Walt Disney

Walter Elias "Walt" Disney (December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) was an American entrepreneur, animator, voice actor, and film producer. He was a pioneer in the American animation industry, became famous around the world, and is regarded as a national cultural icon.

Born in Chicago in 1901, Disney developed an early love of drawing. He took extra art classes as a boy and got a job as a commercial illustrator at the age of 18. In the early 1920s he moved to Hollywood and with his brother Roy O. Disney set up the Disney Brothers Studio (later the Walt Disney Animation Studios). Walt Disney and a colleague, Ub Iwerks, developed the character, Mickey Mouse, which quickly became popular. As the studio grew and became increasingly successful, Disney became more adventurous with his cartoons, introducing synchronized sound, full-color three-strip Technicolor, feature-length cartoons and introducing technical developments on cameras. The results, seen in films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Fantasia, Pinocchio (both 1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942). In the 1950s, Disney moved into the amusement park field, and in 1955 opened Disneyland. He diversified into television programs; he was involved in planning the 1959 Moscow Fair and the 1960 Winter Olympics. He also began to plan another theme park, Disney World (now Walt Disney World), the heart of which was to be a new type of city, the "Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow" (EPCOT). A heavy smoker throughout his life, Disney died of lung cancer in December 1966.

The last film on which Disney worked, Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, was released in 1968; he received his 22nd Academy Award for the work, out of 59 nominations—winning more individual Oscars than anyone else. Several of his films have been included in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress and Disney received numerous awards from within the US and overseas. Although his reputation changed in the years after his death, away from an American patriot and toward someone whose work was representative of American imperialism, he remains an important cultural figure in the United States and in the history of animation, while his films continue to entertain.

Early life: 1901–20
Walt Disney was born on December 5, 1901, at 2156 North Tripp Avenue in Chicago's Hermosa community area. He was the fourth son of Elias Disney—born in the former Province of Canada to Irish parents—and Flora ( Call), an American of German and English descent. In 1906, when Disney was four, the family moved to a farm in Marceline, Missouri, where his older brother Roy had just purchased land. In Marceline, Disney developed his interest in drawing when a retired neighborhood doctor paid him to draw pictures of his horse. Elias was a subscriber to the Appeal to Reason newspaper, and Disney practiced drawing by copying the front-page cartoons of Ryan Walker. Disney also began to develop an interest in and ability to draw and paint with watercolors and crayons. He also became enamored of trains, as he lived near the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway line. He and his younger sister Ruth started school at the same time at the Park School in Marceline in late 1909.

In 1911, the Disneys moved to Kansas City. There, Disney attended the Benton Grammar School, where he met Walter Pfeiffer, who came from a family of theatre fans and introduced Disney to the world of vaudeville and motion pictures. Before long, he was spending more time at the Pfeiffers' house than at home. Elias had purchased a newspaper delivery route for The Kansas City Star and Kansas City Times. Disney and his brother Roy woke up at 4:30 every morning to deliver the Times before school and delivered the evening Star after school. The schedule was exhausting, and Disney often received poor grades after falling asleep in class, but he continued his paper route for more than six years. He attended Saturday courses at the Kansas City Art Institute and also took a correspondence course in cartooning.

In 1917, Elias bought shares in the O-Zell jelly factory in Chicago and moved back there with his family. Disney enrolled at McKinley High School and became the cartoonist of the school newspaper, drawing patriotic pictures about World War I; he also took night courses at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. In mid-1918, Disney attempted to join the United States Army to fight against the Germans, but he was rejected for being too young. After he forged the date of birth on his birth certificate, he joined the Red Cross in September 1918 as an ambulance driver. He was shipped to France but arrived in November, after the armistice. He drew cartoons on the side of his ambulance for decoration and had some of his work published in the army newspaper Stars and Stripes. Disney returned to the US in October 1919, returning to Kansas City to work as an apprentice artist at the Pesmen-Rubin Commercial Art Studio. There, he drew commercial illustrations, including for advertising, theater programs and catalogs, and met and befriended artist Ub Iwerks.

