Episode 1 Walt Disney

-AS MICKEY:

-Hey, Pluto, here she comes.

Hey, Pluto, here she comes.

Walt Disney was as driven a man

as I have ever met in my life.

What he really wanted to do...

..was, as we used to say in the Middle West,

make a name for himself.

Walt Disney was an international celebrity by the time he was 30.

Hailed a genius before he was 40.

He built a media and entertainment company

that stands as one of the most powerful on the planet.

Won more Academy Awards than anybody in history.

Created a cinematic artform

and invented a new kind of American vacation destination.

Walt loved attention.

He was an extrovert.

He loved to be the centre of attention.

He wants to be an artist...

and I think he discovered something early on -

that talent was his way of getting attention.

He's a man of the times,

and the times are exciting.

Kansas City, 1919.

Walt Disney had just returned from France after the First World War.

Not quite 18,

he already stood out from the other working-class boys

returning from the front.

He landed a job as a commercial artist for a local ad company.

Walt had been an enthusiastic artist

from the time he was little,

and he was determined to do work he loved.

But Walt lived for the evenings.

Movie houses were springing up all over town,

and he soon became a regular visitor,

taking in at least one feature film...

..a newsreel...

..and an animated cartoon or two.

It was an exciting

and very dynamic medium.

The industry was very young.

There was no regulations,

or no customs, or no conformity.

It was wide open to what people wanted to make of it.

Disney was captivated.

His only formal training

was a few months at art schools

in Chicago and Kansas City...

..but he was convinced he could make better than what he was seeing.

He took out Eadweard Muybridge's Human Figures in Motion

from the public library.

Then he borrowed a volume

that laid out the basics

of animation in film-making.

Disney read about roughing out a storyline,

creating characters,

and carefully drawing each individual frame

onto white linen paper.

By mounting each frame on pegs,

just as the book instructed,

and shooting them one at a time,

he began to create the illusion of movement.

He was really into modern culture.

The pleasure of somehow engaging with

the potential of cinema,

the potential of animation, was exciting to him

and he had this little ability to draw.

He had a knack.

Disney's first efforts were short cartoons

he made at night and on weekends,

using a film camera he borrowed from his boss at work.

"I gagged 'em up to beat hell," he would say,

and then sold them to a small Kansas City-based theatre chain.

The fees didn't even cover his costs,

but Disney gained something more important than money.

Attention.

Excitement.

A whiff of destiny.

At age 20, Disney quit his day job

and started a company.

Laugh-O-Grams, Inc.

Walter Elias Disney, president.

He hired a salesman,

a business manager

and four young apprentice animators.

Disney and his Laugh-O-Grams crew

secured a contract

for six animated fairy-tale shorts...

..but when they delivered the work,

the distributor wouldn't pay up.

Walt could no longer pay the wages

or the rent on his office,

the phone bill, the electricity bill.

Creditors began circling.

Walt needed to make money, and fast.

Taking advantage of a new technique used by his rival, Max Fleischer,

his big new idea was to insert footage of a real girl

into animated scenes.

Alice in Cartoonland, he claimed,

was bound to be a winner.

Walt was able to scrape together

just enough cash to complete Alice.

He finished his cartoon experiment with little help,

while sleeping at the office,

bathing at the train station,

subsisting on canned beans

and the charity of the Greek diner.

But by the time the cartoon short was finished,

in the summer of 1923,

it was too late.

His company was headed into bankruptcy.

Alice In Cartoonland

would not save Laugh-O-Grams, Inc.

Walt Disney had suffered his first real failure.

He packed his cardboard suitcase with two spare shirts

and what was left of his drawing supplies...

then headed for Union Station,

where he treated himself

to a first-class ticket

on the Santa Fe California Limited,

straight through to Los Angeles.

Hollywood in the 1920s

is a beacon of the future.

That's where the action is at,

and I think Disney senses that,

and that's where he wants to be.

He's not thinking about animation now.

He's already failed with animation,

so the next step is,

"I'm going to go out here and I'm going to become a movie director.

"That's what I'm going to do."

