LAUNCHING SNOW WHITE
Development on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs began in early 1934, and in June 1934, Walt Disney announced the production of his first feature… One evening that same year, Disney acted out the entire story of Snow White and...
The Nine Disney Animated Masterpieces
FIRST FULL-LENGTH FEATURE
Would audiences hold still to watch eighty minutes of drawings on a screen? Nobody knew.[1] Rumor has it that among Hollywood big-wigs and movie critics Walt’s ground-breaking new project became known as “Disney’s Folly”. If this derogative was indeed bruited...
“GOLDEN AGE” INTRO
This period was the high point of Walt’s involvement with animation. He was healthy, eager, endlessly creative and completely consumed. This was far more than a job. He lived these pictures every minute of the day, thinking deeply into every...
TOWARD THE ULTIMATE IMMERSION
After the decade-long hiatus in feature-length animation during World War II and its aftermath the three films that kicked off the ’Fifties – Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan – capitalized on technologies already in use previously but with...
ADDING LENGTH & DEPTH
Next in 1937 Disney evolved the feature-length animated movie during which audiences could explore and savor for nearly an hour-and-a-half a completely fabricated environment as background for an elaborate story: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. A significant part of...
ADDING SOUND & COLOR
Over the course of his career Walt avidly pursued technologies that would enable him to invite his audiences ever more immersively into his revised realities – whatever fantastic realms his imagination conjured. Disney’s drive for technical perfection, one of the...
REINCARNATION AS CARTOON CHARACTERS
Well before his exploitation as that nine-year-old newspaper delivery boy in Kansas City Walt Disney’s revision of reality began during his earliest childhood when his family worked a farm in Marceline, Missouri. All those barnyard animals with whom Disney became...
WALT’S NIGHTMARE
Hours yet until dawn the day after Christmas, 1910, The Kansas City Times must be delivered to seven hundred subscribers before their breakfasts. Your part of the burden slung over your shoulder you trudge away into the blizzard foundering through...
ANIMATION = MIND-CONTROL
With this new emphasis on exploring and clearly defining personality in animated characters a more primitive “language” of cartooning gradually gave way to greater expressiveness in the drawing. Originally, character animators had done all of the effects in their own...
ANIMATORS’ NEW DISCOVERIES
In addition to three-dimensionality, over their first decade working in the Disney Studio key animators gradually discovered more vital capabilities: how to make drawings that even individually convey a feeling of life, how to make these drawings appear to be...
