Walt Disney was born in Chicago on December 5, 1901, to a Protestant family. In 1906, the elder Disney bought a small farm in Marcellin, northeast Of Kansas, with all his family property, and the family moved there ever since.
Disney has been interested in art since childhood, and once worked as a newspaper boy as a teenager, but his real passion was painting. Disney ranked fourth out of the family's 5 children, and because there was no play, he drew farm animals on scratch paper. The mother discovered her son's talent for painting and bought him a picture book, and Walter sorted out and copied it, and the more he painted, the better. He often sold his paintings to his neighbors for pocket money, and once a doctor named Sherwood took a fancy to his paintings and paid 5 dimes to buy them.
Walt Disney with his sister
Like to "toss" and take risks, he worked as a volunteer soldier for a year after graduating from high school, and when he returned home, he did not want to become his father's partner, but was determined to become a "professional painter".
After only a month of working as a painter, Disney was fired. After that, he founded a commercial art company and continued to be hired to use working conditions to learn comics and photography— the two foundations of future animation. In 1922, he founded the "Laughter Animation Company" and gathered manpower to produce cartoons by running "free animation study classes".
The first film, Little Knight at Red Riding Hood, raised $15,000 from local investors, but the problem was that the small producer was rejected by all the big distributors, and only one "unreliable" small company was willing to buy six of his complete cartoons for $11,000 — and only $100 in advance. Walter began to work feverishly, but the orderer soon went out of business. So in July 1923, the animation company broke up, and Walter went to join his brother Roy in Los Angeles. He bought a first-class train ticket for the $40 he had left after selling the camera and announced to the people in the carriage that "I'm ready to direct some really good Hollywood movies."
Everything about Hollywood is novel to Disney, but it's also cold. He came to several studios and tried to get a job, but they were all rejected. After several setbacks, he sent his previous work Alice in Wonderland to miss Winkler, the distributor of the New York cartoon film, hoping to get help, and finally, After reading the sample, Winkler thought it was OK, and paid a part of the deposit.
Alice in Wonderland
Frustrated, Disney finally ushered in his own victory, and he happily begged his brother to join him. In 1923, Walter and his brother scraped together $3,200 to start a new business and founded the "Disney Brothers Animation Production Company", which is the real beginning of today's Disney entertainment empire.
However, the good times did not last long. In 1926, Disney threw himself into his own work, and together with his old partner Ubi, he produced the popular cartoon "Oswald the Lucky Rabbit", but was betrayed by the company's insiders and almost lost everything. In a desperately depressing situation, Disney decided to produce a new cartoon image to resist the other party's despicable behavior.
Once, on the train back to Los Angeles, Disney remembered the rats that often haunted his office in Kansas City's Laughing Cartoon Company, and how many lonely entrepreneurial moments they had spent with themselves at midnight work. So he decided to make the mouse his new character, and at first he named the little mouse Mertimo, but his wife said that the name was too much like a woman, so she suggested that it be called Mickey. Thus, the greatest cartoon image in history was born.
Mickey Mouse's Travels
After "Mickey Mouse", Disney has successively produced "Donald Duck", "Puliutu Dog" and "Three Little Pigs" in the form of short films, and these new images have characteristics that Mickey Mouse does not have. For example, Pulitou plays the role of doing stupid things, while Donald Duck is a chattering complainer.
Disney couple with Mickey Mouse
In 1925, his brother Roy became a family member, and Walter began to live alone. This made Disney, who was not in a hurry, unable to hold back any longer. He had a crush on a beautiful lady in his factory, Lillian Penders. Born into a family of pioneers, Miss Lillian graduated from Lewiston's business school in 1923 and went on to join Disney's studio. She was told not to marry any of the Disney brothers because they were determined to be singletons. But Lillian found Disney to be a seductive and individualistic youth. He always had a small beard to make himself look bigger, and he always wore a few worn-out and ill-fitting clothes, which was extremely disproportionate to the head of the same film studio.
Disney began to pursue Lillian and often drove her home in his broken Ford. Shortly thereafter, on a night when Lillian was alone, he walked into the depiction workshop and kissed her for the first time. On July 13, 1925, they married her mother in Lewiston, Idaho. Their wedding night was over the Lewiston Express to Seattle. Things did not go as Lillian had envisioned, because the groom Walter suddenly had a toothache and could not come to accompany the bride all night, but instead went to help the sleeping attendant wipe the passengers' shoes. Walter explained to her that this would forget about the toothache.
Disney with daughter Diane
Walter had learned that he was unable to have children, which nearly led him to commit suicide. But in the early summer of 1933, Lillian told him she was pregnant, which made him ecstatic. On December 18, 1933, they had a daughter, DianeMarie Disney. To commemorate the birth of the child, he announced that from now on, orphans will be admitted for free on the first day of every Disney cartoon.
49 years ago today, Disney died of illness. Many people didn't believe he was really dead, and some even said that Walter would suddenly appear in front of us one day.
Source: Comprehensive Xinhua Net, Culture and Art News, NetEase and other reports
Editor of this issue: Lingwen Shi