Disney Cartoon Download

[Destini Armstrong]

WaltDisney Animation Studios (WDAS),[6] sometimes shortened to Disney Animation, is an American animation studio that creates animated features and short films for The Walt Disney Company. The studio's current production logo features a scene from its first synchronized sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie (1928). Founded on October 16, 1923, by brothers Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney after the closure of Laugh-O-Gram Studio,[1] it is the oldest-running animation studio in the world. It is currently organized as a division of Walt Disney Studios and is headquartered at the Roy E. Disney Animation Building at the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank, California.[7] Since its foundation, the studio has produced 62 feature films, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) to Wish (2023),[8] and hundreds of short films.

Founded as Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio (DBCS) in 1923, renamed Walt Disney Studio (WDS) in 1926 and incorporated as Walt Disney Productions (WDP) in 1929, the studio was dedicated to producing short films until it entered feature production in 1934, resulting in 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, one of the first full-length animated feature films and the first U.S.-based one. In 1986, during a large corporate restructuring, Walt Disney Productions, which had grown from a single animation studio into an international media conglomerate, was renamed The Walt Disney Company and the animation studio became Walt Disney Feature Animation (WDFA) in order to differentiate it from the company's other divisions. Its current name was adopted in 2006 after Pixar Animation Studios was acquired by Disney.

By 2013, the studio was no longer developing hand-drawn animated features as a result of 3D computer animated films performing better at the box office, and had laid off most of their hand-drawn animation division.[14][15] However, the studio stated in 2019 and 2023 that they are open to proposals from filmmakers for future hand-drawn feature projects.[16][17] In addition, in April 2022, Eric Goldberg confirmed plans within the Disney studio to once again return to hand-drawn animation.[18]

Kansas City, Missouri, natives Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney founded Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in Los Angeles in 1923 and got their start producing a series of silent Alice Comedies short films featuring a live-action child actress in an animated world.[20] The Alice Comedies were distributed by Margaret J. Winkler's Winkler Pictures, which later also distributed a second Disney short subject series, the all-animated Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, through Universal Pictures starting in 1927.[20][21] Upon relocating to California, the Disney brothers initially started working in their uncle Robert Disney's garage at 4406 Kingswell Avenue in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, then, in October 1923, formally launched their studio in a small office on the rear side of a real estate agency's office at 4651 Kingswell Avenue. In February 1924, the studio moved next door to office space of its own at 4649 Kingswell Avenue. In 1925, Disney put down a deposit on a new location at 2719 Hyperion Avenue in the nearby Silver Lake neighborhood, which came to be known as the Hyperion Studio to distinguish it from the studio's other locations, and, in January 1926, the studio moved there and took on the name Walt Disney Studio.[22]

Meanwhile, after the first year's worth of Oswalds, Walt Disney attempted to renew his contract with Winkler Pictures, but Charles Mintz, who had taken over Margaret Winkler's business after marrying her, wanted to force Disney to accept a lower advance payment for each Oswald short. Disney refused and, as Universal owned the rights to Oswald rather than Disney, Mintz set up his own animation studio to produce Oswald cartoons. Most of Disney's staff was hired away by Mintz to move over once Disney's Oswald contract expired in mid-1928.[23]

Working in secret while the rest of the staff finished the remaining Oswalds on contract, Disney and his head animator Ub Iwerks led a small handful of loyal staffers in producing cartoons starring a new character named Mickey Mouse.[24] The first two Mickey Mouse cartoons, Plane Crazy and The Galloping Gaucho, were previewed in limited engagements during the summer of 1928. For the third Mickey cartoon, however, Disney produced a soundtrack, collaborating with musician Carl Stalling and businessman Pat Powers, who provided Disney with his bootlegged "Cinephone" sound-on-film process. Subsequently, the third Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie, became Disney's first cartoon with synchronized sound and was a major success upon its November 1928 debut at the West 57th Theatre in New York City.[25] The Mickey Mouse series of sound cartoons, distributed by Powers through Celebrity Productions, quickly became the most popular cartoon series in the United States.[26][27] A second Disney series of sound cartoons, Silly Symphonies, debuted in 1929 with The Skeleton Dance.[28]

