The Disney Character Encyclopedia

Walt Disney

1901-1919: Childhood

Walt Disney was born on December 5, 1901 in Chicago, Illinois to Elias Disney and Flora Call. He was named after his father's close friend Walter Parr, the minister at St. Paul Congregational Church. In 1906, his family moved to a farm near Marceline, Missouri. The family sold the farm in 1909 and lived in a rented house until 1910 when they moved to Kansas City. Disney was nine years old at the time.

According to the Kansas City Public School District records, Disney began attending the Benton Grammar School in 1911, and graduated on June 8, 1917. During this time, Disney also enrolled in classes at the Chicago Art Institute. He left school at the age of sixteen and became a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I after he changed his birth certificate to show his year of birth as 1900 in order to be able to enlist in the service. He served as a member of the American Red Cross Ambulance Force in France until 1919.

1920-1936: Early years in animation
Kansas City animation studios

Disney returned to the USA, moved to Kansas City and, with Ub Iwerks, formed a company called "Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists" in January 1920. The company faltered and Disney and Iwerks soon gained employment at the Kansas City Film Ad Corporation, working on primitive animated advertisements for local movie houses.

In 1922, Disney started Laugh-O-grams, Inc., which produced short cartoons based on popular fairy tales and children's stories. Among his employees were Iwerks, Hugh Harman, Rudolph Ising, Carmen Maxwell, and Friz Freleng. The shorts were popular in the local Kansas City area, but their costs exceeded their returns. After creating one last short, the live-action/animation Alice's Wonderland, the studio declared bankruptcy in July 1923. Two of Disney's brothers, Roy Oliver Disney and Raymond Arnold Disney, were employed as bank tellers in the First National Bank in downtown Kansas City during this time when Walt was developing his Laugh-O-grams, Inc. Studio. Roy later invited Walt to move to Hollywood, California, and Disney earned enough money for a one-way train ticket to California, leaving his staff behind, but taking the finished reel of Alice's Wonderland with him.

Disney set up shop with his brother Roy, started the Disney Brothers Studio in their Uncle Robert's garage, and got a distribution deal with New York City states-rights distributors Margaret Winkler and her fiancé Charles Mintz. Virginia Davis, the live-action star of Alice's Wonderland, was sequestered from Kansas, as was Ub Iwerks. By 1926, the Disney Brothers Studio had been renamed as the Walt Disney Studio; the name Walt Disney Productions would be adopted in 1928. One of the studio's employees, Lillian Bounds, became Walt Disney's wife; they were married on July 13 1925.

The Alice Comedies were reasonably successful and featured both Dawn O'Day and Margie Gay as Alice after Virginia Davis' parents pulled her out of the series because of a pay cut. Lois Hardwick also briefly assumed the role. By the time the series ended in 1927, the focus was more on the animated characters, in particular, a cat named Julius who recalled Felix the Cat, rather than the live-action Alice.

By 1927, Charles Mintz had married Margaret Winkler and assumed control of her business, and ordered a new all-animated series to be put into production for distribution through Universal Pictures. The new series, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, was an almost instant success, and the Oswald character became a popular property. The Disney studio expanded, and Walt hired Harman, Ising, Maxwell, and Freleng from Kansas City.

In February of 1928, Disney went to New York to negotiate a higher fee per short from Mintz, but was shocked when Mintz announced that not only did he want to reduce the fee he paid Disney per short, but that he had most of his main animators, including Harman, Ising, Maxwell, and Freleng, but notably excepting Ub Iwerks, under contract and would start his own studio if Disney did not accept the reduced production budgets. Universal, not Disney, owned the Oswald trademark and could make the films without Disney. Disney declined, lost most of his animation staff, and he, Iwerks, and the few non-defecting animators secretly began work on a new mouse character to take Oswald's place. The defectors became the nucleus of the Winkler Studio, run by Mintz and his brother-in-law George Winkler. When that studio went under after Universal assigned production of the Oswald shorts to an in-house division run by Walter Lantz, Mintz focused his attentions on the studio making the Krazy Kat shorts, which later became Screen Gems, and Harman, Ising, Maxwell, and Freleng marketed an Oswald-like character named Bosko to Leon Schlesinger and Warner Bros., and began work on the first entries in the Looney Tunes series.