The wannabe movie man

walked past Charlie Chaplin's studio,

along La Brea Avenue,

rode the trolley to Culver City

to see the set used in Ben Hur...

..and talked his way onto the Universal lot,

where he wandered around late into the night.

But after weeks of effort,

Walt had not been able to talk his way into a job.

His older brother, Roy,

had little patience

for Walt's insistence

on finding a place in the movie business.

He had sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door

when he first got to town,

and he admonished his brother to find a similar job.

One that paid.

Walt was considering this advice

when a cartoon distributor from New York got in touch.

Margaret Winkler, the only woman in the business,

had remembered Walt's Alice In Cartoonland pitch

and wanted to see how the young animator's big idea had turned out.

Soon after Disney shipped his Alice reel

to Winkler's office in New York,

the distributor wired back an offer.

She wanted Walt to make 12 Alice shorts

and was willing to pay 1,500 per episode.

When he gets that telegram,

the first thing he does is

he goes to visit his brother Roy,

and Walt is waving this telegram saying,

"Look!

"We've got a chance here!"

His brother is not enthusiastic.

His brother has no entertainment ambitions whatsoever.

His brother is the pragmatist.

But Walt says, you know,

"We can do this.

"I need you for this."

The two brothers scraped up a little cash

from friends and relatives,

and set up a two-man operation

in the back of a real-estate office.

Walt was the artist and idea man.

Roy was the fundraiser,

the book-keeper, and all-round utility man.

But Walt recognised that he needed the kind of help

Roy could not provide,

so he convinced an old friend

and collaborator, Ub Iwerks,

to relocate from Kansas City to Los Angeles.

Iwerks is incredible and can work fast,

so it's an early sign that Disney

always wants to work with the very best,

and isn't afraid of working with someone

who's better than he is at many things.

Iwerks began restyling

the Alice's Wonderland shorts

as soon as he arrived -

creating films with less emphasis on the girl,

and more on the cartoon characters.

The Disneys' distributor

loved the new look.

They wanted more, and faster,

and were willing to pay good money to get them.

Walt recruited more of his old gang from Missouri,

then hired some locals,

and the number of employees at the Disney studio

swelled to a dozen.

The brothers enjoyed their early success

and expected it to continue.

Roy bought an unassuming new sedan,

Walt a flash Moon Roadster.

They purchased adjoining plots

and built new houses next door to each other.

In 1925,

Walt married Lillian,

an inker working at the Disney Brothers Studio.

"He just had no inhibitions,"

Lillian said of Walt.

"He was completely natural.

"He was fun."

By the beginning of 1926,

the Disney Brothers Studio

was churning out a new Alice short every 16 days

and Walt and Roy were ready to take on a more spacious studio building

in the Silver Lake neighbourhood of Los Angeles.

When they moved from the Disney Brothers Studio

to the Hyperion Avenue facility,

a very striking and a very revealing thing happens.

Walt goes to Roy and he says,

"I've made a decision and that decision is, from hence,

"this will be called the Walt Disney Studio,

"not the Disney Brothers Studio."

Walt Disney believed

that it was his vision

of creativity and entertainment

that was the engine of this enterprise,

and that's what was being sold.

By the end of 1926,

Disney had become obsessed with his rivals in the cartoon industry.

He knew his Alice pictures were running out of steam.

He spent much of his free time in darkened theatres,

assessing the work of the top New York-based animators -

the Fleischer brothers and Pat Sullivan.

He was taking aim at the industry's gold standard -

Sullivan's Felix the Cat.

If you look at animation at that period,

it's extremely crude,

it's really violent,

it's really gag-driven,

and it's very urban.

These are older men making kind of crude, hard animation

and Disney steps in as this young guy,

and he's like, "OK, well, I see what you're doing,

"I'll try this out and then I'll figure out my own voice

"and my other influences around me to transform it."

The key to a challenging the supremacy of Felix the Cat,

Walt believed,

was creating his own compelling and likeable character.

Disney's distributor

suggested he try a rabbit.

Too many cats on the market.

Ub Iwerks took charge of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit's look,

while Disney wrote the storylines and the gags.

