Begin Walt's Journey
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     Walt Disney was born in Chicago in 1901, his family would move first to Marceline, Missouri in 1906 and finally to Kansas City in 1910. He went on to join the American Red Cross at the age of 16 where he would serve in France during World War 1. After a year of deployment, Walt came back to Kansas City and looked desperately for a job where he could draw. He would apply at the Kansas City Star and the Journal, but neither had openings available for him at the time. Depressed and disappointed, he would confide in his brother Roy about his failed ventures. Roy tried to persuade Walt into seeking more practical employment but when he mentioned that he heard wind of a couple of commercial artists looking for an apprentice, Walt jumped at the opportunity.
      
      In a gray advertising building, downtown of Kansas City lied the Pesmen-Rubin Commercial Art Studio fronted by Louis Pesmen and Bill Rubin. Impressed by Walt’s eagerness they asked to see samples of his works for which Walt in return showed them his sketches of the Paris streets when he was deployed. Easily enough, Walt was hired for 50 dollars a month, the equivalent to almost 700 dollars today. His initial duties under the assistant title were to finish the front cover artworks that were left over by Pesmen whenever he designed the covers for the weekly program of the Newman Theater. A task like this would normally take a day but Walt would knock the front and back covers out in three hours’ time. The job of designing the covers were now his alone.

      Walt Disney would soon cross paths with a similarly aged German immigrant by the name of Ub Iwerks a typographer and airbrush artist who was hired a month earlier at the firm. Both young men quickly became friends and would churn out large volumes of artwork for the firm sourcing from department stores, theaters, and farms during the holiday season. Both Walt and Iwerks were laidoff in the winter unfortunately and discussed going into a joint business themselves. Walt would write to his mother asking for the money he saved during his time in the Red Cross but doubtful of her son’s intentions, she only sent half the amount. Together they put up a listing in the Railroad Exchange Building under the name Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists. Iwerks would handle lettering and some of the drawing duties, while Walt was the cartoonist and the salesman as Iwerks was typically described as the quieter of the two. The first month managed to make a profit of 135 dollars with Walt having to go door to door hustling local businesses for work. It however only lasted that single month as Iwerks spotted an advertisement in the Kansas City Star that the Kansas City Slide Company was looking for a cartoonist. There was only one opening at the time and after discussing who should apply for the job, Iwerks handed it off to Walt, assuring him that he could manage the business by himself. Walt accepted the job and shortly after convinced his employer to hire Iwerks as well.

      Working here would immensely change the course of Walt’s life as it was here that he was first brought to the attention of the world of animation. The animation work done here was very lackluster to what we think of animation as now. You would have human and animal cutouts of paper pinned to another sheet of paper, have the joints shifted and moved, be photographed, and then stitched together creating what we see as movement. Each department had their own artists who would make their own cutouts and direct the cameramen on what to be filmed, however each department was also jealous of each other and would hide their trade secrets from one another. This displeased Walt as he wanted to learn the process, so he became friends with one of the cameramen, Jimmy Lowerre, who showed Walt how the process was done in-house. Almost immediately, Walt was unimpressed at his own work, especially when shown how a particular movie made via animation looked with a greater depth of realism and done with drawings, not cutouts. Determined, he visited the Kansas City public library and found two books that skyrocketed his progress as an animator: His advisors took notice, as they were soon impressed by the added quality of realism Walt had shown in his animations, but he was ready for more, so he began to experiment yet again.

      Returning to work one day he asked to borrow one of the studio's stop-action cameras for a project outside of work, reluctantly they gave in, and Walt headed to his brother Roy asking if he could assist in setting up a studio in their uncle’s garage. He spent many evenings experimenting and eventually came up with a finished cartoon that occupied over three hundred feet of film. He would then ask Kansas City’s leading exhibitor, Frank Newman, to include samples of his animations in the weekly newsreels that Newman would produce for his theater chain. Frank Newman agreed and commissioned Walt to make more at the price of thirty cents a foot ($4.15 value today). The animations would be called “Newman Laugh-O-Grams” and would feature a fusion of humor and advertising. Currently, only footage from the pilot has survived over the years and the last scene of this two and half minute sample reel was animated only by Walt, making it one of the last ever scenes we have of his own self-completed work. The animations soon became a wide success amongst the citizens of Kansas City, commissions for animated intermission fillers and teasers would take the firm’s incoming requests by storm. Walt Disney’s ego would take a much-rewarded boost and he would grow anxious for bigger projects.

After about a year of running a not-so-official business out of his family’s garage, he would rent out a small workshop and put postings out for much-needed assistance, as he was ready to expand his company. In June of 1920, an animated film adapting Aesop’s Fables would release, and this inspired Walt. He wanted to adapt his own versions of fairy tales into cartoons but to have the setting and issues be more current with more recent events that may have occurred. Walt put a goal for himself to produce 6 animated films within this little workshop and for six months he worked alongside other local cartoonists, sometimes having a night school to educate any newcomers. The first film in his saga of fairytales would be Little Red Riding Hood. Walt would be a novice at producing an actual film rather than the short minute clips he was used to making. The sketches were simple and so were the backgrounds, he used an animation style called the “Slash-and-Tear” technique. Walt however was incredibly pleased by his team’s production that he quit his job at the Kansas City Ad Company and pursued making the next five films. The areas of improvement we can analyze throughout the works that follow were improving upon the sketches for both the characters and storyline, as well as creating smoother animation transitions. Walt would also go to experiment with avenues of humor, creating these long-winded gags mimicking the slap-stick style and overall improving upon the comedic timing of how these animations interact within their world. He was so enthralled and confident in his skill that he finally took out the loans necessary to start up his own production house, Laugh-O-Gram films on May 23, 1922.

      We have now caught up to the year 1922 where Walt has now been tasked with the job of making 6 more animated films for the company Pictorial Clubs of Tennessee, offering $11,100 for the lot, and to do so promptly. Walt and his crew, including Iwerks who he managed to persuade into leaving the ad company as well, would work for close to a year on each one of these projects, checking them off, one-by-one. Walt even went as far as moving into the studio since he would no longer be able to afford the expense of his own apartment. Unfortunately for him, the company that his studio was hired by had fallen under so Walt was never able to receive his full payment. As much as he tried not to buckle under the need for funding, Laugh-O-Grams fell through, and the studio was no more. Luckily, two things happened for Walt that would change his life. Number one, while making the films for this other company, Walt had the idea to start on another project that involved bringing in a child actor, Virginia Davis, and having her interact with cartoon characters drawn onto the film. Alice’s Cartoonland would involve a four-year-old girl who Walt recognized from working his previous job at the Ad agency. The idea was to have a physical actor interact in a "cartoon-land" reality. From this, he was able to create a reel that he could showoff to potential clients. Secondly, Walt had a cousin living in Los Angeles, California, who had just recently moved to the city and was in need of roommates to split the cost of rent there. As the saying goes, fortune favors the bold, and so Walt went, packed his things, and never looked back.