Walt Disney

 

1929

We are getting successful day by day and finally we are doing the things that we wanted all along. We are not attached to a company so we are free to draw and produce the things that we like. Skeleton Dance has been outstanding. Seeing skeletons dancing about in time to music or playing each other like xylophones was very exciting for both the audience and the producers. By establishing this cartoon we realized that this alley could be used for testing our new ideas. Since the focus was not on a main character, we always had freedom to do the things we think that would look good. Right now, we are working on a new one named Flowers and Trees. Our biggest obstacle is bringing color to our cartoons so they could look more lively and cheerful. We decided to make this cartoon colorful so that everyone shows interest in watching it. It should not be boring in order for it to be as fruitful as Skeleton Dance. Ub and I are sleepless once again and we do not know e-when will it be produced. Still, when you do the job you like it doesn’t matter if you are tired or not.

 

1936

Today, we finally established our last cartoon of Silly Symphonies. It was a very fantastic journey that we went through. The review of the crowd was amazing; they liked nearly everything we did. Skeleton Dance, Flowers and Trees, The Old Mill, Three Little Pigs, The Big Bad Wolf, Three Little Wolves… All of them were entertaining in different ways. In every cartoon we tried something different to prove our originality. For example we first used the multiplane camera in The Old Mill. We developed our animation in every cartoon we did. Everyone sang the songs that we used in our cartoons. When we released The Big Bad Wolf, people across the county began to mumble the song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf”. It also became an anthem for the Great Depression. Everyone knows that I normally do not prefer to do sequels and I even made an attempt of doing it. Each of these cartoons are different because some are set to classical music, while others use the song that we created just for the cartoon. Today is the day that we thought we should finish it and start something new. Of course we did not run out of ideas, we just want to implement it to somewhere different and more successful.   

 

1939

Our film was a huge success. I have never gotten these kinds of reviews before. They are all about how much they liked the movie and how much they enjoyed it. The film was premiered on December 21,1937. It was released to the public on February, and it quickly grossed 8 million dollars. This was a huge sum for the movies that was made during the Great Depression. The film even made it to Hollywood and got critiqued with admiration. Famous names like Charlie Chaplin who attended to the Hollywood premiere told the Los Angeles Times that the film “surpassed our high expectations.”  This is why Ub and I were glad that we didn’t listen to the warnings. I got nominated to an Academy Award and then won it. This was one of the highlights that made me the happiest. I hope that the success will come further as we produce more and more cartoons. 

 

1937

Ub and I are aiming for something totally different. We had enough of short movies because they only lasted five minutes or so. We want to shoot a long length movie. We are very excited because we have done such a thing before. It is going to be produced in English and in Technicolor. When we first planned to release this full length movie, some people warned us that the audience, especially adults, wouldn’t sit through a long length cartoon fantasy about dwarfs. We decided to name our movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It will be based on a famous fairytale by the Brothers Grimm. Right now we are in the process of drawing the cartoons and because this will be longer than the others, we are going to make more sacrifices. Even though people gave us warnings not to establish a very long movie, we trust our ideas and we are not afraid of trying.