Early career: 1920–28
In January 1920, as Penmen-Rubin's revenue fell off after Christmas, Disney and Iwerks were laid off. They started their own business, the short-lived Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists. Failing to attract many customers, Disney and Iwerks agreed that Disney should leave temporarily to earn money at the Kansas City Film Ad Company, run by A. V. Cauger; the following month Iwerks, who was not able to run their business alone, also joined.

The company produced commercials using the cutout animation technique. Disney became interested in the process of animation, although he preferred drawn cartoons such as Mutt and Jeff and Koko the Clown. He borrowed the only book on animation available at a local library, and a camera from Cauger, and began experimenting at home. He came to the conclusion that cel animation was more promising than the cutout method. Unable to persuade Cauger to try cel animation at the company, Disney opened a new business with a co-worker from the Film Ad Co, Fred Harman. The two produced short cartoons they called "Laugh-O-Grams"; their main client was the local Newman Theater, and the shorts were sold as "Newman's Laugh-O-Grams". Disney studied Paul Terry's Aesop's Fables as a model, and the first six "Laugh-O-Grams" were modernized fairy tales.

In May 1921, the success of the "Laugh-O-Grams" led to Disney setting up Laugh-O-Gram Studio, for which he hired a number of additional animators, including Fred Harman's brother Hugh, Rudolf Ising and Iwerks. The Laugh-O-Grams cartoons did not provide enough income to keep the company afloat, so Disney started production of Alice's Wonderland—based on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland—which combined live action with animation; he cast Virginia Davis in the title role. The result, a 12-and-a-half-minute, one-reel film, was completed too late to save Laugh-O-Gram Studio, which went into bankruptcy in 1923.

Disney moved to Hollywood in July 1923. His efforts to sell Alice's Wonderland were in vain until he heard from New York film distributor Margaret J. Winkler. She was losing the rights to both the Out of the Inkwell and Felix the Cat cartoons, and needed a new series. In October they signed a contract for six Alice comedies, with an option for two further series of six episodes each. Disney and his brother Roy formed the Disney Brothers Studio—which later became Walt Disney Animation Studios—to produce the films; they persuaded Davis's family to relocate to Hollywood to continue production, with their daughter on contract at $100 a month. In July 1924 Disney also hired Iwerks, persuading him to relocate to Hollywood from Kansas City.

Early in 1925, Disney hired an ink artist, Lillian Bounds; the pair began a relationship and married in July of that year. Their marriage produced two daughters, Diane (born December 1933) and Sharon (adopted in December 1936, born six weeks previously).

By 1926 Disney's role in the Alice series had been handed over to Winkler's husband, the film producer Charles Mintz, although the relationship between them was sometimes strained. The series ran until July 1927, by which time Disney had begun to tire of it, and wanted to move away from the mixed format to all animation. After Mintz requested new material to distribute through Universal Pictures, Disney and Iwerks created Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a character Disney wanted to be "peppy, alert, saucy and venturesome, keeping him also neat and trim".

In February 1928, Disney hoped to negotiate a larger fee for producing the Oswald series, but found Mintz wanting to reduce the payments. Mintz had also persuaded many of the artists involved to work directly for him, including Harman, Ising, Carman Maxwell and Friz Freleng. Disney also found out that Universal owned the intellectual property rights to Oswald. Mintz threatened to start his own studio and produce the series himself if Disney refused to accept the reductions Disney declined Mintz's ultimatum and lost most of his animation staff, except Iwerks, who chose to remain with him.

Creation of Mickey Mouse to the first Academy Awards: 1928–33
To replace Oswald, Disney and Iwerks developed Mickey Mouse, possibly inspired by a pet mouse that Disney had adopted while working in his Laugh-O-Gram studio, although the origins of the character are unclear. Disney's original choice of name was Mortimer Mouse, but Lilian thought it too pompous, and suggested Mickey instead. Iwerks revised Disney's provisional sketches to make the character easier to animate, although Disney provided Mickey's voice and personality until 1947. In the words of one Disney employee, "Ub designed Mickey's physical appearance, but Walt gave him his soul."