The bosses at Universal Pictures

were so taken with the first sketches of Oswald,

they offered a contract for 26 episodes.

Walt Disney Studios seem to be riding high.

But by the time the team put the finishing touches

on the first order of Oswald shorts,

the animators were increasingly frustrated with their boss.

The old Kansas City hands

who had helped Disney get started in the business

were working into the night and through the weekends,

whilst Walt was taking much of the money and most of the credit.

I think the two sides of Disney emerged.

You have, on the one hand, Walt the inspirer.

The other side of Disney was Disney the driver,

who demanded work,

who demanded creativity,

demanded productivity

and if people didn't meet his standards,

he could come down on you

like a ton of bricks.

By this time, his distributor, Margaret Winkler,

had married the businessman Charles Mintz.

Mintz saw an opportunity.

They owned the rights to Oswald,

not the Disney brothers.

Ub Iwerks comes to Walt Disney and says,

"Walt, I've been approached by Charles Mintz

"to essentially leave you and to go to work for Mintz -

"and I'm not the only one.

"All of the animators have,

"but they haven't told you." Disney doesn't believe it.

He just sort of pooh-poohs the whole thing

and doesn't really believe Ub Iwerks, who says, you know,

there's a problem brewing here.

Walt went to New York in February of 1928

with big hopes for a new contract from Mintz,

but it only took a few days for Disney to realise

that Iwerks had been right.

Mintz had already poached

almost all of Disney's artists,

except for Ub,

and the distributor told Walt

he was going to go on making the Oswald cartoons without him.

When Disney boarded the train for the trip back to Los Angeles,

he was despondent.

Almost all of his team

had abandoned him.

He had no distributor,

no Oswald,

and very little money in the bank.

When Walt arrived at Union Station in Los Angeles,

Ub Iwerks detected none of his friend's trademark good cheer

and enthusiasm.

"He looked like he'd just run into a stone wall," Ub would say.

But Walt was not in the mood to give up.

Walt steps up,

"Boom, you think Oswald was good?

"I can do much better than that.

"I'll show you what I'm capable of doing."

Disney has daily brainstorming sessions with Roy and Ub,

and a few other loyalists who had not signed with Mintz.

Intent on dreaming up a bankable new character,

and one they would own,

Disney's skeleton team scoured popular magazines for inspiration,

bounced ideas off one another

and drew figures on their sketchpads

until something began to emerge.

Pear-shaped body,

ball on top,

a couple of thin legs.

Iwerks later explained,

"You gave it long ears and it was a rabbit.

"Short ears, it was a cat.

"With an elongated nose, it became a mouse."

Walt suggested they name him "Mortimer".

His wife, Lillian, thought that was terrible

and came up with "Mickey".

As with Oswald,

Ub took charge of the mouse's look.

Walt gave him his personality.

He doesn't have the financial backing

to support what it is he's doing.

He wants to be a bigger voice than he is.

And it's a perfect metaphor -

him being the small mouse,

this seemingly insignificant figure,

individual within this big industry

that he wants to break into.

Disney was unable to find a distributor

willing to take a chance on his new mouse...

but Walt refused to give up.

At a meeting with Roy one day,

as the tiny staff worked up a third

and still unsold Mickey Mouse cartoon,

Walt suddenly blurted out,

"We'll make them over with sound."

"How can I do something better with animation

"than what everybody else is doing?"

He's always the person looking for new technology.

He's always the person trying to find the newest invention,

to make animation better.

Just as with Alice's Wonderland,

Max Fleischer had invented the technique,

but it was Walt who would make it work.

At the time, producing a soundtrack in sync with,

and music that makes sense with,

the action on screen is very difficult.

This was a very precise and intricate process

that Disney had to think through.

Disney saw no good option than to take the chance.

He headed back to New York

and signed a quick deal with the licensor

of one of the most advanced sound systems in town.

Walt didn't have enough money in the bank

to pay for the recording sessions, so he wired Roy

to do whatever he had to to get the cash.

He told his brother to sell his beloved Moon Roadster if needed.

