Walt Disney

Walter Elias Disney was born to Elias and Flora Disney in Chicago and grew up partly in Marceline and Kansas City, Missouri, where his childhood interest in drawing developed and later inspired elements of Disneyland’s Main Street, U.S.A. After briefly serving with the Red Cross in World War I as a teenager, Disney returned to pursue commercial art and began studying cartooning by correspondence while working at local art studios in Kansas City. In the early 1920s Disney co-founded Laugh-O-Gram Studio in Kansas City, then moved to Hollywood with his brother Roy O. Disney and animator Ub Iwerks and established a studio that evolved into the Disney Brothers Studio (later The Walt Disney Company). In 1928 Disney and Iwerks introduced Mickey Mouse in the short Steamboat Willie, one of the first cartoons with synchronized sound, which propelled Disney to national prominence and launched an era of character-driven animation. Walt Disney produced the first full-length animated feature in the United States, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), which proved the commercial and artistic viability of feature animation and led to a series of classic animated films and technical advances (multiplane camera, refined character animation, and storytelling techniques). In the 1950s Disney expanded into television and live-action production, using TV programs to promote the studio and finance projects such as Disneyland. Walt Disney opened Disneyland in Anaheim, California, in 1955 — a park conceived as a clean, immersive, story-driven family destination overseen closely by Disney himself — and later began planning the Florida project that became Walt Disney World after his death. His interests in education and the arts led him to help found the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Disney’s company continued expanding after his 1966 death, cementing his legacy as a major influence on 20th-century popular culture and the global entertainment industry.