Walt Disney

Walt Disney was an American animator, filmmaker, and businessman whose 50-year career produced the founding of the Walt Disney Company — one of the foundational documents of 20th-century American animation, family-entertainment, and theme-park industry. He was born Walter Elias Disney on December 5, 1901, in Chicago, Illinois, into an Irish-Canadian-American family. His father Elias Disney was a Canadian carpenter and farmer, and his mother Flora Call was an American school teacher. The family relocated to Marceline, Missouri, in 1906, where Walt's idealized rural childhood shaped the subsequent Main Street, U.S.A. design of his 1955 Disneyland theme park.

His World War I service in 1918 — at age 16, after lying about his age to join the Red Cross Ambulance Corps in France — preceded his 1920 early-career commercial-art and animation work in Kansas City, Missouri. His 1920 founding of the Laugh-O-Gram animation studio in Kansas City — and the studio's 1923 bankruptcy — preceded his October 16, 1923 relocation to Hollywood and his founding of the Disney Brothers Studio with his older brother Roy O. Disney.

His 1928 creation of Mickey Mouse — with animator Ub Iwerks — produced his American animation breakthrough. The November 18, 1928 release of Steamboat Willie (the third Mickey Mouse short and the first synchronized-sound Mickey Mouse short) launched the Disney Studios commercial breakthrough. The 1937 release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — Disney Studios's first full-length animated feature film — produced the studio's commercial peak and grossed $8 million worldwide on a $1.5 million budget.

His subsequent animated-feature output produced multiple foundational 20th-century American animated films — particularly Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942), Cinderella (1950), and Sleeping Beauty (1959). His July 17, 1955 opening of Disneyland in Anaheim, California — the first themed amusement park ever opened — and his subsequent 1965 announcement of the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida (which opened October 1, 1971, five years after his death) launched the foundational 20th-century American theme-park industry. He won 22 Academy Awards across his career — the most of any individual recipient. He died on December 15, 1966, at age 65, in Burbank, California, of lung cancer.

His name Walt is the English short form of Walter (from the Old Germanic root meaning "ruler of the army"). Walt has been a popular American boys' name across the 20th century.