Walt Disney Animation Studios facts for kids

Quick facts for kids
Walt Disney Animation Studios

Type	Subsidiary of The Walt Disney Studios Division of Walt Disney Pictures
Industry	Animation Motion pictures Traditional animation CGI animation Flash animation
Founded	October 16, 1923 (1923-10-16) (as Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio)
Founder	Walt and Roy Disney
Headquarters	2100 W Riverside Dr Burbank, California U.S.
Key people	Ed Catmull, President John Lasseter, Chief Creative Officer Andrew Millstein, General Manager
Products	Animated films
Parent	Walt Disney Pictures
Divisions	Disney Television Animation DisneyToon Studios

Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS), sometimes shortened to Disney Animation, is an American animation studio that creates animated features and short films for The Walt Disney Company. The studio's current production logo features a scene from its first synchronized sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie (1928). Founded on October 16, 1923, by brothers Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney, it is the oldest-running animation studio in the world. It is currently organized as a division of Walt Disney Studios and is headquartered at the Roy E. Disney Animation Building at the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank, California. Since its foundation, the studio has produced 62 feature films, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) to Wish (2023), and hundreds of short films.

History

The building on Kingswell Avenue in Los Feliz which was home to the studio from 1923 to 1926.

Kansas City, Missouri, natives Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney founded Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in Los Angeles in 1923 and got their start producing a series of silent Alice Comedies short films featuring a live-action child actress in an animated world. The Alice Comedies were distributed by Margaret J. Winkler's Winkler Pictures, which later also distributed a second Disney short subject series, the all-animated Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, through Universal Pictures starting in 1927. In 1926 , the studio changed its name to Walt Disney Studio, being incorporated as Walt Disney Productions in 1929.

Mickey Mouse in Plane Crazy, the first short film produced with the character as protagonist.

The first two Mickey Mouse cartoons, Plane Crazy and The Galloping Gaucho, were previewed in limited engagements during the summer of 1928. For the third Mickey cartoon, however, Disney produced a soundtrack, collaborating with musician Carl Stalling and businessman Pat Powers, who provided Disney with his bootlegged "Cinephone" sound-on-film process. Subsequently, the third Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie, became Disney's first cartoon with synchronized sound and was a major success upon its November 1928 debut at the West 57th Theatre in New York City. The Mickey Mouse series of sound cartoons, distributed by Powers through Celebrity Productions, quickly became the most popular cartoon series in the United States. A second Disney series of sound cartoons, Silly Symphonies, debuted in 1929 with The Skeleton Dance.

The studio was dedicated to producing short films until it entered feature production in 1934, resulting in 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, one of the first full-length animated feature films and the first U.S.-based one. In 1986, during a large corporate restructuring, Walt Disney Productions, which had grown from a single animation studio into an international media conglomerate, was renamed The Walt Disney Company and the animation studio became Walt Disney Feature Animation in order to differentiate it from the company's other divisions. Its current name was adopted in 2006 after Pixar was acquired by Disney.

Production logo

Until 2007, Walt Disney Animation Studios did not use a traditional production logo, using the standard Walt Disney Pictures logo instead. Starting that year, an on-screen production logo based on Steamboat Willie was added after the 2006 Disney logo. It depicts Mickey Mouse, in his classic form, being drawn in against a beige paper background. As pages flip in the manner of a flip book, the drawing is animated into a scene from the aforementioned short in which Mickey is whistling. The camera zooms out onto a yellow-gold spotlight background and the wordmark of the studio's name is displayed below the scene.

The logo has appeared on every film since Meet the Robinsons (2007). Milestone variants were used for Tangled (2010) and Encanto (2021), with text saying "50th Animated Motion Picture" and "60th Animated Motion Picture" respectively, and with Mickey in the "0"; the latter used a shortened version. An 8-bit version of the logo was used for Wreck-It Ralph (2012). Additionally, Mickey's whistling was muted to allow an opening theme to play over the logo, in such films as Frozen (2013), Moana (2016), Frozen II (2019), Raya and the Last Dragon (2021), the aforementioned Encanto, and Wish (2023).

The logo currently remains in use despite Steamboat Willie entering the public domain on January 1, 2024, due to the cartoon being a work published in 1928.

Locations

The south side of the Roy E. Disney Animation Building, as seen from the public park that separates it from the Ventura Freeway.

Since 1995, Walt Disney Animation Studios has been headquartered in the Roy E. Disney Animation Building in Burbank, California, across Riverside Drive from the Walt Disney Studios, where the original Animation building (now housing corporate offices) is located. The Disney Animation Building's lobby is capped by a large version of the famous hat from the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment of Fantasia (1940), and the building is informally called the "hat building" for that reason. Disney Animation shares its site with ABC Studios, whose building is located immediately to the west.

Until the mid-1990s, Disney Animation previously operated out of the Air Way complex, a cluster of old hangars, office buildings, and trailers in the Grand Central Business Centre, an industrial park on the site of the former Grand Central Airport about two miles (3.2 km) east in the city of Glendale. The Disneytoon Studios unit was based in Glendale. Disney Animation's archive, formerly known as "the morgue" (based on an analogy to a morgue file) and today known as the Animation Research Library, is also located in Glendale. Unlike the Burbank buildings, the ARL is located in a nondescript office building near Disney's Grand Central Creative Campus. The 12,000-square-foot ARL is home to over 64 million items of animation artwork dating back to 1924; because of its importance to the company, visitors are required to agree not to disclose its exact location within Glendale.

