All our dreams come true if we have the courage to pursue them- Walt Disney
Walter Elias “Walt” Disney and his brother Roy co-founded Walt Disney Productions, which became one of the best-known motion-picture production companies in the world. Disney was an innovative animator and created the cartoon character Mickey Mouse. He had won 22 Academy Awards during his lifetime and was the founder of theme parks Disneyland and Walt Disney World.
Walter Elias didn’t just wake up one day and decide that he was going to create a character named Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse was created after a long stretch of failures. He had to declare bankruptcy during his stint in animation business because of heavy debt. He had family problems that needed looking after, the rights to his character Oswald the lucky Rabbit- were stolen along with his team of animators. It was during this period that the character Mickey Mouse was born. The first animated short cartoons featuring Mickey were Plane Crazy and The Gallopin’ Gaucho, both silent films for which they failed to find distribution. But it was when sound made its way into the industry that Disney created a third, sound-and-music-equipped cartoon called Steamboat Willie. With Walt as the voice of Mickey, the cartoon was an instant sensation.
Walt Disney had a dream that he wanted to bring happiness to children and he had the courage to pursue that dream even though failure had rained down upon him. His one success overpowered his past failures and paved the way for more successes to come. In 1929, Disney created Silly Symphonies, which featured Mickey’s newly created friends, including Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy and Pluto. One of the most popular cartoons, Flowers and Trees, was the first to be produced in color and to win an Oscar. In 1933, The Three Little Pigs and its title song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” became a theme for the country in the midst of the Great Depression.
On December 21, 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length animated film, premiered in Los Angeles. It produced an unimaginable $1.499 million, in spite of the Depression, and won a total of eight Oscars. During the next five years, Walt Disney Studios completed another string of full-length animated films, Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942).
Dreams are not the things that you see when you sleep, dreams are those things that don’t let you sleep, and in the words of Jiminy Cricket from Pinocchio “If your heart in your dreams then no request is too extreme.”