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. He and Ub partnered again, this time with a few other promising artists. After establishing this new business, Walt continued to play with his movie camera and was working on a film called Alice’s Wonderland where he would mix real actors with cartoons, something that had never been done before. However, before he could complete this project, his company went bankrupt for lack of customers.
After Walt had to sell everything, including his movie camera, he realized that he could not stay in Kansas City because there were not enough people interested in his art. He decided to move to Hollywood, where the movie industry was biggest.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Hollywood”
The 1920s saw the booming of the American film industry in Hollywood. Some of today’s biggest studios, including Universal, Paramount, and Warner Brothers, enjoyed tremendous growth in this period. Walt wanted to be part of this, so he moved to live with his uncle in California. There, Walt enjoyed his first successes as a small business owner. It was also the first time he encountered a major setback, when his distributor bought away the rights to one of his own creations.
California was also where his brother Roy lived, and the two founded the Disney Brothers Studio. Roy was in charge of the financials for their studio, which proved to be perfect because he was a logical thinker, whereas Walt was more creative and more suited to be the artistic director.
The Disney Brothers Studio’s first task was to complete Alice’s Wonderland because someone was interested in the concept. They paid Walt to keep working on the project and planned on selling the film to theaters. Walt had very little time and a lot of work, so he hired artists to help him. One artist was Ub, whom Walt convinced to move to California and who would later take on more and more responsibilities as an artist while Walt did less drawing and more directing. Another artist hire was Lillian Bounds, who was in charge of inking and painting the drawings.
With the money from Alice’s Wonderland, Walt could now work on new animation projects. He created a character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and this series was a hit in theaters. With his brother’s support, Walt changed the name of the company to Walt Disney Studios.
However, Walt encountered another big problem: His distributor for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit bought the rights to the character and even bribed some of Walt’s artists to work for him instead. Walt was extremely angry and down about this at first, but he decided to create a new character that would be even more popular than Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Roy, Ub, and Lillian were some of the few people aware of this new idea, and they all worked extremely hard to make Walt’s vision happen.
Chapter 6 Summary: “A Mouse Named Mickey”
Walt was romantically interested in Lillian but was afraid to ask her out because he was inexperienced and had been focused on his career and art for so long. After he finally gathered his courage, she accepted, and the two married on July 13, 1925. Lillian quit her job, but because Walt often stayed to work until very late, she often joined him at the office. They bought a dog, whom Lillian named Sunnee, to keep her company.
Walt and Lillian discussed the creation of Mickey Mouse, and later, Walt would claim that Mickey was originally named Mortimer and that Lillian suggested the less formal name Mickey.
The first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Plane Crazy, was a silent, black-and-white short film about Mickey doing flying stunts to impress his girlfriend, Minnie. The film’s release coincided with Charles Lindbergh’s history-making flight across the Atlantic Ocean, but it did not sell well.
Walt, undeterred, wanted to continue to innovate on animation technologies by incorporating sound. In his new animated project, Steamboat Willie, Mickey whistled, and Minnie said “yoo-hoo.” This was so impressive to the audience that Mickey Mouse immediately became a hit. Steamboat Willie was the first animated film to feature sound, and it came out in 1928, just one year after the first use of sound in films.
The spread of Mickey Mouse Clubs further boosted Mickey’s popularity. The original idea came from a theater manager, who invited kids to form a group and come watch Mickey cartoons all day, making it a fun bonding experience. Walt thought that this was a great idea and encouraged the building of Mickey Mouse Clubs in theaters all across America. The Mickey Mouse Clubs made Disney cartoons more popular, and the cartoons inspired more kids to join the club. Walt even encouraged the making of Mickey Mouse merchandise, such as toothbrushes, books, dolls, and buttons.
Mickey was the first and biggest hit for Walt Disney Studios’ production of short animations, but Walt was looking to make even more technological advances in the industry.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Ups and Downs”
In the early 1930s, America and the rest of the world were hit by the Great Depression, an economic disaster that began with the stock market crash of 1929, forcing businesses to close, people to lose their jobs, and prices of goods, including food, to skyrocket. Walt’s company weathered this period of scarcity by continually thinking of ways to innovate. Walt’s greatest loss during this era was not financial but personal: His friend Ub decided to leave.
