100 Years of Disney: Catapulting Cartoons to Global Fame

“Just remember, it all started with a mouse,” declared Walt Disney on a TV show in 1954.

By that time, his film production company had been in business for over 30 years and was one of the most successful in the United States — with cartoons!

Not only did Mickey Mouse become a screen hero, he was already smiling in T-shirts, soccer balls and toothbrush cups. A year later, in 1955, the cartoon mouse came to life at the first Disneyland to open in California.

Walt Disney, who grew up on a farm in Missouri, started out as a commercial artist and later discovered animated films. With just $40 in his pocket, he left for Hollywood, and exactly 100 years ago, in 1923, he founded the Walt Disney Company, now a billion dollar company.

“It’s fun to do the impossible”, was one of the cartoon pioneer’s convictions.

However, hidden behind this light-hearted statement was an intense work ethic and almost manic workload, but also an unshakable belief in his own ideas. Time and again, the farmer born in 1901 was on the verge of bankruptcy. Designs by him were considered very daring; the latest cinematic technology has always had to be tried and perfected. With that momentum, Walt Disney was soon sleeping on a couch in his studios, barely seeing his own children but working hard to delight other, unknown children with his fairy tales on screen.

An Oscar accompanied by seven miniatures

Walt Disney made film history in 1937: “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was the first animated feature film to hit theaters; Mickey Mouse and company previously only starred in short films. At the time, no one could have imagined that 60 more feature films would follow to this day.

After all, daring producer Walt Disney made a dramatic miscalculation: instead of $250,000 (approximately €228,000), $1.5 million was needed; instead of 18 months, its cartoonists worked for three years on an idea that was considered complete madness in Hollywood. An animated feature film? Who’s going to line up at the ticket office for this?

It turned out to be quite a lot, as it became clear after the release of the film: “Snow White” collected about $ 8 million – at that time, a movie ticket cost an average of 25 cents.

Translated into 10 languages, the film became a box office hit in 46 other countries.

The following Academy Awards awarded Walt Disney an honorary Oscar for this, or more accurately, true to the film’s title, eight: one full-size, plus seven miniature Oscar statuettes.

Working at the Walt Disney Studios, on the other hand, wasn’t always a fairy tale.

Maybe not a nice guy?

Overtime demands, low wages, and a boss who micromanaged every stroke of the pen: these were the working conditions at the company, along with a boss whose creative ego demanded that a name appear in the opening credits—his own Walt Disney.

Even today, his signature adorns the billion-dollar corporation’s logo.

However, it wasn’t just Walt Disney’s talent that led to the company’s success. He founded the studios together with his brother Roy, who later handled the finances.

The mouse that started it all was designed by art director Ub Iwerks, but seemingly to the strict specifications of the character’s inventor.

Incidentally, Mickey Mouse was also created during an entrepreneurial low point: during a train ride back to Los Angeles. In New York, Walt Disney was unable to reach an agreement with a distributor, who then plucked his successful short films “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit” right from under his nose.

Mickey Mouse and merchandising

Walt Disney was a visionary and a businessman. And he had a gift for discovering talented people.

Interestingly, it was during the Great Depression in the late 1920s, when businesses failed and many families were left desperately poor, that merchandising was born.

With ingenious publicity manager Kay Kamen on board, Mickey Mouse’s image was plastered on socks, cereal boxes, and soccer balls starting in the 1930s. movies themselves.

They are still a core source of revenue for the company worth billions of dollars today.

The following “Snow White”, “Pinocchio” (1940), “Dumbo” (1941) and “Bambi” (1942) were among the films released by Disney Studios. But the films failed to match the success of “Snow White”: the forecast revenues failed to materialize, in part because the European sales market collapsed due to World War II.

As almost no banks could be found to provide the necessary loans for new productions, the company went public.

Today, according to the Institute for Media and Communications Policy, The Walt Disney Company ranks sixth among the most successful media groups in the world and is part of the Dow Jones stock index, which lists the 30 most successful American companies. -succeeded.

During World War II, Disney Studios became a propaganda tool for the United States. The studios produced several short films and cartoons that glorified the US war and reproduced enemy footage.

For example, in the well-known propaganda film “Der Fuehrer’s Face” (1943), Donald Duck is forced to work in an armaments factory in Nazi Germany and freaks out when he hears shouts of “Heil Hitler”.

Likewise, Disney produced educational and training films for the US Army. Critics complained that the company would have done better spreading pacifist and humanist messages rather than wartime propaganda.

Lots of Oscars for Disney

In the years after World War II, Disney built on the success of its feature films with “Alice in Wonderland” (1951) and “Peter Pan” (1953).

In 1955, Walt Disney had another crazy idea: his fairytale worlds would come true, and so the first Disneyland was built in the US state of California. Later, branches appeared in Florida, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Walt Disney received 26 Oscars – an unprecedented record. However, he did not live to see the premiere of his last film, “The Jungle Book” (1967), as he died of lung cancer in 1966.
However, the Disney brand survived despite a massive financial crisis during the early 1980s. In 1986, Walt’s nephew Roy E. Disney took over the animation studio and, along with Jeffrey Katzenberg, led a “Disney revival”: “The Little Mermaid” (1989), “Beauty and the Beast” (1991) and “The Lion King” (1994) were born.

“I think when you relate Disney to anything, you relate it to magic and imagination and creativity, and I think that’s what’s so different about our company: we tell stories and make magic in everything we do,” he said. Betty Cline, director of the Walt Disney Archive, told DW.

Starting in the 2000s, the former cartoon company turned to expansion. First, it bought the successful animation studio Pixar (including “Toy Story”, “Finding Nemo”), then gobbled up the countless superhero movies with Marvel, and finally the blockbuster company Lucasfilm with the series “Star Wars”. . TV series and various prequels, sequels and spin-offs followed.

Of course, in the spirit of its founder, Disney continues to keep pace with technological innovations. While its own streaming platform Disney+ got off to a rather late start in 2019 and stumbled early on, its quarterly numbers for 2022 now place it third in the world behind Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Criticisms about racism and cultural appropriation?

Although the billion-dollar corporation can confidently overcome financial obstacles, its former core business – fairy tale films – has been criticized. Due to allegations of racist depictions in classics like “Dumbo” or “The Jungle Book”, Disney has equipped the films with warning labels.

In response to criticisms of cultural appropriation, such as in the marketing of the Swahili saying “Hakuna Matata” (loosely: “Don’t worry”) in the 1994 film “The Lion King”, the corporation is now trying to deal more sensitively with the attributes cultures of other nations and peoples. And so, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary, the long-awaited live-action film version of “The Little Mermaid” is being released – with lead black actress Halle Bailey.

Disney’s 100″The international exhibition tour began at the Kleine Olympiahalle in Munich, Germany on April 18, 2023; prior to that, it debuted at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA on February 18, 2023.