From "Disney's Folly" to Frozen: Twelve Turning Points at Walt Disney Animation Studios
Walt Disney Animation Studios, founded in 1923, is the longest-running animation studio in the world. Its history is not a steady climb. It nearly went under more than once, closed whole departments and reinvented itself several times. These twelve moments explain how the studio behind Snow White ended up making Frozen, and they are the background to the questions in our Disney quiz.
1. Losing Oswald (1928)
Disney's first big hit character was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, but Universal owned him. When Walt Disney refused to accept a lower fee per cartoon, producer Charles Mintz hired away most of his staff to make Oswald cartoons without him. Disney, his head animator Ub Iwerks and a few loyal staff then worked in secret on a new character, Mickey Mouse. Disney did not get Oswald back until 2006.
2. Adding sound (1928)
The first two Mickey cartoons, Plane Crazy and The Galloping Gaucho, were shown silently. For the third, Steamboat Willie, Disney added a synchronised soundtrack. It premiered in New York in November 1928 and was a major success, and Mickey's sound cartoons quickly became the most popular cartoon series in the United States. A scene from Steamboat Willie still serves as the studio's production logo.
3. Colour and story (1932–1933)
In 1932 Disney signed a two-year exclusive deal to use Technicolor's new three-strip process. The result, the Silly Symphony Flowers and Trees, was the first film commercially released in full Technicolor. Around the same time, Walt Disney decided that cartoons needed emotionally gripping stories and set up a separate story department with dedicated storyboard artists. Storyboarding, which the studio pioneered, is now standard across film, television and video games. The 1933 short Three Little Pigs showed what the new approach could do: its song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" became a chart hit.
4. "Disney's Folly" (1934–1938)
When Walt Disney announced a feature-length cartoon in 1934, much of the film industry called it "Disney's Folly". Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs cost $1.4 million, including $100,000 on story development alone. Released in February 1938, it grossed over $8 million on its first release and was briefly the highest-grossing film of all time, until Gone with the Wind. The profits paid for the new studio in Burbank, where the Walt Disney Company is still based.
5. War and the pause on features (1941–1949)
The early 1940s were hard. Pinocchio, Fantasia and Bambi lost money, a bitter animators' strike began in May 1941, and the war cut off overseas cinemas. The studio's lenders at the Bank of America would only lend it working capital if it stuck mostly to short films. During 1942 and 1943, 95 percent of the studio's animation was made for the US military. For the rest of the decade it released mainly low-budget anthology films.
6. Cinderella saves the studio (1950)
Cinderella cost nearly $3 million, and the studio's future depended on it. It was a box-office success, and its profits restarted Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Lady and the Tramp, which had been shelved during the war. Lady and the Tramp (1955) became Disney's first widescreen animated feature.
7. Cutting costs with xerography (1959–1961)
Sleeping Beauty (1959) cost $6 million, the studio's most expensive film at the time. Its costs, together with the poor performance of Disney's other 1959 releases, led to the company's first annual loss in a decade and to large layoffs. For One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), the studio used xerography to transfer animators' drawings directly onto cels instead of tracing them by hand. It saved money and gave Disney films a scratchier, sketchier look that lasted into the 1980s.
8. Walt Disney's death (1966)
Walt Disney died in December 1966, ten months before The Jungle Book was released. The Aristocats (1970) was the last film project he approved. Under producer and director Wolfgang Reitherman, the studio focused on family-friendly films, and its villains became more comic or pitiful than frightening for the next two decades.
9. Rock bottom (1985)
In 1979 a group of young animators led by Don Bluth walked out to start a rival studio. In 1985 The Black Cauldron, an adaptation of Lloyd Alexander's Prydain novels, cost $44 million, the studio's most expensive animated film to that point, and took only $21 million. New chief executive Michael Eisner seriously considered closing feature animation altogether. Roy E. Disney, Walt's nephew, offered to run the division himself and turn it around, and the animators were moved out of the Burbank lot into warehouses and trailers in Glendale.
10. The Renaissance (1989–1999)
The Little Mermaid (1989), directed by John Musker and Ron Clements with songs by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, set a box-office record for the studio and began the period now called the Disney Renaissance. Beauty and the Beast (1991) became the first animated film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. The Lion King (1994), with songs by Tim Rice and Elton John, earned $768 million worldwide, still a record for a traditionally animated film.
11. Goodbye to hand-drawn features (2002–2006)
By the early 2000s, Pixar, DreamWorks and Blue Sky were succeeding with computer animation while Disney's hand-drawn films were earning less. Disney laid off most of its Burbank feature animators, closed its Paris and Florida studios and sold off its traditional animation equipment. Its first fully computer-animated feature, Chicken Little (2005), earned $315 million but got poor reviews. In 2006 Disney bought Pixar for $7.4 billion and put Pixar's Ed Catmull and John Lasseter in charge of its own animation studio as well. Lasseter had been fired by Disney in 1983 for pushing it towards computer animation.
12. The billion-dollar princess (2013)
After The Princess and the Frog (2009) underperformed, part of the blame fell on the word "Princess" in its title. Films in production about princesses got gender-neutral names: Rapunzel became Tangled, and The Snow Queen became Frozen. Frozen, directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, was the first Disney animated film to earn over $1 billion worldwide and the studio's first winner of the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
What the history shows
The studio's big successes often came straight after its worst moments. Snow White followed the loss of Oswald and most of the staff. Cinderella followed a decade of wartime cutbacks. The Little Mermaid followed The Black Cauldron, and Frozen followed the end of hand-drawn features. Each time, the studio survived by changing how it made films, through sound, colour, storyboards, xerography, Broadway-style musicals and finally computer animation.
Source: the English Wikipedia article on Walt Disney Animation Studios.