Stuck in New York to oversee the sound work,

Walt trawled desperately for a distributor.

He carried his reels from one office to another

for three long months,

and came up empty.

He did manage to secure a two-week run at the Colony Theater,

at Broadway and 53rd Street.

Steamboat Willie premiered

on November 18th, 1928.

ENGINE CHUGS

HORN BLARES

HE WHISTLES

The audience at the Colony Theater was enthralled.

People had heard sound in pictures before,

but never like this.

HORN BLARES

WHISTLING

"It knocked me out of my seat,"

one New York reporter wrote.

"TURKEY IN THE STRAW" PLAYS

Some audiences begged the projectionist

to delay the start of the feature

and rerun Steamboat Willie.

Steamboat Willie was such a huge hit

and it gave Disney studio really a sort of pre-eminence -

where suddenly this company is taking a step to the front ranks.

This upstart from the West Coast

just erupts in the middle of everybody

with this amazing character.

HE SINGS

Mickey was a multi-talented charmer,

a dancer, a comedian, a singer.

And within months,

never mind he was just a cartoon,

Mickey Mouse was the newest Hollywood celebrity.

Fanmail for Mickey Mouse

poured into the studio, on Hyperion Avenue,

with postmarks from across the world.

From England, Spain,

the Philippines...

Some were addressed to Mickey, some to Walt.

Mickey is understood as being the creation of Disney

and Disney is understood as being the father of Mickey -

and combined, that makes for a kind of

international stardom

-that we really hadn't seen before.

-APPLAUSE

Walt Disney ALWAYS talked about Mickey Mouse as being his alter ego.

He would say that, you know,

"I'm closer to Mickey Mouse than I am to anyone else."

-AS MICKEY:

-Hey, Pluto, here she comes.

Mickey and Walt are talking to each other.

Hey, Pluto, here she comes.

So, he's got to do Mickey's voice.

Someone's got to do it.

So, of course, Walt does it -

because it's him talking to himself.

Walt Disney was not yet 30

and he had made himself

the first celebrity of animation.

A film cartoonist the public could name.

His studios stood atop the industry,

and was growing to meet the demand for new cartoons.

The success of Mickey

attracted some of the best talent to Hyperion,

but Disney insisted on having the final word

on every foot of finished film that came out of his studio.

He spent long hours at the office,

often until one or two o'clock in the morning.

He was anxious and obsessive,

chain-smoking day and night,

drumming his thumbs impatiently

on the table in story meetings.

His role was changing in the studio.

He was leaving behind things that were so familiar to him -

working with his hands, being an active participant in the work.

Becoming more and more a man who was the intellectual overseer -

evaluating, criticising, editing.

And as he stepped back from this more active participation,

initially, he was, I think, very distressed by it.

He felt uncomfortable doing it.

Outside of work,

Walt had talked of having a big family of his own for years.

He wanted ten children,

he told his sister, and would spoil them all.

His wife, Lillian,

had her doubts about raising any number of children,

especially when she considered

the office hours Walt kept.

Roy's wife, Edna, had had her first child already.

Finally, Lillian was talked into it,

and, by the spring of 1931,

she was pregnant as well.

Walt was ecstatic

and made plans for a bigger house

to accommodate the new addition.

Then Lillian miscarried.

Disney waved off the well-wishers and sympathisers.

He threw himself back into his work.

He insisted he was fine.

He was not.

-WALT ON TAPE:

-In 1931, I had a hell of a breakdown.

I went all to pieces.

It was just, pound, pound, pound.

It was costs, but costs were going up,

and I was always way over

whatever they figured the pictures would bring in.

And I cracked up.

I just got irritable.

I got to a point that I couldn't talk on the telephone.

I'd begin to cry.

And at the least little thing,

I'd just go that way.

In October, 1931,

Walt Disney took his doctor's advice

and escaped on the first real vacation of his life.

He and Lillian went across the country to Washington, DC,

then to Key West, and on to a week's stay in Cuba.

They took a steamship through the Panama Canal

on the way back to Los Angeles.