In 1929, disputes over finances between Disney and Powers led to Disney's animation production company, reincorporated on December 16, 1929, as Walt Disney Productions, signing a new distribution contract with Columbia Pictures.[29][30][31] Powers, in return, signed away Ub Iwerks, who began producing cartoons at his own studio, although he would return to Disney in 1940.[32]

Columbia distributed Disney's shorts for two years before the Disney studio entered a new distribution deal with United Artists in 1932. The same year, Disney signed a two-year exclusive deal with Technicolor to utilize its new 3-strip color film process,[33] which allowed for fuller-color reproduction where previous color film processors could not.[34] The result was the Silly Symphony cartoon Flowers and Trees, the first film commercially released in full Technicolor.[34][35] Flowers and Trees was a major success[34][36] and all Silly Symphonies were subsequently produced in Technicolor.[37][38]

By the early 1930s, Walt Disney had realized that the success of animated films depended upon telling emotionally gripping stories that would grab the audience and not let go,[39][40] and this realization led him to create a separate "story department" with storyboard artists dedicated to story development.[41] With well-developed characters and an interesting story, the 1933 Technicolor Silly Symphony cartoon Three Little Pigs became a major box office and pop culture success,[34][42] with its theme song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" becoming a popular chart hit.[43]

In 1934, Walt Disney gathered several key staff members and announced his plans to make his first animated feature film. Despite derision from most of the film industry, who dubbed the production "Disney's Folly," Disney proceeded undaunted into the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,[44] which would become the first animated feature in English and Technicolor. Considerable training and development went into the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the studio greatly expanded, with established animators, artists from other fields and recent college graduates joining the studio to work on the film. The training classes, supervised by head animators such as Les Clark, Norm Ferguson and Art Babbit and taught by Donald W. Graham, an art teacher from the nearby Chouinard Art Institute,[12][44] had begun at the studio in 1932 and were greatly expanded into orientation training and continuing education classes.[12][44] In the course of teaching the classes, Graham and the animators created or formalized many of the techniques and processes that became the key tenets and principles of traditional animation.[12] Silly Symphonies such as The Goddess of Spring (1934) and The Old Mill (1937) served as experimentation grounds for new techniques such as the animation of realistic human figures, special effects animation and the use of the multiplane camera,[45] an invention that split animation artwork layers into several planes, allowing the camera to appear to move dimensionally through an animated scene.[46]

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs cost Disney a then-expensive sum of $1.4 million to complete (including $100,000 on story development alone) and was an unprecedented success when released in February 1938 by RKO Radio Pictures, which had assumed distribution of Disney product from United Artists in 1937. It was briefly the highest-grossing film of all time before the unprecedented success of Gone with the Wind two years later,[47][48] grossing over $8 million on its initial release, the equivalent of $173,163,120 in 1999 dollars.[48]

During the production of Snow White, work had continued on the Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies series of shorts. Mickey Mouse switched to Technicolor in 1935, by which time the series had added several major supporting characters, among them Mickey's dog, Pluto, and their friends Donald Duck and Goofy. Donald, Goofy, and Pluto would all be appearing in series of their own by 1940, and the Donald Duck cartoons eclipsed the Mickey Mouse series in popularity.[49] Silly Symphonies, which garnered seven Academy Awards, ceased in 1939, until the shorts returned to theatres with some re-issues and re-releases.[50]

The success of Snow White allowed Disney to build a new, larger studio on Buena Vista Street in Burbank, where The Walt Disney Company remains headquartered to this day. Walt Disney Productions had its initial public offering on April 2, 1940, with Walt Disney as president and Roy Disney as CEO.[51]

Much of the character animation on these productions and all subsequent features until the late 1970s was supervised by a brain-trust of animators Walt Disney dubbed the "Nine Old Men," many of whom also served as directors and later producers on the Disney features: Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, Woolie Reitherman, Les Clark, Ward Kimball, Eric Larson, John Lounsbery, Milt Kahl, and Marc Davis.[62] Other head animators at Disney during this period included Norm Ferguson, Bill Tytla and Fred Moore. The development of the feature animation department created a caste system at the Disney studio: lesser animators (and feature animators in-between assignments) were assigned to work on the short subjects, while animators higher in status such as the Nine Old Men worked on the features. Concern over Walt Disney accepting credit for the artists' work as well as debates over compensation led to many of the newer and lower-ranked animators seeking to unionize the Disney studio.[63]

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