Disney

How Disney has influenced animation for many years after they started.

Disney was one of the first major animation companies founded by Walt and Roy Disney. By starting out with a simple black and white animation with no sound to 3D animation with synchronized voices and music, Disney has changed the whole course of animation in the film industry. Starting out as Laugh-O-Gram productions, Disney has evolved and come a large way in the business view as they started off as a company only creating to now be a company that owns other multiple companies like Miramax, Marvel, Touchstone and many more. This is just one example of how large Disney has become and how it has impacted on the world of media.

The first noted animation with sound, which was also the debut of loveable children’s character Mickey Mouse, was the short film in 1928 “Steamboat Willie”. This had a massive impact on the animation industry as it was something new that nobody had seen before and gave more of a story to the animated films made after. This however made Sullivan and Messmer’s “Felix the Cat” look out dated causing them to move, unwillingly, into sound production.

The first animation with colour was a series, “Silly Symphony”, made up of shorts that debuted with the short called “Flowers and Trees”. This opened up a new revolution in animated films by using Technicolor as it was around this time where more and more people would go to the cinema to specifically watch the short animation at the start of the feature film being played.  After the invention of colour in animation, black and white films like Laurel and Hardy, Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom” were re-released with added colour into the films using the same technique.

Disney is also responsible or creating the first ever animated full-length feature film that was the 1937 film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”. This was the start of a completely new type of film that had then opened up a new world of film and cinema.

Disney has influenced many different companies in the animation industry, from Pixar Studio’s to Studio Ghibli. As Disney was one of the first animation companies they had created techniques, which had been used in many animations years after. An example of this is the same cel technique of the characters for hand drawn animation against a background that they had used in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”. 31 years later the film “The Beatles Yellow Submarine” used the same style and technique to capture the imagination and fantasy of the music and story of the Yellow Submarine and Sgt. Peppers lonely Hearts Club.

Another company that was running at the same time as Disney was the well known company Warner Brothers. The creator of the hit animated show Looney Tunes, Warner Brothers had been influenced and followed the same pattern as Disney for example creating characters that are iconic and well known like Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny and many more. 

However the famous characters of the Looney Tunes group have stayed in the 2D animation whereas Disney have now moved on to their first 3D animated film, after the great success from Disney’s company Pixar, in 2005 with the film “Chicken Little”. With high hopes for “Chicken Little” from knowing the success that animation studio DreamWorks had gained with 3D animated films like “Shrek” and “Shark Tale” their dreams were fallen when the film did not make such an impact as thought. It was only in 2010 when Disney tried again with the film “Tangled” which had a larger hit on the film box office.

By being partner companies with a smaller company, films have started to merge together. An example of this is Studio Ghibli’s character Totoro from the 1988 film “My Neighbor Totoro” was featured in the Disney Pixar film “Toy Story 3”. This shows how animation companies are starting to work together and using each other’s animation technique.