Walt Disney

Walt Disney, founder of the world's biggest and most famous comic enterprise, started his career at the age of sixteen by making illustrations for Life magazine. Soon after art school, he started his own animation company, called Laugh-O-Gram-Corporation. The first short films he made with Ub Iwerks ('Alice's Wonderland') were a combination of live-action and animation. Recently some copies of this unique material were found in the basements of the Dutch Filmmuseum.

Later, Disney produced another feature-length adaptation of the book by Lewis Carroll. In 1923, Disney founded the Disney Studios, the precursor of the multi-national which it is today. Disney stopped animating and became a producer. Among the first successful productions were the 'Mickey Mouse' cartoons (starting with 'Steamboat Willie' in 1928) and 'Silly Symphonies' (beginning with 'Skeleton Dance' in 1929). These were short, humorous animations in which anthropomorphic animals moved in time to music. Some of these animals became modern icons, and later appeared in their own publications, like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck Weekly magazines.

The two pillars of the Disney Corporation are the magazines and the feature-length animation films. The first film was 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' (1937), in which Disney experimented with revolutionary animation techniques. After a period of decline in the seventies, Disney rose like a phoenix with action-packed romantic animation films like 'Aladdin' and 'The Lion King'. In biographies, Walt Disney is characterized as a difficult man who demanded the highest perfection. He succeeded because he surrounded himself with the greatest talents available, like Carl Barks, Fred Quimby, and Walt Kelly.

"All our dreams can come true –            
if we have the courage to pursue them."

- Walt Disney