In May 1928, Mickey Mouse first appeared in a single test screening of the short Plane Crazy, but it, and the second feature, The Gallopin' Gaucho, failed to find a distributor. Following the 1927 sensation, The Jazz Singer, Disney used synchronized sound on the third short, Steamboat Willie. After the animation was complete, Disney signed a contract with the former executive of Universal Pictures, Pat Powers, to use the "Powers Cinephone" recording system; Cinephone also became the new distributor for Disney's early sound cartoons, which soon became popular.

To improve the quality of the music on the cartoon, Disney hired Carl Stalling, a professional composer and arranger. At Stalling's suggestion, the Silly Symphony series was developed, which provided stories through the use of music; the first cartoon in the series, The Skeleton Dance (1929), was drawn and animated entirely by Iwerks. Also hired were local artists, some of whom stayed with the company to be the core animators; the group later became known as the Nine Old Men. Both the Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies series were successful, but Disney and his brother felt they were not receiving their rightful share of profits from Powers. In 1930, Disney tried to trim costs from the process by urging Iwerks to abandon the practice of animating straight through in favor of the more efficient technique of drawing key poses and letting lower-paid assistants sketch the in-between poses. Disney also asked Powers for an increase in payments for the cartoons. Powers refused and signed Iwerks to work for him; Stalling resigned shortly afterwards, thinking that without Iwerks, the Disney Studio would close. Disney had a nervous breakdown in October 1931—which he blamed on the machinations of Powers, and his own overwork—so he and Lilian took an extended holiday to Cuba and a cruise to Panama to recover.

With the loss of Powers as distributor, the Disney studio signed a contract with Columbia Pictures, based on the success of Mickey Mouse, who became increasingly popular, including internationally. Disney, always keen to embrace new technology, filmed Flowers and Trees (1932) in full-color three-strip Technicolor; the cartoon was popular with audiences. After the release of Flowers and Trees, all subsequent Silly Symphony cartoons were in color. Disney was also able to negotiate a deal with Technicolor, giving him the sole right to use their three-strip process until August 31, 1935. The cartoon won the Academy Award in the Short Subject (Cartoon) category at the 1932 ceremony. At the same ceremony Disney had been nominated in the same category for Mickey's Orphans, as well as receiving an Honorary Award "for the creation of Mickey Mouse".

In 1933 Disney produced The Three Little Pigs, a film described by the media historian Adrian Danks as "the most successful short animation of all time". The film won Disney another Academy Award in the Short Subject (Cartoon) category. The film's success led to a further increase in the studio's staff, which numbered nearly 200 by the end of the year. The success also made Disney realize the importance of telling emotionally gripping stories that would interest the audience, and he invested in a "story department" separate from the animators, with storyboard artists who would be dedicated to working on a plot's development phase of a production pipeline.

Golden age of animation: 1934–41
By 1934 Disney had become dissatisfied with producing formulaic cartoon shorts, and began a four-year production of a feature-length cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, based on the fairy story. When news leaked out about the project, many in the film industry predicted it would bankrupt the company; industry insiders nicknamed it "Disney's Folly". The film, which was the first animated feature made in full color and sound, cost $1.5 million to produce—three times over budget. It premiered in December 1937 to high praise from critics and audiences. The film became the most successful motion picture of 1938 and by May 1939 its total gross of $6.5 million made it the most successful sound film made to that date. Disney won a further Honorary Academy Award, which consisted of one full-sized and seven miniature Oscar statuettes.

The success of Snow White heralded one of the most productive eras for the studio; The Walt Disney Family Museum calls the following years "the 'Golden Age of Animation', it was to be one of the most creative periods in the history of the Disney Studios". With work on Snow White finished, the studio began producing Pinocchio in early 1938 and Fantasia in November the same year. Both films were released in 1940, and neither performed well at the box office—partly because revenues from Europe had dropped following the start of World War II in 1939. The studio made a loss on both pictures and was deeply in debt by the end of February 1941.

