“If you can dream it, you can do it” – Walt Disney.

There is no name better known in the film

industry than that of Walt Disney. An American film icon, the very name Disney

continues to carry weight decades after the death of its namesake. However, few

people know how Walt Disney became successful and know less of his early life.

Walter Elias Disney was born on 5 December 1901.

Born into a large family, Walt had a passion for art and drawing even as a

child and although art would be his longtime passion, his early life was filled

with a more aimless wandering. Moving to Chicago in 1917, Walt Disney attempted

to join the United States Army in order to fight in World War I but he was

rejected due to him not being of legal age to sign up. He decided the following

year to lie about his age and managed to join the American Red Cross arriving

in France in November 1918 just after the armistice had already been signed.

Many of Walt Disney’s early cartoons,

especially those in his school newspaper, were very patriotic with him creating

drawings and artwork on the subject of World War I, and a lifelong love of

country was something that Walt Disney would be known for in the decades to

come.

Overshadowed by the extraordinary success he

would go on to have, few people remember that the first company Walt Disney

started actually failed.  The company,

Laugh O-gram Studio, was bankrupt by 1923 and true success for Walt Disney was

still some years away.

On 13 July 1925, Walt Disney married Lillian Bounds

in Idaho who had been an ink artist in the Disney studio. The couple went on to

have two daughters, Diane who was born in 1933 and Sharon who was born in 1936.

In the 1990s Lillian said that Walt was a wonderful father and grandfather and had

been a wonderful husband to her.

It wasn’t until May of 1928 that Disney’s signature

character, Mickey Mouse, was finally developed and the beginnings of the

brilliance of what would become the Walt Disney Company slowly began to emerge

and take shape.

The exact origins of Mickey Mouse are somewhat

unclear.  Some theories suggest that the

character may have been inspired by a pet mouse that Walt Disney used to keep some

years previously. Despite its uncertain origins, it was the third attempt at

using this character when it was synchronized to music in the short clip Steamboat

Willie that not only marked a landmark moment for Disney but also for animation

in general as this was the first post-produced sound cartoon.

Throughout the late 1920s, Walt Disney sought

professional composers and music writers who would be able to turn animations

into a device through which music could be expressed.  He had his heart set on having music and

animation combined to assist in telling stories. This is one of the primary

reasons why so many of the early cartoons are musicals.

The best was yet to come though, and by the

middle of 1934 Walt Disney was interested in pursuing new ideas and this is

when his young studio began the creation of a feature-length animated film – Snow

White and the Seven Dwarves. This production took four years and came at a cost

of $1.5 million. As a full-length colour and sound cartoon, it went

significantly over budget and individuals throughout the industry believed this

would utterly bankrupt the company, many even calling the film project Disney’s

folly. However, as history knows,