Remembering Walt Disney on His 56th Death Anniv

 Today marks the 55th death anniversary of Walt Disney, who is regarded as one of the finest American cartoonists of all time.

Best known as the illustrator of one of the greatest American humourists, Micky Mouse, Disney created a remarkable cartoon studio and gallery with his drawings of Micky Mouse’s characters.

A character like Donald Duck in The Wise Little Hen (1934), a story in which Donald and his friend Peter Pig try to avoid work by faking stomach aches until Mrs. Hen teaches them the value of labor, lives on in our minds also because of the sharp drawing by Disney.

On this occasion, here are lesser-known facts about the late cartoonist:

Disney was born on December 5, 1901, in Chicago, USA. He was one of five children, four boys, and a girl.

When Disney was only just four years old, his family moved to a farm just outside of Marceline of Missouri in 1906.

He began drawing, painting, and selling pictures to his neighbors and family friends from a very early age.

The late cartoonist joined McKinley High School in Chicago, where he took drawing and photography classes and was a contributing cartoonist for the school magazine. At night, he took courses at the Art Institute of Chicago.

According to American newspapers, Disney dropped out of school to join the Army at the age of 16 but was rejected for being underage.

Instead, he joined the Red Cross and went to France for a year to drive an ambulance.

He return to America in 1919 and moved to Kansas City to pursue a career as a newspaper artist. He got a job at the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio through his brother Roy.

Disney worked at the Kansas City Film Ad Company, where he made commercials based on cut-out animation.

In 1920, Disney began experimenting with a camera, doing hand-drawn cel animation and he decided to open his own animation business.

At this time, Disney made a deal with a local Kansas City theatre to screen their cartoons, which they called Laugh-O-Grams.

The cartoons were hugely popular, and Disney was able to acquire his studio, upon which he bestowed the same name. Soon Laugh-O-Gram hired a number of employees.

They did a series of seven-minute fairy tales that combined both live-action and animation, which they called Alice in Cartoonland.

However, this good run didn’t last long and the studio had become burdened with debt by 1923 and Disney had to declare bankruptcy.

In the same year, Disney and his brother Roy moved to Hollywood with cartoonist Ub Iwerks whom he met at Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio and they started the Disney Brothers’ Cartoon Studio.

His breakthrough came when he created “packaged features,” groups of shorts strung together to run at feature length.

By 1950, he was once again focusing on animated features. Disney’s last major success that he produced himself was the motion picture Mary Poppins, which came out in 1964 and mixed live-action and animation.

Unfortunately, he passed away on December 15, 1966, due to lung cancer.