In response to the financial crisis, in 1940 Disney and his brother started the company's first public stock offering and implemented heavy salary cuts. The latter measure, and Disney's sometimes high-handed and insensitive manner of dealing with staff, led to a 1941 animators' strike which lasted five weeks. While a federal mediator from the National Labor Relations Board negotiated with the two sides, Disney accepted an offer from the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs to make a goodwill trip to South America, ensuring he was absent during a resolution he knew would be unfavorable to the studio. As a result of the strike—and the financial state of the company—several animators left the studio, and Disney's relationship with other members of staff was permanently strained as a result. The strike temporarily interrupted the studio's next production, Dumbo (1941), which Disney produced in a simple and inexpensive manner; the film received a positive reaction from audiences and critics alike.

World War II and beyond: 1941–50
Shortly after the release of Dumbo in October 1941, the U.S. entered World War II. Disney formed the Walt Disney Training Films Unit within the company to produce instruction films for the military such as Four Methods of Flush Riveting and Aircraft Production Methods. Disney also met with Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the Secretary of the Treasury, and agreed to produce short Donald Duck cartoons to advertise war bonds. Disney also produced several home-front morale-boosting shorts such as Der Fuehrer's Face—which won an Academy Award—and the 1943 feature film Victory Through Air Power.

The military films generated only sufficient income to cover their costs, and the feature film Bambi—which had been in production since 1937—underperformed on its release in April 1942. On top of the low earnings from Pinocchio and Fantasia, the company had debts of $4 million with the Bank of America in 1944. At a meeting with Bank of America executives to discuss the future of the company, the bank's chairman and founder, Amadeo Giannini, told his executives "I've been watching the Disneys' pictures quite closely because I knew we were lending them money far above the financial risk. ... They're good this year, they're good next year, and they're good the year after. ... You have to relax and give them time to market their product." The population of short films dipped in the late 1940s, which coincided with increasing competition in the animation market from Warner Bros. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Roy Disney, for financial reasons, suggested more combined animation and live-action productions. In 1948, Disney initiated a series of popular live-action nature films, titled True-Life Adventures, with Seal Island the first; the film won the Academy Award in the Best Short Subject (Two-Reel) category.

As Disney aged, he grew more politically conservative. A Democratic Party supporter until the 1940 presidential election, when he switched allegiance to the Republicans, he became a generous donor to Thomas E. Dewey's 1944 bid for the presidency. In 1946 he was a founding member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, an organization who stated they "believ[ed] in, and like, the American Way of Life ... we find ourselves in sharp revolt against a rising tide of Communism, Fascism and kindred beliefs, that seek by subversive means to undermine and change this way of life". In 1947, during the Second Red Scare, Disney testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where he branded Herbert Sorrell, David Hilberman and William Pomerance, former animators and labor union organizers as Communist agitators; Disney stated that the 1941 strike led by them was part of an organized Communist effort to gain influence in Hollywood.

In 1949, Disney and his family moved to a new home in the Holmby Hills district of Los Angeles. With the help of his friends Ward and Betty Kimball, who already had their own backyard railroad, Disney developed blueprints and immediately set to work on creating a miniature live steam railroad for his backyard. The name of the railroad, Carolwood Pacific Railroad, came from his home's location on Carolwood Drive. The miniature working steam locomotive was built by Disney Studios engineer Roger E. Broggie, and Disney named it Lilly Belle after his wife; after three years Disney ordered it into storage after a series of accidents involving guests to his property.

Theme parks and other interests: 1950–66
In early 1950 Disney produced Cinderella, the studio's first animated feature film for eight years; it was popular with critics and theater audiences; costing $2.2 million to produce, it earned the studio nearly $8 million in first year's box office returns. Disney was less involved in the production of the film than he had been with previous pictures because of his involvement in his first entirely live-action feature, Treasure Island (1950), which was shot entirely in Britain, as was The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (1952). Other all-live-action features followed, many of which had patriotic themes. He continued to produce full-length animated features too, including Alice in Wonderland (1951) and Peter Pan (1953). From the early to mid 1950s, Disney began to devote less attention to the animation department, entrusting most of its operations to his key animators, the Nine Old Men, although he was always present at story meetings. Instead, he started concentrating on other ventures.

