What I Learned From Walt Disney – Dream Bigger Dreams

Walt Disney was an enigma.? I recently finished reading Neal Gabler’s Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, and after 1,000 pages, I think I have the same experience that most people had with Walt – he was unknowable.? His nephew Roy said “I’ve always said that if you get forty people in a room together and ask each one of them to write down who Walt was, you’d get forty different Walts.”? (p 21.)

He was an auteur.? He was a terrible manager.? He was a doting father and a neglectful husband.? He was America’s uncle and the company tyrant.? He was approachable by strangers, and feared by his employees.

As I reviewed my notes from the book, I tried to sort my notes into categories of lessons.? I’m halfway through my notes and have 1,000 words...? so I’m going to start with one idea.

Walt Disney constantly dreamed bigger dreams.

Biographers always try to explain why their subject has their tendencies.? Neal Gabler is no exception, and he spends time explaining Walt’s restlessness.? Walt Disney lived a childhood with his dreams deferred.? His family was poor.? His dad was a failure in business several times over.? As a result, Elias Disney forced Walt to work from a very young age.? Walt’s days started at 3 am with a paper route, then he went to school, came home and did work around the house, then passed out exhausted.? Elias took all the proceeds from the paper route to support the household.? In short, Walt had no control over his life as a child.

The rest of his life he spent that time trying to reclaim that control.

It started with his choice of vocation.

From the jelly factory to drawing

Walt loved drawing and acting.? He would scribble in the margins of his books.? He made the decision very early that he would make his living in the arts.? He drew constantly.? When he came back from a tour in the military, his dad couldn’t understand why he would forego a stable job at the jelly factory in favor of an unstable job in the arts.? But Walt insisted on pursuing his dream of being a cartoonist in a local newspaper.

From struggling cartoonist to animation

It was hard for him to find work.? He had no experience.? In order to create his own work, he created a small business and sold his services to local businesses.? He drew advertisements.? As he did this, he discovered that if you flipped multiple pictures in a row, you could simulate movement.?? Nobody else was doing this, and there was no established marketplace for it.

Yet when an offer came in from the local newspaper for Walt to be their cartoonist, he turned it down.? Instead, he chose something bigger.? He chose the path of animation.

From silent pictures to sound

Animation eventually made its way to movie screens in the form of shorts.? It was a path that was fraught, and Walt almost didn’t make it.? But nonetheless, he found a distributor that helped him sell a series of short animations across the country.? At the time, they were all silent.? Multiple competitors made their way into the marketplace and made similar films.? He almost lost his company and experienced a coup.

It was at that moment that Walt followed an intuition to synchronize sound with animation on the screen.? He combined this with a brand-new character.? This is the original Steamboat Willie.

Creating a cultural phenomenon

The short film Steamboat Willie set off a cultural phenomenon.? Mickey Mouse became a household name.? Walt went from being anonymous to a celebrity overnight.?

Walt could have been comfortable and made a good living producing Mickey Mouse short animations for a long time.? But he never rested.?

Feature length films

Walt decided to make a feature length film.? No one had ever done it before.? At one point, some animators questioned whether audiences would accept “talking cartoons”.

Then he made “Snow White”.

It was tremendously expensive.? It was intricate to make.? They had small shortcuts for drawing these movies, because every frame had to be drawn by hand.? This is a crude explanation, but they would draw a background, then reuse the background repeatedly while redrawing the foreground.

Still, the foreground needed to be drawn for each slide.? Artists would specialize in drawing individual characters, and artists wouldn’t always know what other artists were working on.? So if Snow White and Sleepy were in a scene together, the two artists weren’t always aware the other artist was drawing their character.

There was no existing demand for it.? No one had ever seen a movie that looked like it before.

It was another cultural phenomenon.?

Walt Disney became an icon.

Amusement parks

Yet Walt was restless.? He spent most of World War 2 just trying to keep the company afloat.? The company made a series of movies that are now considered classics yet were unprofitable when they were released.

Bambi, Dumbo, Fantasia all come to mind.

Eventually, Walt got bored.? He had made feature length movies.? There was intense pressure to make them more profitable.? More and more, he came to the realization that animated films were not going to be profit centers for the company.? On top of that, short animations were no longer as profitable.

Walt continued to dream.? And dream bigger.?

Instead of making films, decided he wanted to make the fantasy of those films come to life.? He wanted to make a place that was perfect, that would be completely immersive.? He wanted to make a place that was like walking through a movie.

He made Disneyland.?

It became his obsession.? He lived there.? He walked through the park every day and would fret when a piece of trash wasn’t picked up quick enough.

He created a new world.

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Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) – a picture of utopia

And after he created a fantasy world, he wanted to build a real utopian city.? It was his last dream.? He would call it “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow”, or EPCOT for short.

It would have senior living, childcare, gardens, public play areas.? Walt would live at the center for it.? Walt wanted to build a city.? He wanted to transform Disneyland into a real utopia.

But Walt ran out of time.? Before he could build the city, he died of lung cancer.

And when he died, that dream died with him.

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Conclusion

When I write it down this way, Walt could have settled seven different times and been successful at each turn.? He innovated repeatedly.? Once he achieved one dream, he developed another dream.? A grander one.? It started as pursuit of a career that he really loved.? Then he created new industries several times throughout his career.? At each point along the way, he could have settled.

He had competitors that settled.? The makers of Felix the Cat refused to incorporate sound.? Warner Brothers didn’t convert Looney Tunes into movies.? Absolutely no one thought to make theme parks.

I’m not sure this desire to innovate all came from a healthy place.? Honestly, when he wanted to create EPCOT and put himself in the center, it seemed to me he was trying to play god.?

But the desire for growth is something that we all can control.? It doesn’t have to be unhealthy.? Complacency kills as easily as ambition.

Walt lays out a path on a way for all of us to dream bigger dreams.