He was a producer, director, screenwriter and animator and of course, the origin of the history of children's animated cinema. Walt Disney became the universal entertainment industry icon for his great contributions to humanity in art and communication. Surely many of you are faithful lovers of his work, so I have decided to share with you a small analysis and review of the eternal God of animation.
Although he died at a very young age (65 years old) from lung cancer, during his life he managed to make contributions that would change the way of understanding entertainment, magic and storytelling. From a young age he allied with his brother Roy to create together a small studio that would later become the most important and richest company in the world today with billions of dollars of annual turnover.
The modest cartoonist who dedicated his time to creating fairy tales had ambitions to be a film director and despite the fact that Hollywood turned its back on him, he built a film empire. He is the undisputed representative of the universalization of animated cinema. Walt Disney was born in Chicago in 1901. From childhood he was inspired by the stories his mother told him and already at the age of sixteen he wanted to emigrate to Europe, which at that time was devastated by the war. His fascination for the European continent forced him to remain in constant motion and when he returned to America decided to create his first company with his brother Roy. They made commercials in the form of small animated films and soon the first hits arrived. He created new techniques, combined graphic, literary and cinematographic trends, and displayed his undoubted talent. And it all started with a mouse.
Mickey became an international success, although Disney was convinced that the animated dream should not fade after a few minutes. Many of his feature films have their sources in European libraries. Bambi is based on a story by Feliz Salten whose books were banned by Nazism, Snow White is by the Brothers Grimm, Pinocchio by the Italian Collodi, Alice in Wonderland by the Englishman Lewis Carroll.
One of Walt Disney's secrets was to surround himself with artists with a great cultural, personal and academic background. Walt Disney had no chance to study, he was not born into a wealthy family, but into a family that had to work very hard. He himself had to work from an early age and that is why somehow he mistrusted the culture in general, he was afraid of being taken for an intellectual since he wanted to reach the largest number of people but at the same time he felt a fascination for culture elevated. Aware of the limitation of his knowledge, he hired mostly European artists at least at the beginning, such as the cartoonists who collaborated with him on his first films. They were artists who had emigrated from Europe to the United States. Disney gave them work and probably saw in each of these cartoonists the cultural background on which they had fed and he understood that he could use in his films the iconography that they dominated and that he did not know so well.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is not only the first animated feature film in film history, it is a masterpiece with breathtaking scenes inspired by the great horror and suspense films.
Disney thought that when a movie was very successful, you had to dedicate an animated short to it. When King Kong was released he automatically thought about drawing it. The real King Kong was nothing more than an eighty-centimeter doll and Walt Disney thought of including it in his work «The pet shop«. It was always one step ahead, although it was inspired by the references of its present time, its illustrators, directors and technicians took to the streets and went to the theater, exhibitions, the cinema, and even had a projection room where certain films such as Frankenstein who would later inspire The Mad Doctor. Each animator contributed their grain of sand to the construction of the building, to the construction of the Disney aesthetic.
By the XNUMXs, films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in which spaces are played to create an oppressive atmosphere and at the same time very representative of German expressionism. We find clear influences of this cinematographic trend in Disney works such as Pinocchio or Fantasia.
Disney was imbued with the Europe of tales and legends, but also with the real Europe who traveled by train on numerous occasions. His insatiable curiosity knew no bounds. His visions mix royal monuments, landscapes, country scenes, romantic architecture, dazzling cathedrals, and modest huts.