In March 1952 Disney received planning permission to build a theme park in Burbank, near the Disney studios. This site proved too small, and a larger plot in Anaheim, 35 miles south of the studio, was purchased. To distance the project from the studio—which might attract the criticism of shareholders—Disney formed WED Enterprises (now Walt Disney Imagineering) and used his own money to fund a group of designers and animators to work on the plans; those involved became known as "Imagineers". After obtaining bank funding he invited other stockholders, American Broadcasting-Paramount Theatres and Western Printing and Lithographing Company. Construction work started in July 1954, and Disneyland opened in July 1955; the opening ceremony was broadcast on ABC.

The funding from ABC for Disneyland had been contingent on Disney television programs. The studio had previously been involved in a television special on Christmas Day 1950 about the making of Alice in Wonderland, which was seen as a success by Disney. Roy Disney believed the program added millions to the box office takings. In a letter to shareholders in March 1951 he wrote that "television can be a most powerful selling aid for us, as well as a source of revenue. It will probably be on this premise that we enter television when we do". In 1954, after the Disneyland funding had been agreed, ABC broadcast Walt Disney's Disneyland, an anthology series that consisted of animated cartoons, live-action features and other material from the studio's library. It was successful in terms of ratings, and profitable for the company. ABC were delighted with the show, and it led to Disney's first daily television show, The Mickey Mouse Club, a variety show that catered specifically for children. From the first episode of Disneyland, the five-part miniseries Davy Crockett was broadcast which, according to Disney's biographer Neal Gabler, "became an overnight sensation". The show's theme song, "The Ballad of Davy Crockett", became a hit, and ten million records were sold. As a result, Disney formed his own record production and distribution entity, Disneyland Records.

In addition to the building of Disneyland, Disney worked on other projects away from the studio. He acted as consultant to the American exhibition in the 1959 Moscow Fair; his exhibit was America the Beautiful, a 19-minute film in the 360-degree Circarama theater which was one of the most popular exhibits. The following year he acted as the chairman of the Pageantry Committee for the 1960 Winter Olympics, where he organized the opening, closing and medal ceremonies.

Despite the demands on Disney's time for non-studio projects, he still worked on film and television developments. In 1955 he was involved in "Man in Space", an episode of the Disneyland series, which was made in collaboration with NASA rocket designer Wernher von Braun. He also oversaw aspects of the full-length features Lady and the Tramp (the first animated film in CinemaScope) in 1955, Sleeping Beauty (the first animated film in Technirama 70 mm film) in 1959, One Hundred and One Dalmatians (the first animated feature film to use Xerox cels) in 1961, and The Sword in the Stone in 1963.

In 1964, Disney produced Mary Poppins, based on the book series by P. L. Travers; he had been trying to acquire the rights to the story since the 1940s. It became the most successful Disney film of the 1960s, although Travers disliked the film intensely and regretted having come to an agreement over the rights. The same year, he provided four exhibits for the 1964 New York World's Fair. He obtained funding from selected corporate sponsors, and used the technology to improve Disneyland. He began a further project that year, when he became involved in plans to expand the California Institute of the Arts (colloquially called CalArts), and had an architect draw up plans for a new building.

During the early to mid-1960s, Disney developed plans for a ski resort in Mineral King, a glacial valley in California's Sierra Nevada mountain range. He brought in experts such as the renowned Olympic ski coach and ski-area designer Willy Schaeffler. With income from Disneyland accounting for an increasing proportion of the studio's income, Disney continued to look for venues for other attractions. In late 1965, he announced plans to develop another theme park to be called "Disney World" (now Walt Disney World), a few miles southwest of Orlando, Florida. Disney World was to include the "Magic Kingdom"—a larger and more elaborate version of Disneyland—plus golf courses and resort hotels. The heart of Disney World was to be the "Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow" (EPCOT), which he described as:

"an experimental prototype community of tomorrow that will take its cue from the new ideas and new technologies that are now emerging from the creative centers of American industry. It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing and testing and demonstrating new materials and systems. And EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise."