Previously, feature animation satellite studios were located around the world in Montreuil, Seine-Saint-Denis, France (a suburb of Paris), and in Bay Lake, Florida (near Orlando, at Disney's Hollywood Studios theme park). The Paris studio was shut down in 2002, while the Florida studio was shut down in 2004. The Florida animation building survives as an office building, while the former Magic of Disney Animation section of the building is home to Star Wars Launch Bay.

In November 2014, Disney Animation commenced a 16-month upgrade of the Roy E. Disney Animation Building, in order to fix what then-studio president Edwin Catmull had called its "dungeon-like" interior. For example, the interior was so cramped that it could not easily accommodate "town hall" meetings with all employees in attendance. Due to the renovation, the studio's employees were temporarily moved from Burbank into the closest available Disney-controlled studio space – the Disneytoon Studios building in the industrial park in Glendale and the old Imagineering warehouse in North Hollywood under the western approach to Bob Hope Airport (the Tujunga Building). The renovation was completed in October 2016.

Characters

List of Disney characters

Filmography

Since 1937, Walt Disney Animation Studios has produced 60 movies with Walt Disney Pictures. The first one, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, was released in 1937. The newest one, Encanto, was released in 2021, with their last released being Strange World in 2022.

Filmography

This list includes the films made by Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Released films

Upcoming films

Franchises

This does not include Disney's direct-to-video or television follow-up films produced by either Disney Television Animation or DisneyToon Studios.

Achievements

The animation studio is noted for creating a number of now-standard innovations in the animation industry, including:

• The multiplane camera (for Snow White, but first used in the Academy-award winning short "The Old Mill")
• The realistic animation of special effects and human characters (for Snow White)
• Advanced composition processes to combine live-action and animated elements using color film (for The Three Caballeros)
• The use of xerography in animation to transfer drawings to cels as opposed to ink-tracing (developed for 101 Dalmatians, but first tested in a few scenes in Sleeping Beauty and first fully used in the Academy-award nominated short Goliath II)
• The use of all-digital methods for painting, compositing, and recording animated features using the CAPS (Computer Animation Production System)

Among its significant achievements are:

• The first animated feature in Technicolor (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs)
• The first major motion picture in stereophonic sound (Fantasia), otherwise known as Fantasound.
• The first animated feature in CinemaScope (Lady and the Tramp)
• The first large format animated movie (the 70 mm Sleeping Beauty)
• The first Disney animated feature to use computer-generated imagery (The Black Cauldron)
• The first Disney animated feature making heavy use of CGI computer animation (Oliver & Company)
• The first Disney animated feature to use digital coloring (The Little Mermaid, which introduced Disney's CAPS process)
• The first feature movie to be shot using a 100% digital process (The Rescuers Down Under, CAPS)
• The first animated feature to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, and the only nominee for Best Picture to be traditionally-animated (Beauty and the Beast)
• The first Disney animated feature to gross $200 million, and the highest-grossing movie of 1992 (Aladdin)
• The highest grossing traditionally-animated (or hand-drawn) movie of all time (The Lion King)
• The largest movie premiere with over 100,000 viewers (Pocahontas)
• The most expensive animated movie ever made costing $260 million (Tangled)
• The highest number of original characters ever created for an animated movie (188 characters) (Wreck-It Ralph)

Documentary movies about Disney animation

• A Trip Through the Walt Disney Studios (1937, short)
• The Reluctant Dragon (1941, a staged "mockumentary")
• Frank and Ollie (1995)
• Dream On Silly Dreamer (2005)
• Waking Sleeping Beauty (2010)

Related pages

• The Walt Disney Company
• Disney's Nine Old Men
• Pixar
• Blue Sky Studios
• 20th Century Animation
• Disney Television Animation

Images for kids

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  Walt Disney introduces each of the Seven Dwarfs in a scene from the original 1937 Snow White theatrical trailer.

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  The Disney animators' strike started in May, 1941.

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  The original Animation Building at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California, the headquarters of the animation department from 1940 to 1985.

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  Roy E. Disney (Chairman, 1985–2003), nephew of Walt Disney, was a key figure in restructuring the animation department following the reorganization of the Disney company in 1984.

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  1400 Flower Street in Glendale, California, one of several buildings used by Walt Disney Feature Animation between 1985 and 1995.

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  622/610 Circle 7 Drive (the Hart-Dannon Building), another Glendale building used by Walt Disney Feature Animation during the early 1990s.

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  Walt Disney Feature Animation logo, used from 1994 to 1997.

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  John Lasseter (Chief Creative Officer, 2006–18, left) and Edwin Catmull (President, 2006–18, right) came to Disney following its acquisition of Pixar and dedicated themselves to revitalizing Walt Disney Animation Studios after the studio's unsuccessful early 2000s period.

See also

In Spanish: Walt Disney Animation Studios para niños