The Walt Disney Company celebrates its 100th anniversary. It was the business acumen of Walt Disney, originally a cartoonist, that shaped the company that made him remembered.
Disney animated films have entered the lives of millions, if not billions, over the past century.
The adventure began in Hollywood on October 16, 1923, when Walt Disney signed the contract for Alice’s Wonderland, a series of silent short films mixing live action and cartoons.
The date marks the beginning of success for Walt Disney and his eponymous company.
Animator and entrepreneur
Born in 1901 in Chicago, Walter Elias Disney developed a passion for drawing as a child.
First called the Disney Brothers Studios, then the Walt Disney Studio, Walt and his brother Roy Disney worked hard to build the company we still know, a hundred years after its founding.
A third key figure in the launch of Walt Disney’s career is the designer and animator Ub Iwerks, to whom we owe Mickey. Ironically, the character most associated with Disney was not drawn by Walt Disney himself, although he was behind the concept and lent his voice to the famous animated mouse.
It was thanks to Mickey that Walt Disney understood that there was much to be gained from capitalizing on the image of a popular character. He quickly sold licenses for advertising rights using the image of his mouse, and launched the production of derivative products.
If Walt Disney entered the industry thanks to drawing and animation, these were not his only talents: “he realized that his greatest asset was not being an animator himself , but to build teams that could bring his ideas and stories to life,” explains Louise Krasniewicz, professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Walt Disney: A Biography.
In the 1920s and 1930s, a select group of nine animators emerged, the Nine Old Men, or the Nine Old Men, as Walt Disney himself called them.
The latter surrounded himself with highly qualified animators, requiring them to give the best of themselves. A requirement that he had towards all his employees.
“It will be fine”
“I wouldn’t want to say that it was hard to work with him, but he demanded excellence,” analyzes Aaron Goldberg, author of several books on the company and the Disney family.
According to him, Walt Disney was known for putting his employees in challenging situations, in order to bring out the best in them and take them out of their comfort zone. Like commissioning animators to write a song for a movie when they’ve never done it before.
“He was very intense,” according to Aaron Goldberg, “and he wasn’t very forthcoming with compliments. If you did a great job, you weren’t necessarily going to hear the words ‘good job’. The phrase he used to say was ‘it’ll be fine’.”
Walt Disney boasted of forming a big family with his employees, with himself in the role of head of the family.
He considered that only the core of exceptional employees, such as the Nine Old Men, deserved privileges and high salaries. The rest had to prove they were worth more than the bare minimum.
He did not see the 1941 strike coming. Why, after all, would a large, united family be unhappy?
But the artists who worked for him didn’t see it that way, in part because they were still waiting for their fair share of the colossal profits generated by Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first animated feature film produced by the studio in 1937.
The strikers demanded more benefits and a salary increase, their salaries being below the national average.
Refusing to admit that his management style was the problem, Walt Disney added fuel to the fire during a meeting with the strikers:
“I have always felt, and always will, that the men who contribute most to the business should enjoy certain privileges. My first recommendation to you all is this: clean your house, you won’t get a damn thing done by sitting around waiting to be told what to do.”
The eccentric idea of Disneyland
After several weeks, the strike ended with the creation of a union, and the studio returned to its usual business.
However, World War II pushed Disney towards the production of propaganda films. Even on American soil, almost entirely spared from the clashes, the cinemas are deserted.
Now considered Disney classics, films such as Dumbo (1941) or Bambi (1942) were a commercial failure when they were released in theaters.
Success returned after the war, at the same time as the somewhat extravagant idea germinated in the unconventional mind of Walt Disney: a theme park.
Although commonplace in our time, such amusement parks were not common in the 1940s.
Walt Disney imagines a place where children and adults could meet their favorite Disney characters, while enjoying a day of leisure in an environment where everything reminds them of their childhood.
Beyond the sets reproducing the greatest hits of his studios, Walt Disney’s wish was to recreate the place he cherished the most: Marceline, a small town in Missouri where he spent five years during his childhood.
His memories of this era, filled with farm animals and activities typical of an early 20th century American Midwestern village, gave birth to the Main Street central avenue of his parks.
Rumor has it that Walt Disney’s rather unconventional idea was rejected by 300 investors, but that he persevered to see his dream of a $17 million family park see the light of day.
The first Disneyland opened in 1955 in California. At the time, a ticket cost one dollar per adult and 50 cents per child. But this only entitles you to entry to the park: you have to pay an additional 25 cents for adults and 10 for children for each of the thirty-five attractions.
The success was immediate, with the symbolic threshold of one million visitors reached in just two months after the opening of the park.
The one-and-a-half-hour opening ceremony was broadcast live on ABC (American Broadcasting Company), the longest live program ever broadcast at the time.
Four decades later, the Walt Disney Company would purchase the American chain, adding it to its large portfolio of companies acquired over the years.
From a family business of cartoon studios to a gigantic multinational
Walt Disney died of cancer in 1966. His vision for his company carried the Walt Disney Company for less than half of its hundred years of existence.
His brother Roy Disney, his partner since the early days of the company, takes over. Just like Walt, Roy Disney was a businessman.
Roy Disney continues his late brother’s work, including plans to open the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. However, Walt’s absence is felt on the artistic side.
Roy Disney chose a different approach, embarking on the path of live-action films, notably producing The Duck with the Golden Eggs, and Scandalous John. Their posterity speaks for itself.
Roy Disney died in 1971, just two months after the opening of Disneyland Florida. Since then, the Walt Disney Company has never again been led by a member of the Disney family.
The entertainment giant has since grown significantly, with the company worth $203.63 billion in 2022 (€191.6 million). Disney theme parks have since opened in four other cities: Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai.
The Walt Disney Company has also bought several well-known studios, such as Lucasfilms, the production company of the Star Wars saga, and Marvel Studios.
The multinational has also acquired numerous companies in the entertainment industry, such as Twentieth Century Home Entertainment (formerly Twentieth Century Fox), the cable sports channel ESPN, and National Geographic.
It owns cruise lines, real estate agencies, holiday villages and many others. In short, the Walt Disney Company has transformed into a gigantic multinational.
What would its founder think?
“When you look at the years before his death in 1966, it was a family business, a family affair. Nowadays it’s so big and vast. But I think overall he would be happy with it,” says Aaron Goldberg.
For Luise Krasniewicz, places like Disneyland parks still have that family spirit from the company’s early years. And that’s not all :
“What Walt Disney mainly introduced into the entertainment industry was the idea of derivative products. I think he would be very happy with this current aspect of the business.”