Walt Disney

Walter Elias "Walt" Disney (/ˈdɪzni/; December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) was an American entrepreneur, cartoonist, animator, voice actor, and film producer. He was a prominent figure within the American animation industry and throughout the world, and is regarded as a cultural icon, known for his influence and contributions to entertainment during the 20th century. As a Hollywood business mogul, he and his brother Roy O. Disney co-founded The Walt Disney Company.

As an animator and entrepreneur, Disney was particularly noted as a filmmaker and a popular showman, as well as an innovator in animation and theme park design. He and his staff created numerous famous fictional characters including Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy. Disney himself was the original voice for Mickey. During his lifetime, he won 22 Academy Awards and received four honorary Academy Awards from a total of 59 nominations, including a record of four in one year, giving him more Oscar awards and nominations than any other individual in history. Disney also won seven Emmy Awards and gave his name to the Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resort theme parks in the U.S., as well as the international resorts Tokyo Disney Resort, Disneyland Paris, Hong Kong Disneyland, and Shanghai Disney Resort.

List of animation studios

The following list of animation studios presents past and present organizations similar to artists studios but principally dedicated to the production and distribution of animated films. Such studios may be actual production facilities or corporate entities. The countries with the most listed, active studios, are Japan, United States, Canada, United Kingdom and South Korea, but studios are found across all continents.

Studios

See also

References

Animation studios owned by The Walt Disney Company

The Walt Disney Company has owned and operated several animation studios since the company's founding on October 16, 1923, by Walt and Roy Disney as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio; the current Walt Disney Animation Studios in Burbank, California is the company's flagship feature animation studio and claims heritage from this original studio. Adding to the growth of the company and its motion picture studio division The Walt Disney Studios, several other animation studios were added through acquisitions and through openings of satellite studios outside of the United States. These expanded the company's animation output into television, direct-to-video, and digital releases, in addition to its primary feature animation releases.

Currently Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar Animation Studios, DisneyToon Studios and Lucasfilm Animation are parts of The Walt Disney Studios unit. This article does not include other animation studios whose films were released by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures (the company's distribution unit) and not acquired by the company, nor does it count the Laugh-O-Gram Studio (1921–23), Disney's first animation studio, which predated the founding of The Walt Disney Company. For example, certain Studio Ghibli films were distributed by Disney internationally but never owned by the company. Also, Miramax, a independently operating unit of the Walt Disney Studios, also purchased US rights to foreign animated movies.

Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life

Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life (576 p.) is a book by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, two of the animation masters at Disney's during the Golden Age of animation, referred by Walt Disney as his "Nine Old Men". Topping the list of "best animation books of all time" in a poll at AWN, it is still used as reference on and source of inspiration for character animation.

Contents

The book gives a history of Disney animation and explains the processes involved in clear, non-technical terms. The philosophy of the Disney animators is expressed in the so-called 12 basic principles of animation. It contains 489 plates in full color, and thousands of black and white illustrations ranging from storyboard sketches to entire animation sequences.

Editions

The 1981 edition published by Abbeville Press (ISBN 0896592332) used better quality paper and subsequently image quality than the 1988 edition and revised one from 1995 (ISBN 0-7868-6070-7) published by Disney's Hyperion with the inverted title The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation .

Walt Disney Animation Studios

Walt Disney Animation Studios, headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California, is an American animation studio that creates animated feature films, short films, and television specials for The Walt Disney Company. Founded on October 16, 1923, it is a division of The Walt Disney Studios. The studio has produced 54 feature films, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 to Big Hero 6 in 2014.

Originally founded as Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in 1923 and incorporated as Walt Disney Productions in 1929, the studio was exclusively dedicated to producing short films until it expanded into feature production in 1934. In 1983, Walt Disney Productions named its live-action film studio Walt Disney Pictures. During a corporate restructuring in 1986, Walt Disney Productions was renamed The Walt Disney Company and the animation division, renamed Walt Disney Feature Animation, became a subsidiary of its film division, The Walt Disney Studios. In 2006, Walt Disney Feature Animation took on its current name, Walt Disney Animation Studios after Pixar Animation Studios was acquired by Disney in the same year.