Once home, Disney told people

that the breakdown had been a godsend.

Life was sweet, he said,

and there was more to it than work.

He threw himself into a new exercise regime.

He went with Lillian on long horseback rides...

..learned to play polo

and joined a league.

Walt comes back from his nervous breakdown,

and he does change his lifestyle.

But does Walt Disney withdraw?

Does he delegate?

Does he do the things that one might have expected him to do?

No, he does not.

SINISTER MUSIC PLAYS

OWL HOOTS

Disney had never shied away

from spending money on his vision,

even when the studio was cash-poor.

He had already used up his earliest Mickey profits

in the creation of a new series of cartoon shorts,

called "Silly Symphonies".

It marked a turning point.

Walt aspired to make not just cartoons, but art.

DOG HOWLS

CAT HISSES

The Silly Symphonies were much more about animation as art.

So The Skeleton Dance and others like them

were understood as these wonderful,

almost avant-garde films

that merged music and dance,

and made characters out of nature,

and also other kinds of inanimate things

in ways that people hadn't really seen before.

HARP PLAYS

Silly Symphonies raised Walt

to near-mythical status

among cartoonists and animators.

Artists from all over the country

packed their bags and headed for California

just for the chance to work with the great Walt Disney.

The Hyperion staff grew to nearly 200.

Men ruled the studio,

as they did all studios in the 1930s.

The women who came to work at Disney

were relegated to the low-wage ink and paint department...

..but, in the middle of the Great Depression,

few complained about a steady job with steady pay.

It becomes, like, the studio to work at

and all of those animators just thrive,

because Disney sets it up

as a legitimate profession.

"Here, step in, I will recognise your talent.

"I will pay you well."

It was like a renaissance to us, you know.

It was the flowering of the animation industry.

It had never been done before.

It's fine art, you know.

Not just dumb cartoons.

BIRDS TWEET

Disney's new series was the test ground for innovation,

with firsts in sound technique,

colour and multiplane camera technology

which produced a three-dimensional depth

never seen before in animation.

PIGEONS COO

Walt intended the studio

to be the place

where you created great art.

SINISTER MUSIC BLARES

That was so instrumental

to Walt's understanding of the studio...

..and that became,

in many ways,

the most powerful element

in how he dealt with his workers.

THUNDER CRASHES

They wanted to produce great things.

He MADE them want to produce great things.

HORN TOOTS

He was very jovial.

He was very informal.

He's the one who first insisted

on only being referred to by his first name.

Boss?

He wasn't boss.

He was a friend.

And everybody called him Walt.

If they didn't call him Walt,

that was the end of that one.

We used to play volleyball at noon

over there, across the street in the annexe.

And Walt used to come over there and watch us, you know.

He used to say, "Don't play too rough."

He wanted us to be careful not to hurt our hands -

our drawing hand, particularly.

And we loved to win, because then he'd applaud!

But he was the big daddy there,

he didn't miss anything, you know.

Disney offered drawing classes at the studio,

and brought in professors

from the art institute to teach them.

He invited experts

to lecture on impressionism,

expressionism, cubism,

the Mexican muralists.

He was always very much about not only hiring the artists,

but providing a safe place for them to do their job.

And by "safe", I mean a place to make mistakes,

and a place to fail, and a place to take criticism

without the fear of being fired,

and a place to be able to learn.

INDISTINCT

CHEERING

He wanted a family, a community, a place.

I can actually create...

a little world -

bordered, mine.

Just what I need it to be.

Inhabited by all these people,

a community.

Marked "Disney".

Walt Disney, not yet 35,

appeared to be on top of the world.

His studio was a Technicolor rainbow

in the middle of the pale, grey, Depression-era America.

His home life was thriving, too.

Lillian had given birth to a daughter, Diane,

and the Disneys would soon adopt a second daughter, Sharon.

But Disney wasn't satisfied.

He needed a new adventure, he would say.

"A kick in the pants to jar loose some inspiration and enthusiasm."

One evening, in 1934,

Walt sent his entire staff out for an early dinner,

but told them to hurry back to the Hyperion sound stage

for an important company meeting.

