Walter Elias Disney was a huge inspiration for me. Walt Disney is the co-founder of Walt Disney Productions, which is well known for creating some of the greatest films of all time. However, Disney was not always successful in everything he tried to do. Before the release of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” Disney used his talents as an animator to create his own studio called
Laugh-O-Gram. While many of the short animated films Disney created with Laugh-O-Gram were very popular, Disney was not making enough money back on the films.
This was caused by overspending to make sure the films were perfect. Disney would often spend a lot more than the budget allowed for each of his films perfecting every detail as much as possible. This led to Laugh-O-Gram going bankrupt, following this Walt Disney moved back to California to start over.
Two things would become standards for Walt Disney. Walt would never back down and never give up no matter how difficult it got to keep future projects from failing. The other was Disney’s perfectionism.
Every detail of every movie had to be absolutely perfect and if something was not perfect then it needed to be fixed. After Walt Disney struggled with the Alice Comedies and also lost the rights for “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit” to Universal Studios Walt Disney started the Walt Disney Productions studio and would start a new era of Disney animated films.
These Disney animated films would be a huge success for Walt Disney Productions, starting with the release of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” This golden age of Disney films would also see the release of “Pinocchio,” “Fantasia,” “Dumbo,” and “Bambi.”
Photo by J. Tyler O’Connor
This would not be the last failure that Disney would face.
The Walt Disney Productions golden age of animation would come to a close when the war started and Walt Disney Productions shifted its focus to making propaganda films. Many of the films released during the war-time era of Walt Disney Productions, while still being great films, were nowhere close to the popularity of the golden age Disney films.
However, Disney was still able to gain popularity back by releasing “Cinderella,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Peter Pan,” “Lady and the Tramp,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “One Hundred and One Dalmatians,” “The Sword in the Stone,” and “The Jungle Book.” The popularity of these films would help Walt Disney create a theme park in California, Disneyland.
Disney has been an influential person for me because despite all the difficulty he has had over several decades of creating films he was still extremely successful in the end and created some of the greatest movies ever released, while never releasing a movie that was poorly made or written.
Walt completely changed how animated films were made, first with the creation of the multiplane camera and being one of the first studios to include sound in their animated films.
The success of Walt Disney would inspire me to, despite constant setbacks, never give up on something I wanted to do and to always put in the extra time to make sure that everything I do is done to the best of my ability, regardless of the cost or time that it may take.
