. Disney and her husband Ron Miller. But only the executive producer Michael Eisner proved to be a worthy successor to him.

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