I.

Introduction

Disney, entertainment and media company based in Burbank, California, founded in the early 1920s by the artist and cartoonist Walt Disney. Disney became a leading name in family entertainment for much of the 20th century, created the popular animated character Mickey Mouse, and continues to produce popular animated and live-action films.

Since the mid-1980s Disney has increasingly diversified into broadcasting, sport, the Internet, publishing, and retail. The company purchased Capital Cities/ABC, Inc. in 1996, including the sports cable network ESPN. Among Disney’s assets are the film companies Walt Disney Pictures, Miramax Films, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, and Pixar Animation Studios; Buena Vista Entertainment; the Disneyland theme parks; and the ABC Television Network.

II.

Walt Disney’s Early Life and Work

The American animator and producer Walt(er Elias) Disney (1901-1966) was raised in the American Midwest, and trained as a commercial artist. He moved into animation in Kansas City, where he set up his own company in 1920 with Ub Iwerks, called Laugh-O-Grams. After a first series of cartoons failed to make any money, Disney turned to the cheaper combination of live action and animation of the type pioneered by Max and Dave Fleischer. He recruited more animators, and his elder brother Roy, and moved his operation to Los Angeles in 1923 to produce the “Alice in Cartoonland” series. These were quite successful, but limiting to Disney’s ambition, and in 1927 he started a new series with full animation, starring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. When the rights to this character were taken from him, he and Iwerks designed a new character, Mickey Mouse, in 1927. The addition of sound to the third of the series, Steamboat Willie (1928), made it a great success.

III.

Feature Films and Theme Parks

Disney acted as the producer and story editor, rather than as an artist, and always pushed to improve the quality of his studio’s animation by hiring and training the most promising talent. The Disney Studio was the first to move into Technicolor production in 1932, and a series of further starring characters, such as Donald Duck, was created. More expansion into feature-length animation followed with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937); Pinocchio (1940); Fantasia (1940), an ambitious film that combined groundbreaking animation with classical music; Dumbo (1941); and Bambi (1942); while the merchandising of the Disney cartoon characters made more profits for the studio. After World War II, animated features produced by the Disney Studio included Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955), Sleeping Beauty (1959), 101 Dalmatians (1961), The Sword in the Stone (1963), and The Jungle Book (1967), but the number in production decreased, and there was a move into live-action features (Treasure Island, 1950; 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, 1954; The Shaggy Dog, 1959; The Absent Minded Professor, 1961; The Love Bug, 1968) and nature documentaries (Seal Island, 1948). (The film Mary Poppins (1964) used an innovative combination of live action with animation.) Disney also started a weekly television programme in 1954, and opened a theme park, Disneyland, near Los Angeles in 1955. Disney World planned by Disney before his death opened in Florida in 1971. All these enterprises were very successful commercially, but the quality of the films declined in the 1970s.

IV.

New Leadership

After Disney’s death the film business was revived and expanded by Ron Miller and then Michael Eisner, by moving into adult feature production. Eisner recruited film producer Jeffrey Katzenberg from Paramount and subsequent Disney films such as Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Dead Poets Society (1989), and Pretty Woman (1990) were all extremely successful at the box office. The studio’s cartoon features also improved artistically and commercially with The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991; the first animated film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture), and Aladdin (1992).

The Disney theme park concept continued to expand, including Disneyland, introduced in Japan in 1983, and Euro Disneyland (now Disneyland Paris) outside Paris, which opened in 1992.

V.

Recent Developments

Disney bought Miramax Films in 1993, and the studio went on to produce the popular films Pulp Fiction (1994) and the multi-Oscar winning The English Patient (1996). The Lion King, an animated film that Disney released in 1994, became the company’s most profitable film up to that time. The company’s television division produced a number of successful shows during this period as well, including Home Improvement (1991-1999). At the same time, Katzenberg left Disney to start a new studio, DreamWorks SKG, along with director Steven Spielberg and music executive David Geffen.

Disney explored computer animation in the mid-1990s, partnering with Pixar Animation Studios to produce the acclaimed children’s film Toy Story (1995). Pixar and Disney went on to more success with A Bug’s Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), Monsters, Inc. (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), and The Incredibles (2004). Disney also ventured into live theatre in 1997 with a Broadway musical version of The Lion King. Featuring imaginative puppetry, the hit show won six Tony Awards and transferred to London’s West End in 1999.

In 1995 Eisner recruited Michael Ovitz to become the president of Disney. Before joining the company, Ovitz had founded and run Creative Artists Agency (CAA), which at the time was considered the most influential talent agency in the American film industry. After serving as president of Disney for just over a year, however, Ovitz resigned in December 1996. At a Disney shareholders meeting in early 1997 many investors expressed anger over the size of Ovitz’s severance package, which included Disney shares then valued at tens of millions of US dollars.

The company also suffered a decline at the box office, as Disney’s traditional animated films—including Hercules (1997), Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), and Treasure Planet (2002)—failed to meet financial expectations. In 2003 the company announced it was abandoning hand-drawn animation in favour of more popular digitally animated films, and went on to release its first computer-animated film Chicken Little in 2005.

As the studio struggled with change and the ABC television network’s fortunes fell, Disney shareholders became unhappy with the company’s disappointing stock-market performance. A further blow came in early 2004 when negotiations broke down between Disney and Pixar to extend their lucrative partnership. Shortly afterwards, Eisner was ousted as company chairman by the Disney board of directors, although he retained the title of chief executive officer. Eisner retired in October 2005, just as the company opened its newest Disneyland theme park in Hong Kong.

Eisner’s successor Robert Iger reached agreement with Pixar chairman Steve Jobs in 2006 for Disney to buy Pixar for US$7.4 billion (£4.1 billion).