35 pages • 1-hour read
Who Was Walt Disney
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Chapters 8-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness, death, and racism.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Snow White”
Mickey Mouse was a great commercial success, but Walt was not satisfied: He was already thinking of creating something even bigger. He realized that animated productions of the time were all short, which made it difficult for them to tell a deep story. In fact, cartoons were usually episodic and full of slapstick humor.
Walt dreamed of making a feature-length animation, with a plot that included romance, drama, and excitement. This led to his conception of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. However, creating film like this was an enormous financial risk: Hand-drawn animation is extremely labor intensive, and to make an animated film as long and visually complex as Snow White required hundreds of artists producing over 250,000 drawings. To make Snow White a reality, Roy would have to borrow $1.5 million to pay for everything. If the film did not sell well, Walt Disney Studios would be bankrupt.
Walt, however, was not deterred. He deeply believed in Snow White’s potential to become a great success as the first of its kind. December 21, 1937, was opening night for Snow White. Many Hollywood stars flocked to Cathay Circle Theater in Los Angeles, and they left the movie theater deeply impressed with Snow White’s emotionally rich story and visual beauty. It won an Academy Award, and Walt was featured on the cover of Time magazine.
Walt Disney Studios would continue to produce feature-length animated films like Fantasia, Pinocchio, and Bambi, paving the way for generations of feature-length animations from studios like Pixar, DreamWorks, Illumination, and Japan’s Studio Ghibli.
Chapter 9 Summary: “The Strike”
Walt Disney Studios grew exponentially in the late 1930s, so much so Roy had to purchase a piece of land in the city of Burbank to build a new office complex. The studio now had hundreds of artists and workers. However, the 1940s also marked a few lows for Walt’s career, which pushed him to branch away from the animation industry.
With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Walt Disney Studios encountered financial troubles since it could no longer sell as many films to countries that were actively fighting a war. Roy cut wages to save money, but this angered the workers, pushing them to go on strike in May 1941.
After the great height of Snow White in 1937, the early to mid-1940s saw a few lows for Walt. He was bitter about the strike because he believed that he had been fair to his employees. Soon after, his father passed away. At the same time, Disney’s most recent release, Dumbo, did not do as well as he had envisioned.
On December 7, 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack on a United States naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, killing thousands of soldiers and civilians and prompting President Franklin D. Roosevelt to declare that the US was now at war. The US government wanted Walt’s studio to produce propaganda cartoons for the war. Walt did not like working for the government, but he used Donald Duck in many short videos for the US soldiers.
After the end of the war in 1945, Walt returned to making creative cartoons, but they were not all great hits. Song of the South included much more live action than animation, and several critics at the time of its 1946 release found the live-action scenes disappointing. The film’s racist depictions of enslaved people were hurtful to many at the time and would damage Disney’s legacy for generations to come.
Walt began to feel stifled in the animation industry and was thinking of creating something big and entertaining, but not for movie theaters.
Chapter 10 Summary: “A Fantasy World”
As a child, Walt loved Peter Pan because it was a story about a boy who never grew up. To some extent, Walt himself remained a kid at heart. For example, when he took his daughters to the merry-go-round, he would ride on a horse as well. This childlike wonder for the world may be what caused him to think of his next big creation: Disneyland.
At home, Walt liked to tinker with toys and even built a railroad in his backyard for his daughters to ride. He thought of creating a place where families and children could go and have fun together. The amusement park that he envisioned would make Disney characters come to life so that fans of Disney could go to Disneyland and learn more about other Disney products.
Disneyland would cost a lot of money to create, but Walt believed that the new technology of television would boost his fortune and drive traffic to the new park: The technology would popularize his characters, as people could now watch Disney at home.
He struck a deal with executives in the television industry: In exchange for the rights to broadcast Disney cartoons, they would help finance Disneyland. Just like Mickey Mouse Clubs, Disneyland allowed people to interact with Disney characters even beyond the screen.
The first Disneyland opened on July 17, 1955, in Anaheim, California. It was a great success not only for Disney fans: Walt himself enjoyed driving a mini fire engine through the streets of his theme park after hours.
Walt’s newest project, EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), was going to be the highlight attraction for the new Disney theme park that he planned to open in Orlando, Florida. It was going to be a city of the future where there would be no poverty, crime, or traffic. This was going to be the final big project of Walt’s lifetime.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Final Act”
Rather than slowing down in his final years, Walt continued to innovate and create. For example, he participated in the 1964 New York World’s Fair and made an automaton of Abraham Lincoln that looked so realistic that people thought it was an actor.
Walt’s daughters now had children of their own. In 1966, on a cruise to British Columbia, Canada, with his family, he started feeling unwell. On his return, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. Walt passed away on December 15, 1966, at age 65. He did not see the completion of EPCOT and Disney World in Orlando, but his brother Roy made sure that everything was in order before retiring.
Chapters 8-11 Analysis
This section discusses one of Walt’s greatest accomplishments in the animation industry, though it also covers some roadblocks that Disney Studios encountered even after its rise to international prominence. The most important theme here is Innovation as a Driver of Success, as Walt took enormous risks in pioneering novel forms of storytelling and extended his entertainment empire beyond the screen.
The commercial success of Snow White allowed Disney Studios to expand, hiring hundreds of employees and producing larger quantities of feature-length animated films. However, producing Snow White was a tremendous financial risk, requiring many thousands of hours of work and placing the company in potentially ruinous debt. If it failed, Walt’s business would be bankrupt. In these instances, not every entrepreneur would feel comfortable taking the gamble.
Here, Stewart argues that Walt’s prior experience with The Importance of Resilience in Overcoming Setbacks equipped him to face this risk. If Disney Studios failed, it wouldn’t be the first time Walt had faced financial ruin, and he was confident in his ability to rebuild once again. With Roy as his partner to manage the financial aspects of his larger projects, Walt made sure that he could always focus on growing his art. Most importantly, Walt never scoffed at new technologies: He believed in Snow White because it was the first of its kind, and he was willing to invest the time and resources necessary to make the movie as good as it could be. It was this investment, in the form of visual complexity and never-before-seen realism in animation, that wowed audiences and made Snow White one of the highest grossing films to date.
Later, Walt’s belief in innovation equipped him to succeed in Extending Storytelling Beyond the Screen. The rise of television, another new technology, popularized his cartoons and allowed him to finance the construction of Disneyland, a theme park where reality mingled with the world of Walt’s imagination. It is evident in this section that Walt was not simply an artist but also an entrepreneur. He recognized, after World War II, that animation could extend beyond theaters and even beyond the TV screen. Entertainment did not have to be limited to movies and cartoons. It was this ability to think outside the box that allowed him to work on Disneyland, where cartoon characters would come to life. Thus, even though he is most famous as one of the pioneers of the animation industry, Who Was Walt Disney? highlights the man’s successes as a great businessman as well.
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