The Disney Era

Once upon a time, in a far away land called Chicago, there lived a humble couple and their six loving children. One of their sons, named Walter Elías was a brave boy who wasn’t afraid of following his dreams. He was granted with an extraordinary talent for drawing and creating brand new worlds just with his imagination, and since a very young age, he went from town to town, working with otherartists he met on his journey. However, his dreams were too big and he felt he needed much more than what he already had, so with the help of his brother Roy, he opened his first workshop on the City of the Stars. This family workshop was destined, without them knowing, to become one of the greatest empires of all time.
Walt and Roy Disney opened the “Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio” at the SilverDistrict in Hollywood on October of 1923. This was partly thanks to the help of Miss Margaret Winkler, a New York distributor that agreed on distributing short films based on a project in which Disney had been working on before. This project was named ‘Alice Comedies’ and was a series of short films that combined both animation and live-action, telling the adventures of a young girl, Alice and ananimated cat named Julius in an animated world that Alice had first seen in a cartoon studio. With ‘Alice Comedies’ the ‘sodium vapor screen’ was invented to allow combining the girl with the animation backgrounds and characters.
‘Alice Comedies’ was a great success for Disney, but as the viewers attention was mostly directed to Julius, Disney decided that it was the moment to start a new projectwith an animation-only basis. This way, Iwerks, an almost life-long friend to Walt created ‘Oswald, the lucky rabbit’ in 1927, becoming an instant success. One year later, Disney wanted to negotiate with the distribution company a higher price for each short film. However, the company’s owner, who had the rights for the character, not only wanted to reduce the payment check for Disney’s team ,but he also threatened Walt with taking away all of Disney’s workers that had a contract with him if he didn’t agree. Walt Disney couldn’t accept so he lost his team, except for his loyal friend Iwerks.
Having lost the rights for Oswald, Disney and Iwerks begun the creation of a new character based, this time, on a mouse. Iwerks redesigned all the sketches made by Walt who gave the mouse hisvoice and personality. Originally, the mouse’s name was Mortimer but Disney’s wife, Lillian thought it was a horrible name for a Mouse and finally christened him as Mickey. Mortimer became the name of Mickey’s rival for Minnie’s love. The first animations made with Mickey as the protagonist, ‘Plane Crazy’ and ‘The Gallopin Gaucho’ were silent and didn’t find a distributor. Pat Powers, a richbusinessman offered Disney both distribution for Mickey’s films and a cinephone that would allow the studio to create images with sound. This way, they created the first successful Mickey short film, ‘Steamboat Willie’ that marked both the beginning of Disney’s creations with sound and the unstoppable popularity rise of Disney’s best known character. Ever since it was created, Mickey has made appearancesin a lot of other Disney movies as what is now known as “hidden mickeys” –though on most recent movies, other characters make their appearances too-.
“Silly Symphonies” was the second series created by the studios, though the first short films weren’t as successful as ‘Alice Comedies’. However, inspired by Herbert Kalmus who was experimenting with a new coloring technique (the three-stripeTechnicolor), Disney remade “Flowers and trees”, that was originally in black and white to turn it into the first full-colored short-film. This change brought into ‘Silly Symphonies’ meant a high increase on the series popularity. Starting with ‘Flowers and trees’ in 1932, Disney won an Academy Award on the ‘Best short subject: cartoon’ for six consecutive years for Silly Symphonies. The most...