The room was buzzing by the time Walt took the stage.

Disney is lit on the sound stage...

..and he then proceeds to act out -

alone, just him - a one-man show,

the story of Snow White.

What he did was to go through the whole movie, as he saw it,

acting out all of the parts,

impersonating all of the characters.

Going through all the emotions, all the ups and downs.

The Queen, the Princess,

the seven dwarves.

Even the animals.

What Disney was proposing had never been done.

Never even been tried.

A feature-length story-driven cartoon.

Snow White would have to captivate its audience

in a way no cartoon ever had before.

In the shorter cartoons

you can make people laugh,

and the gag is the basic component of these things.

He'd get people to laugh.

But Walt Disney, now, is asking another question.

"Can you make people cry?"

"Can you make people cry over a drawing?"

One key, Disney believed,

was to infuse his animated film with a natural realism.

He brought live animals into the studio

so his artists could study their movements.

He had his animators throw heavy objects

through plate glass windows just to analyse the shattering effects.

Disney hired a teenage dancer

to act the part of Snow White

so his animators could study how she looked when she leaned over,

or laughed, or smiled.

So they could see the movement of her dress as she danced.

They would bring in actors,

and they would have them impersonate these characters

in front of the animators

who would try to capture certain qualities of their movements.

They would even film them

to try to get a sense of personality of movement, of realism.

What he was after was something different.

Making thought and emotion visible

in a way that seems natural,

and not artificial.

Disney really kind of took the art of animation

and pushed it towards the animator as an actor

and about performance.

He wanted his animators to take acting classes,

studying their facial muscles,

how you say certain words.

How is your lips shaped

when you say "vee", or "oh", or "ooh"?

How does it affect your eyes?

Walt's stubborn insistence

on getting the story right,

on innovation,

and on attention to detail

meant the pace of production at Hyperion was glacial.

To draw each of these characters,

to draw these backgrounds,

to do it in a way that transcends anything that had been done before

is...excruciating.

It's painful.

It's tormenting.

We were the crew that did most of the Snow White drawings

and we'd sometimes take a whole day for a close-up of Snow White,

that's how intricate the drawing was.

It was so precise.

It was like making watches, you know?

It was just such fine detail, you know?

One little line would throw the whole thing off.

The production process did not change.

Key animators would draw the main characters in Snow White.

In-betweeners would draw the movements between the key frames.

The ink-and-paint artists

would add colour to the drawings

and transfer them to the transparent sheets,

or cells, to go to camera.

At 24 frames per second,

and often multiple cells per frame,

Snow White would require

more than 200,000 separate drawings.

Making the film required an army of people

and I'm not sure that's Disney thought of all of them as "talent".

There are real workers here who are doing the grot work.

Supper!

THEY SHOUT OVER ONE ANOTHER

As the production dragged into its second, and then its third year,

Walt's demands began to look dangerous.

He repeatedly pushed deadlines

and, by the start of 1937,

with the premiere set for that December,

the studio was behind. Way behind.

Ten months to the premiere date,

and not a single animation cell had been shot on film.

With little regard for the consequences,

Walt insisted that Snow White could not be rushed,

and could not be done on the cheap.

Walt kept upping the ante...

which meant Roy had to raise Walt's original budget number

six times over.

The trade papers were beginning to write stories about the delays.

People were calling Snow White "Disney's folly".

I was working a 12-hour day,

where you'd come in at eight and go home at eight

and we really were cleaning cells, and patching cells,

fixing mistakes and things like that.

And there were a lot.

And the Queen was...

She had the kind of paint

that was kind of sticky.

And so those things would come back from camera

and we'd have to clean them up

and patch them, and send them back to camera.

I worked my tail off.

I was put in charge of the clean-up and in-betweens.

That's where it was lagging.

We went in at seven instead of at eight.

And we went to dinner,

and we came back, and usually worked till almost ten.

The ink-and-paint girls, you know,

some of them were losing their eyesight.

It was hell of a thing.

They were just slaves that were doing it,

but they believed in this thing so much

they're willing to drop dead on the job.

