Walt Disney Animation Studios
Walt Disney Animation Studios, sometimes shortened to Disney Animation, is an American animation studio which produces animated feature films 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. Founded on October 16, 1923, by brothers Walt and Roy O. Disney after the closure of Laugh-O-Gram Studio, it is the longest-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. Since its foundation, the studio has produced 64 feature films, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs —which is also the first hand-drawn animated feature film—to Zootopia 2, and hundreds of short films.
Founded as Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in 1923, renamed Walt Disney Studio in 1926 and incorporated as Walt Disney Productions in 1929, the studio was dedicated to producing short films until it entered feature production in 1934, resulting in 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 in order to differentiate it from the company's other divisions. Its current name was adopted in 2007, one year after Pixar Animation Studios was acquired by Disney.
For many people, Disney Animation is synonymous with animation, for "in no other medium has a single company's practices been able to dominate aesthetic norms" to such an overwhelming extent. The studio was recognized as the premier American animation studio for much of its existence and was "for many decades the undisputed world leader in animated features"; it developed many of the techniques, concepts and principles that became standard practices of traditional animation. The studio also pioneered the art of storyboarding, which is now a standard technique used in both animated and live-action filmmaking, as well as television shows and video games. The studio's catalog of animated features is among Disney's most notable assets, with the stars of its animated shorts—Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Daisy Duck, Goofy, and Pluto—becoming recognizable figures in popular culture and mascots for the Walt Disney Company as a whole.
Four of the studio's films—Frozen, Frozen 2, Moana 2, and the aforementioned Zootopia 2—are all among the 50 highest-grossing films of all time, with the latter one becoming the second-highest-grossing animated feature film of all time and the highest-grossing American-produced animated feature film. By 2013, the studio had no hand-drawn animated feature films in development as a result of their computer animated films performing better at the box office, and had laid off a large portion of their hand-drawn animators. However, the studio stated in 2019 and 2023 that they are open to proposals from filmmakers for future hand-drawn feature projects. In addition, in April 2022, Eric Goldberg, a hand-drawn animator who has been working with the studio since 1992, confirmed plans within the Disney studio to return to hand-drawn animation.
History
1923–1929: Early years
, 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. 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. 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.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.
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. 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. The Mickey Mouse series of sound cartoons, distributed by Powers through Celebrity Productions, quickly became the most popular cartoon series in the United States.
File:The Skeleton Dance.webm|thumb|right|The Skeleton Dance, the first short in the Silly Symphonies series
A second Disney series of sound cartoons, Silly Symphonies, debuted in 1929 with The Skeleton Dance. In total, five different shorts from the Silly Symphonies series were released by the end of 1929. All were scored by Stalling and involved animation by Iwerks.
1929–1940: Reincorporation, ''Silly Symphonies'' and ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs''
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. Powers, in return, signed away Ub Iwerks, who began producing cartoons at his own studio, although he would return to Disney in 1940.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, which allowed for fuller-color reproduction where previous color film processors could not. The result was the Silly Symphony cartoon Flowers and Trees, the first film commercially released in full Technicolor. Flowers and Trees was a major success and all Silly Symphonies were subsequently produced in Technicolor.
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, and this realization led him to create a separate "story department" with storyboard artists dedicated to story development. 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, with its theme song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" becoming a popular chart hit.
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, 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, had begun at the studio in 1932 and were greatly expanded into orientation training and continuing education classes. 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. Silly Symphonies such as The Goddess of Spring and The Old Mill 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, an invention that split animation artwork layers into several planes, allowing the camera to appear to move dimensionally through an animated scene.
File:Walt Disney Snow white 1937 trailer screenshot.jpg|right|thumb|Walt Disney introduces each of the Seven Dwarfs in a scene from the original 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs theatrical trailer.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs cost Disney a then-expensive sum of $1.4 million to complete 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, grossing over $8 million on its initial release, the equivalent of $ in 1999 dollars.
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. Silly Symphonies, which garnered seven Academy Awards, ceased in 1939, until the shorts returned to theatres with some re-issues and re-releases.