Ub left because Walt was not treating him with respect. Although Ub did most of the art, Walt wanted to take all the credit for creating Mickey Mouse. Even though Walt was directing much more than he was illustrating, he once asked Ub to create a drawing of Mickey so that he could sign it and give it to a fan, pretending that it was his work.
Walt was also an authoritarian boss: His decisions were final, and if his artists didn’t agree, they had to leave. He worked extremely hard, but he expected his artists to work long hours as well. Although his personality angered many of his artists and forced them to quit, Walt was always chasing higher goals and replacing artists that left.
In the 1930s, Walt Disney Studios began experimenting with short animations featuring more complex plots, like The Three Little Pigs. This happy story was a hit during the Great Depression, as it cheered people up. The first color films were developed during this period. Walt was elated and immediately wanted to become the first to make colored animations. His production, Flowers and Trees, was fully colored and won an Academy Award.
Walt and Lillian welcomed the birth of their first child, a girl named Diane Marie Disney, in 1933. However, Lillian could no longer get pregnant after this, so the couple adopted their second daughter in 1937, naming her Sharon Mae.
Walt built castles out of cardboard for his girls and acted out stories for them. He had no interest in mingling with Hollywood stars. Instead, he used his money to buy a house for his parents so that they could all live in proximity and organize backyard barbecues. However, a gas leak in their new home caused Elias and Flora to become sick. Though Elias recovered and lived for a few more years, Flora died in 1938.
Walt experienced many ups and downs during this period, but nothing could prevent him from chasing higher and higher career goals.
Chapters 4-7 Analysis
This section covers the period of Walt’s early career, from his first small success in establishing his own studio to his first big hit in the character of Mickey Mouse. It also explores developments in Walt’s personal life, from marrying Lillian to buying a retirement home for his parents in California. Walt faced challenges alongside his successes throughout this period, and Stewart uses these to illustrate The Importance of Resilience in Overcoming Setbacks.
After Walt discovered his passion for animation, he began studying the techniques necessary to create high-quality cartoons. Though working for others gave him the experience necessary to launch his own studio, Stewart portrays him as frequently chafing against the authority of his employers. This characterization foreshadows his eventual rise to the head of his own empire, suggesting that he believed in his own vision and that everything he did was aimed at making that vision a reality. Despite his commitment to his own dreams, he recognized talent in others, such as in his friend Ub, and knew that they could help him realize his projects. He also recognized that opportunities were scarce where he lived, so he made sure to move to a place where the movie industry was growing. Walt not only trusted in himself but also had the drive to take immediate action, increasing his chances of building something big.
Though Walt’s plans often failed, he consistently demonstrated resilience: Despite having failed twice to start a company, he tried again in California. He even convinced Ub to move to California to work with him, and he enlisted his brother Roy to manage the business side of their studio, leaving himself free to focus on art direction. Walt was not deterred by the past and chose to learn from his mistakes, recognizing that his two previous businesses failed not because he was not talented but because he could not find clients. By moving to California, the center of the nascent film industry, he positioned himself to take advantage of Innovation as a Driver of Success, as his own innovative spirit matched that of his environment. In Walt’s first sale, Alice’s Wonderland, he tried something new by combining real actors with cartoons. He knew that he had to continue innovating to remain relevant. His studio was subsequently the first to use sound and color in their animated work, which impressed his audience and won him an Academy Award.
Stewart suggests that Alice’s Wonderland had a secondary impact in that, by placing animation alongside live action, it established the idea that Walt’s animated characters might exist in the real world, thus laying the groundwork for Extending Storytelling Beyond the Screen. Walt’s innovation was not only in animation: He was also an astute businessman. He saw the spread of Mickey Mouse Clubs as another way to popularize his cartoons beyond movie theaters and beyond the screen. Walt welcomed the creation of Mickey Mouse Clubs all across the country, and he produced other Mickey paraphernalia, such as toothbrushes and pencils, to extend brand recognition.
Walt was always thinking of the next big thing, and in the following years, he would again experience setbacks, overcome them, and continue to create and expand.
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