The animators finished in early November,

but the last cells weren't painted until November 27th.

Rumours were flying around Hollywood

that there would be no print of the film ready

for the December 21st premiere.

But he would confound them all.

Blase Hollywood, accustomed to gala openings,

turns out for the most spectacular of them all.

The world premiere of the 1.5 million fairy-tale fantasy

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Replicas from the feature cartoon

thrilled thousands who turned out for a glimpse

of lovely Marlene Dietrich, with Doug Fairbanks Jr,

and a parade of stars.

Shirley Temple is just as enthralled

as are the grown-up stars and moviegoers

with the seven fantastic dwarves.

Walt was in a state of high anxiety.

He had no idea how the audience was going to respond.

He didn't know if it would really work,

and one part of him was almost agonising over,

"Well, if people don't buy this, this will just fall flat

"and then I will be done."

Audience members gasped

at the opening shots of the Queen's Castle.

Slave in the magic mirror,

come from the farthest space.

Through wind and darkness, I summon thee.

Speak!

They howled with laughter at the dwarves' antics.

THEY SNIFF IN SYNC

THEY SIGH

Soup!

Hooray!

THEY SHOUT OVER ONE ANOTHER

THEY SHOUT OVER ONE ANOTHER

Ah-ah-ah! Just a minute!

The heart of a pig!

And I've been tricked.

They hissed disapproval at the Evil Queen...

..and still, Walt was anxious.

Can't let the wish grow cold.

Oh, I feel strange.

He sat gripping Lillian's hand for nearly 75 minutes,

nervously anticipating the scene

that would put the power of his personal vision

to the ultimate test.

SHE CACKLES

THUNDER CRACKS

The fairest in the land!

When it arrived,

the apparent death of Snow White,

the theatre was hushed.

HE SOBS

The audience started weeping...

..and that's when Walt knew.

That's when they all knew.

The audience had suspended its disbelief

so thoroughly,

so believed in the reality

of the situation and of the dwarves

that they were crying.

That was really the triumph of the film.

When the curtain came down,

the audience rose from their seats

and broke into a thunderous ovation.

"I could not help but feel,"

one rival movie producer gushed,

"that I was in the midst of motion picture history."

Now a celebrity

from London to New York,

Disney had finally achieved

everything he had dreamt of.

But at home, he was still just plain Dad.

Walt made a point to drive his two young daughters to school every day.

Chased them around the house

cackling like the Wicked Witch...

..and read them bedtime stories.

There's no question, he adored them.

Absolutely adored them.

He was a man who had a lively sense of play

that he never lost from the time he was a child.

He was very domestic.

Very nurturing in a way that,

usually, in that day and age,

was associated more with Mother's role.

Lillian was a bit of... Aloof,

a bit reserved, a bit cool -

even with her children -

and Walt was just the opposite,

he was overflowing with enthusiasm.

I think, in a way,

he was reacting against his own childhood.

Disney often said, "I want to spoil my children terribly,

"I just want to spoil them."

Walt Disney had been a player in the movie business

for more than 15 years

and a celebrity for nearly ten...

..but the acclaimed film-maker

still did not think of himself

as a Hollywood insider.

He complained that other major film producers

refused to acknowledge animation

as serious cinema,

and he wasn't wrong.

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

announced the ten nominees

for the best picture of 1938,

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was not on the list.

Instead, Disney was given a special Oscar

for his pioneering work in feature-length cartoons.

I hear the boys and girls

in the whole world are going to be very happy

when they find out the daddy of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,

Mickey Mouse, Ferdinand and all the others,

is going to get this beautiful statue.

Isn't it bright and shiny?

Oh, it's beautiful.

Aren't you proud of it, Mr Disney?

I'm so proud, I think I'll bust.

Stung by Hollywood's consolation prize,

Walt determined to push the bar even higher

and create what he hoped

would be genuine works of art.

Walt Disney once exploded during a story session.

He pounded the table and he said, "We're not making cartoons here!"

"We're not making cartoons."

Walt Disney had made this separation

between Mickey Mouse

and some of the early Silly Symphonies.

