100 years of history of The Walt Disney Company

October 16 marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of The Walt Disney Company, which had a tremendous impact on popular culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. Mickey Mouse, who became one of the first popular characters in mass animation; the first commercially successful full-length film in the history of animation, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” and the first theme parks dedicated to animated characters—the famous Disneylands. Over the past two decades, Disney has included several successful film studios, including Pixar, already legendary in the world of computer animation, and the streaming service it launched just five years ago has already taken a place in the world’s top 3.

Mickey Mouse and first successes

The history of the company began 100 years ago – on October 16, 1923, when the brothers Walt and Roy Disney created the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio – The Walt Disney Company. Walt Disney was 22 years old at that time, and during this time he managed to serve as an ambulance driver in World War I, work in an advertising company, filming commercials, and try his hand at animation.

It was animation, which was then just taking its first steps, that attracted Walt – at the time of the creation of the studio, he had already made several short animated films.

When the company started, it had a small office on Kingswell Avenue in Los Angeles, and the brothers only had $40 to their name. Roy was 8 years older than his brother and, unlike him, was more of a businessman than a creative person. Therefore, it was he who dealt with finances, and his brother with the creative process.

Among the first creations of the young studio was a series of children’s films Alice Comedies – about the girl Alice and her cat Julius. According to the fashion of the time, films combined real-life actors with animation. Alice Comedies ran from 1923 to 1927. Although these films brought Disney some fame, they are now more likely a part of cinematic history, but certainly not mass culture.

And soon the same character appeared who is still recognized all over the world – the mischievous eared mouse Mickey Mouse. He first appeared in the short – only 6 minutes – cartoon “Crazy Airplane”, released in May 1928. The cartoon was silent, but already in November of the same year the studio released a sound cartoon with him in the title role – “Steamboat Willie”. It also became the world’s first animated film with synchronized—rather than post-recorded—sound.

Critics, who already wrote enthusiastically about this cartoon, noted not only technical innovations, but also humor and the quality of animation. Steamboat Willie and other Mickey Mouse cartoons made the studio a trendsetter in the world of animation and one of the main players in this young market.

Disney classics

The year 1937 was an important milestone in the history of not only the studio, but also world animation. Disney’s first full-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, was released. The characteristic appearance of the characters in this cartoon has also become an animation classic. Walt Disney himself was very actively involved in its creation – he proposed ideas for the plot, reviewed and selected storyboards, and voiced some of the characters.

“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was nominated for an Oscar in several categories at once – and became a model for the creators of animated films for many years and in many countries.

It also brought financial success to its creators – its box office grossed $8 million, more than any other film in 1937. In addition, Snow White became the first commercially successful feature film in the history of animation. Many years later, in 2007, the American Film Institute included Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in its list of the 100 best American films of the last 100 years. And the following year he put it in first place in a separate list of the best American animated films.

In 1940, an equally important cartoon for the development of animation, although not as iconic and well-known to everyone, was released – “Fantasia”. It is considered one of the studio’s most daring experiments under Walt Disney and brought a real breakthrough to the global animation market. The cartoon consists of eight parts, each of which is a visual accompaniment for one classical piece of music. For example, a suite from Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker” or an excerpt from Bach’s works. These works were performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra, one of the “Big Five” symphony orchestras in the United States. The performance was accompanied by a story about the music of the famous American composer and music critic Deems Taylor.

When creating the cartoon, the most advanced sound recording technologies of that time were used – primarily the Fantasound sound recording system developed at the Disney studio itself. Critics praised Fantasia as an “unforgettable aesthetic experience” and a “successful experiment” in combining popular entertainment such as cinema with classical music. The cartoon was also very successful at the box office.

Disneyland and new marketing

In the following decades, Disney released many cartoons that became true classics of world animation. “Pinocchio” (1940), “Bambi” (1942), “Cinderella” (1950), “Sleeping Beauty” (1959), “101 Dalmatians” (1961). During these years, the animation studio also entered the cinema market, starting to produce regular feature films.