Disney spent considerable time in 1966 traveling to meet with corporations willing to sponsor aspects of EPCOT, although he also increased his involvement in the films being undertaken by the studio and became heavily involved in the story development of The Jungle Book, the live-action musical feature The Happiest Millionaire (both 1967) and the animated short Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day.

Illness, death and aftermath
Disney had been a heavy smoker since his time serving in World War I. He eschewed filtered cigarettes, although he also smoked a pipe as a young man. In November 1966, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and was treated with cobalt therapy sessions. On November 30 he felt unwell and was taken to the St. Joseph Hospital where, on December 15, ten days after his 65th birthday, he died of circulatory collapse caused by lung cancer. Disney's remains were cremated two days later, and his ashes interred at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

When Disney died, nearly 45 percent of his estate after taxes was designated for CalArts, to build a new campus (a figure of around $15 million); he also donated 38 acre of the Golden Oaks ranch in Valencia for construction of the school. The university moved onto its new campus in November 1971.

The release of The Jungle Book and The Happiest Millionaire in 1967 took Disney's involvement in feature films produced by the studio to 81. When Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day was released in 1968 it earned Disney an Academy Award in the Short Subject (Cartoon) category, awarded posthumously. After Disney's death the studio largely abandoned animation until the 1980s, after which there was what The New York Times describes as the "Disney Renaissance".

Disney's plans for the futuristic city of EPCOT did not come to fruition. After his death, Roy Disney deferred his retirement to take full control of Walt Disney Productions and WED Enterprises; Roy changed the focus of the project. Although building work had started on Disney World before Disney's death, the park did not open until October 1971. At the inauguration, Roy dedicated the park to his brother, saying, "Walt Disney World is a tribute to the philosophy and life of Walter Elias Disney ... and to the talents, the dedication, and the loyalty of the entire Disney organization that made Walt Disney's dream come true." Roy died in December 1971.

During the second phase of the Walt Disney World theme park, EPCOT was translated by Disney's successors into the Epcot Center, which opened in 1982. Disney's vision of a functional city was replaced by a park that is more akin to an ongoing world's fair. In 2009, the Walt Disney Family Museum opened in the Presidio of San Francisco. Thousands of artifacts from Disney's life and career are on display, including numerous awards that he received. The museum was designed by Disney's daughter Diane and her son Walter E. D. Miller.

Disney has been portrayed numerous times in fictional works. H. G. Wells references Disney in his 1938 novel The Holy Terror, with World Dictator, Rud, fearing Donald Duck is a political caricature of himself. In 1993, HBO began development of a Walt Disney biographical film, but the project never materialized and was soon abandoned. Disney was portrayed by Len Cariou in the 1995 made-for-TV film A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes: The Annette Funicello Story, and by Tom Hanks in the 2013 film Saving Mr. Banks. In 2001, the German author Peter Stephan Jungk published Der König von Amerika (trans: The King of America), a fictional work of Disney's later years that re-images him as a power-hungry racist. The composer Philip Glass later adapted the book into an opera The Perfect American (2013).

Criticism
Disney was long rumored to be antisemitic, beginning in 1938 when he welcomed German filmmaker and Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl to Hollywood to promote her film Olympia, although three months after Riefenstahl's visit, Disney disavowed it, claiming that he did not know who she was when he issued the invitation. Another accusation came from Art Babbitt, one of the animators who had been a driving force in setting up the 1941 strike at Disney's studio. Babbitt asserted he had seen Disney and his lawyer attend meetings of the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi organization, during the late 1930s. Gabler questions Babbitt's story, on grounds that Disney had no time for political meetings, and was "something of a political naïf" during the 1930s; he adds that none of Disney's employees—including Babbitt, who disliked Disney intensely—ever accused him of making antisemitic slurs or taunts.