"They're cartoons, but now we're not making cartoons.

"we're making art."

His animators were already in the early stages

of creating two new characters,

a boy puppet and a young deer...

..but Walt was far more interested

in an enticing new experiment

going on right down the hall.

STRING MUSIC PLAYS

CYMBALS CLASH

The project had begun as a cartoon short

based on a symphony entitled The Sorcerer's Apprentice

starring Mickey Mouse,

with the backing of an orchestra,

conducted by the celebrated

Leopold Stokowski.

CLASSICAL MUSIC CONTINUES

This was the opportunity Walt was looking for.

He decided to expand it

into a feature-length film, Fantasia.

He and Stokowski selected eight separate classical symphonies,

and Walt and his team began thinking about imagery to match.

The Disney studio was crawling with musicians,

dancers, even famous scientists -

like the astronomer Edwin Hubble -

and composers, like Igor Stravinsky.

So, these experts are coming and going

and there's a ballet company in the next room dancing

and here's Hubble talking about theories of deep space,

and where the cosmos came from.

There's a dinosaur expert

and it is this cultural kind of petri dish

of people together working and collaborating,

creating Fantasia, and he loves it.

He's dealt with realism and realistic emotions,

but now he's trying to get to emotion in a different way.

Circumventing realism

to try to see if you can reach emotion

directly through abstraction.

He's saying, "I want to try what heroes of art do.

"I want the great artists of the time to join in here.

"I want to create art that lasts centuries."

# Like a bolt

# Out of the blue

# Fate steps in

# And sees you through... #

By the time the studio was ready to launch Pinocchio,

in New York City, in February of 1940,

Walt's push for new heights

of creativity was paying off.

# ..your dreams come true. #

# Take the straight and narrow path

# And if you start to slide

# Give a little whistle! Yoo-hoo! #

His animators were developing new techniques

that, once again, broke through the boundaries of what was possible.

# And always let your conscience be your guide! #

OBJECTS CLATTER

Little puppet made of pine, wake.

The gift of life is thine.

Father...

For the first time in the field of animation,

Disney proclaimed, audiences will see, in Pinocchio,

underwater effects that look like super special marine photography.

Can you tell me where we can find Monstro?

Gee, they're scared.

You really have to stop yourself and say, "This was all blank paper.

"This all began as blank paper, it doesn't exist."

We believe its water and we believe those characters are real

and that's the summit of the animators' art.

That's the pinnacle of what we call personality animation,

which is creating a completely artificial world that we accept.

Father...

Mmm.

Pinocchio has richness and dimensions

that other animated cartoons don't have.

I mean, he's swallowed by a whale, for Christ's sake.

He is in peril throughout the movie.

Hey, whopper mouth, open up.

I've got to get in there!

And, at the same time,

there's Jiminy Cricket...

you know, who is delightful and charming,

and takes some of the sting off this really...

That's a pretty dark movie.

WAILING

MULE BRAYS

OBJECTS SMASH AND CLATTER

Oh, what's happened?

I hope I'm not too late.

What'll I do?

Pinocchio is just a wooden boy

who is trying to be human.

One would think that that means he can make mistakes.

That he would be allowed to have the faults of being a boy.

'Prove yourself brave,

'truthful and unselfish

'and someday you will be a real boy.'

That's what the goal is.

I want to feel my life most fully.

And then, once I feel my life,

I will have a chance to feel the big truths.

The things that give us sustenance.

I'm alive, see?

And I'm...

I'm...

I'm real.

I'm a real boy!

You're alive!

And you are a real boy!

-Yay! Whoopee!

-A real, live boy!

This calls for a celebration!

Audiences across the country

walked away from Pinocchio emotionally drained

and enormously satisfied.

The critics raved.

"Walt Disney has created something

"that will be counted in our favour,

"in all our favour,

"when this generation

"is being appraised by the generations of the future,"

the New York Times movie critic wrote.

Well, this is practically where I came in.

"For it will be said that no generation

"which produced a Snow White and a Pinocchio

"could have been altogether bad."

# Dreams come true... #