Before Mickey, Walt Disney lost his rabbit and nearly all his animators
In February 1928 Walt Disney went to New York to ask for a bigger budget for his hit cartoon Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Instead he learned that Universal owned Oswald and that his distributor had lured away most of his artists. Only Ub Iwerks stayed loyal, and that year the pair came up with Mickey Mouse.
Born in Chicago on 5 December 1901, Disney spent his happiest childhood years on a farm in Marceline, Missouri, where a retired doctor paid him to draw his horse and the nearby Santa Fe railway sparked a lifelong love of trains. In Kansas City he and his brother Roy rose at 4:30 every morning to deliver newspapers before school and again after it, a routine he kept up for more than six years, often dozing in class. He took Saturday art classes and a correspondence course in cartooning.
At sixteen he tried to enlist to fight in the First World War and was turned away as too young. He forged his birth date, joined the Red Cross as an ambulance driver and reached France just after the armistice, decorating his ambulance with cartoons. Back in Kansas City he met Iwerks at a commercial art studio, where both were laid off in January 1920. At a firm making cutout-animation advertisements he borrowed a book and a camera, experimented at home and concluded that drawn cel animation had more promise.
His first studio, Laugh-O-Gram, made modernised fairy tales for a local cinema but went bankrupt in 1923, just as he finished Alice's Wonderland, a short mixing a live girl with cartoons. He moved to Hollywood that July, aged 21, partly because Roy was recovering from tuberculosis there. A New York distributor, Margaret Winkler, signed him for a series of Alice comedies, and the brothers formed the studio that became the Walt Disney Company. Oswald followed in 1927 and made them a major force, until the rights dispute.
After Mickey came sound, Technicolor and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. Disney still holds the individual records for Academy Awards, 22, and nominations, 59. He opened Disneyland in Anaheim in July 1955, funding it partly through television. A heavy smoker, he died of lung cancer on 15 December 1966, before Disney World was complete.
Source: Walt Disney