The Walt Disney Family Museum acknowledges that ethnic stereotypes common to films of the 1930s were included in some early cartoons, such as The Three Little Pigs (in which the Big Bad Wolf comes to the door dressed as a Jewish peddler) and The Opry House (in which Mickey Mouse is dressed and dances as a Hasidic Jew); but both Gabler and the museum point out that Disney donated regularly to Jewish charities (the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, Yeshiva College, the Jewish Home for the Aged, and the American League for a Free Palestine), and was named "1955 Man of the Year" by the B'nai B'rith chapter in Beverly Hills. Artist and story man Joe Grant noted that "some of the most influential people at the studio were Jewish"—including himself, production manager Harry Tytle, and Herman "Kay" Kamen, the head of marketing. Gabler, the first writer to gain unrestricted access to the Disney archives, concluded that the available evidence did not support accusations of antisemitism; he later said Disney was:

"... not [anti-semitic] in the conventional sense that we think of someone as being an anti-Semite. But he got the reputation because, in the 1940s, he got himself allied with a group called The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, which was an anti-Communist and anti-Semitic organization. And though Walt himself, in my estimation, was not anti-Semitic, nevertheless, he willingly allied himself with people who were anti-Semitic, and that reputation stuck. He was never really able to expunge it throughout his life."

Disney distanced himself from the Motion Picture Alliance in the 1950s.

Disney has also been accused of racism, because of a number of productions released between the 1930s and 1950s contain racially insensitive material. Examples include Mickey's Mellerdrammer, in which Mickey Mouse dresses in blackface; the "black" bird in the short Who Killed Cock Robin; Sunflower, the half donkey/half black centaurette with a watermelon in Fantasia; the American Indians in Peter Pan; and the crows in Dumbo (although the case has been made that the crows were sympathetic to Dumbo because they knew what it was like to be ostracized). The feature film Song of the South was also criticized by film critics, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and others for its perpetuation of black stereotypes. Disney later campaigned successfully for an Honorary Academy Award for its star, James Baskett, the first African American so honored. Baskett died shortly afterward, and his widow wrote Disney a heartfelt letter of gratitude for his support. Gabler argues that "Walt Disney was no racist. He never, either publicly or privately, made disparaging remarks about blacks or asserted white superiority. Like most white Americans of his generation, however, he was racially insensitive." Floyd Norman, who was the studio's first black animator and who worked closely with Disney during the 1950s and 1960s, said, "Not once did I observe a hint of the racist behavior Walt Disney was often accused of long after his death. His treatment of people—and by this I mean all people—can only be called exemplary."

Views of Disney and his work have changed over time, and there has been some polarization of opinions. Mark Langer, in the American Dictionary of National Biography, writes that "Earlier evaluations of Disney hailed him as a patriot, folk artist, and popularizer of culture. More recently, Disney has been regarded as a paradigm of American imperialism and intolerance, as well as a debaser of culture." Historian Steven Watts describes how some denounce Disney "as a cynical manipulator of cultural and commercial formulas", while PBS record that critics have censured his work because of its "smooth façade of sentimentality and stubborn optimism, its feel-good re-write of American history".

Watts argues that may of Disney's post World War II films "legislated a kind of cultural Marshall Plan. They nourished a genial cultural imperialism that magically overran the rest of the globe with the values, expectations, and goods of a prosperous middle-class United States." Film historian Jay P. Telotte acknowledges that many see Disney's studio as an "agent of manipulation and repression", although he observes that it has "labored throughout its history to link its name with notions of fun, family, and fantasy". John Tomlinson, is his study Cultural Imperialism, examines the work of Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart whose 1971 work Para leer al Pato Donald (trans: How to Read Donald Duck) identifies that there are "imperialist ... values 'concealed' behind the innocent, wholesome façade of the world of Walt Disney"; this, they argue, is a powerful tool as "it presents itself as harmless fun for consumption by children. Tomlinson sees their argument as flawed, as "they simply assume that reading American comics, seeing adverts, watching pictures of the affluent yanguí lifestyle has a direct pedagogic effect".

