35 pages • 1 hour read
Who Was Walt Disney
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Chapters 4-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness and death.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Drawings That Move”
After returning to Kansas City, Walt made a friend, Ub Iwerks, who also wanted to become an artist and was very talented. The two had a lot of ideas and ambitions and tried opening a business selling their art, but they had to close their shop within one month after failing to attract customers.
This failure led Walt to the first lucky break of his career: He found a job at the Kansas City Slide Company where he was paid to draw. Ub was there with him. The two, along with many other artists, learned about animation techniques and used them in their daily work. Walt read a lot about animating during this time of his life, and he tried to think of new techniques to perfect his cartoons.
Walt even made his first cartoons, called Laugh-O-Grams, which were silent, lasted only a few minutes, and were meant to make people laugh with slapstick humor. He managed to sell these cartoons to the local theaters and gained confidence that this would be his career in the future.
Though he enjoyed working for the Kansas City Slide Company, Walt still dreamed of opening his own studio.