The next breakthrough was the opening of the Disneyland amusement park in California in 1955. Walt Disney himself took an active part in its creation. According to his plan, it was supposed to be a park where you can not only go on rides and have fun (such parks existed before), but also get into fairy tales and stories familiar from Disney cartoons. On opening day, 28 thousand people visited Disneyland. In 1971, the company opened another amusement park – Walt Disney World (Orlando, Florida) – superior in size and equipment to the original Disneyland. This is also reflected in the number of visitors: on the first day, 100 thousand people came to it.

Since then, amusement parks of this kind have maintained their popularity. Now there are Disneylands in different countries, including France, Japan and China. Even the COVID-19 pandemic could not hinder their success – this year, Disney reported good growth in the financial performance of its amusement parks after the lifting of covid restrictions.

Walt Disney died in 1966, followed by his brother Roy five years later. The departure of the founding fathers led to the first crisis in the company’s history, which occurred in the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s. The studio released new animated and regular films, opened new amusement parks, but there was some stagnation in activity, and income began to decline.

The situation began to change in 1984, when the company’s shareholders—including the children of Walt and Roy Disney—found a new CEO for the company. It was Michael Eisner, who previously worked at the Paramount Pictures film studio, as well as at the American television channels CBS and ABC. His experience reflected Disney’s new need to focus more on television content.

Eisner restructured and created the Disney Television Animation division, which began producing cartoons specifically for showing on TV. This is how the legendary animated series “DuckTales”, “Chip and Dale to the Rescue”, “Black Raincoat”, “Goofy and His Crew” and many others appeared. The importance of television content, as well as the fact that Disney’s business was picking up again, is reflected in the purchase of the Capital Cities/ABC television company in 1995 for $19 billion. The deal was one of the largest in American history at that time.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, things also improved with cartoons for cinemas. Then The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and The Lion King (1994) were released. There were also successful projects in the early 2000s – then Disney released, among other things, the first film “Pirates of the Caribbean”, and also participated in the creation of the cartoon “Finding Nemo”.

Mergers, acquisitions and streaming

The company’s further successes turned out to be associated not so much with its own film production, but with a new strategy – Disney began to buy proven projects and integrate them into its business. The first such transaction was the purchase of Pixar studio in 2006 for $7.4 billion. This studio, on the one hand, was the first to produce full-length cartoons using the most advanced computer graphics technologies of its time.

On the other hand, she created non-standard and unusual cartoons, not similar to classic Disney works, and the further they went, the more suitable not only for children, but also for adults. Among the studio’s successes both before and after its purchase are Toy Story (1995) and its sequel, Monsters Inc. (2001), Cars (2006), Ratatouille (2007), WALL-E (2008), “Inside Out” (2015).

In 2009, Disney made another bold acquisition when it bought comic book company Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion. After the arrival of Walt Disney, the Marvel Cinematic Universe captivated the whole world – “Thor” (2011), “The Avengers” (2012), “Guardians of the Galaxy” (2014), “Avengers: Infinity War” (2018), as well as their numerous sequels and other films. and Marvel series now have hundreds of millions of fans in many parts of the world.

In 2012, another significant event occurred – Disney bought Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion. George Lucas’s film studio was best known for its two Star Wars trilogies, which became truly iconic. As part of Disney, Lucasfilm continued to develop the Star Wars universe, producing a trilogy that became a real commercial success, as well as several spinoffs and TV series.

In the 2010s, video streaming services began to gain popularity. And although Disney cannot be called a pioneer here – Netflix has existed since 2007, and by 2019 – when the Disney+ streaming service appeared – Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc. already existed – the brainchild of Walt Disney has rapidly closed the gap with its competitors. Disney+’s subscriber base has grown rapidly thanks to its extensive collection of films. In the first year alone, the number of subscribers exceeded 60 million. The launch of the Disney+ service occurred on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, when cinemas and amusement parks closed and viewers rushed to streaming services. Now Disney+, with 146 million subscribers, ranks third in this market, behind only Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Yana Rozhdestvenskaya