Honors


Disney received 59 Academy Award nominations for an individual; from those nominations he received 22 awards: both of which are more than anyone else. He also earned four honorary Oscars. He was nominated for three Golden Globe Awards, but won none, although he was presented with two Special Achievement Awards—for Bambi (1942) and The Living Desert (1953)—and the Cecil B. DeMille Award. He also received four Emmy Award nominations, winning once, for Best Producer for the Disneyland television series. Several of Disney's films have been included in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant": Steamboat Willie, The Three Little Pigs, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio, Bambi and Mary Poppins.

In February 1960, Disney was inducted to the Hollywood Walk of Fame with two stars, one for motion pictures and the other for his television work. He was also inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1986, the California Hall of Fame in December 2006, and was the inaugural recipient of a star on the Anaheim walk of stars in 2014.

The Walt Disney Family Museum records that "Disney, along with members of his staff, received more than 950 honors and citations from throughout the world". He was made a Chevalier in the French Légion d'honneur in 1935, and in 1952 was awarded the country's highest artistic decoration, the Officer d'Academie. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom on September 14, 1964 and, in 1969, he was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Other national awards include Thailand's Order of the Crown; Brazil's Order of the Southern Cross; Mexico's Order of the Aztec Eagle; and the Showman of the World Award from the National Association of Theatre Owners. In 1955, the National Audubon Society awarded Disney its highest honor, the Audubon Medal, for promoting the "appreciation and understanding of nature" through his True-Life Adventures nature films. A minor planet discovered in 1980 by astronomer Lyudmila Karachkina, was named 4017 Disneya after Disney, and he was also awarded honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, the University of Southern California and University of California, Los Angeles. ''

Personality and reputation
Disney had a different public persona to the one he maintained in private. On meeting Disney, playwright Robert E. Sherwood thought he was "almost painfully shy and diffident"; he also found Disney to be self-deprecating. According to his biographer Richard Schickel, Disney hid his shy and insecure personality behind his public identity. Kimball argued that Disney "played the role of a bashful tycoon who was embarrassed in public" and knew that he was doing so. Disney acknowledged the façade, and told a friend that "I'm not Walt Disney. I do a lot of things Walt Disney would not do. Walt Disney does not smoke. I smoke. Walt Disney does not drink. I drink." Critic Otis Ferguson, in an article in The New Republic, wrote that Disney in person was "common and everyday, not inaccessible, not in a foreign language, not suppressed or sponsored or anything. Just Disney."

Many of those with whom Disney worked commented on the lack of direct praise he gave staff, something that was put down to the high standards he held. Norman recalls that when Disney said "That'll work" it was an indication of high praise. Instead of direct praise, Disney gave high-performing staff financial bonuses, or praised individuals to others, expecting his thoughts to be passed on.

Several commentators have described Disney as a cultural icon. On Disney's death, the professor of journalism, Ralph S. Izard, identified that the values in Disney's films are those "considered valuable in American Christian society", which included "individualism, decency, ... love for our fellow man, fair play and toleration". Disney's obituarist in The Times thought them "wholesome, warm-hearted and entertaining ... of incomparable artistry and of touching beauty". Journalist Bosley Crowther sees Disney's "achievement as a creator of entertainment for an almost unlimited public and as a highly ingenious merchandiser of his wares can rightly be compared to the most successful industrialists in history." Journalist Alistair Cooke call Disney a "folk-hero ... the Pied Piper of Hollywood", while Langer, in the American Dictionary of National Biography, writes that

Disney remains the central figure in the history of animation. Through technological innovations and alliances with governments and corporations, he transformed a minor studio in a marginal form of communication into a multinational leisure industry giant. Despite his critics, his vision of a modern, corporate utopia as an extension of traditional American values has possibly gained greater currency in the years after his death.