Read complete books and articles on: Disney

Disney, Walt - (Walter Elias Disney)dĭzˈnē, 1901–66, American movie producer, pioneer in animated cartoons, b. Chicago. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago and began his career as a cartoonist in 1920. In 1928 Disney created the character Mickey Mouse in the silent film Plane Crazy. That same year Mickey also appeared in Steamboat Willie, a short that initiated the concept of making a separate cartoon for each animated movement. Instantly famous, the film was also Disney's first attempt to use sound (his own voice for Mickey). He also experimented with the use of music (The Skeleton Dance), the portrayal of speed (The Tortoise and the Hare), three-dimensional effects (The Old Mill), and the use of color.

Disney produced the first feature-length cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1938), which took three years to complete. Additional features included Pinocchio (1939), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi (1942). In Song of the South (1946), he merged live actors and animated figures. During World War II, Disney's studio produced cartoons for the armed services as training tools and morale builders.

Beginning with Treasure Island in 1951, Disney added live-action movies to his output, while still producing such animated classics as Alice in Wonderland (1951) and Peter Pan (1953). Thereafter, his studio produced several animal stories (e.g., Greyfriars Bobby, 1960), musical fantasies (e.g., Mary Poppins, 1964), and television programs. Disney and his productions received numerous Academy and other awards during his lifetime. After his death, the Disney studios remained active, diversified, and ultimately became enormously successful. In the early 1980s, they began producing films for adults.

Disneyland, a huge theme park in Anaheim, Calif., was opened by Disney in 1955. Disney's California Adventure, a second, smaller theme park in Anaheim, opened adjacent to Disneyland in 2001. An even bigger park, Walt Disney World, opened near Orlando, Fla., in 1971 as a theme park and resort, and Epcot Center, Disney-MGM Studios, and Animal Kingdom have since been added. Disneyland parks have also opened near Tokyo (1983) and in Marne-la-Vallée, near Paris (1992).

See biographies by D. D. Miller and P. Martin (1956) and B. Thomas (1958); R. Schickel, The Disney Version (1968); C. Finch, The Art of Walt Disney (1973); R. Merritt and J. B. Kaufman, Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney (1994); H. A. Giroux, The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (1999); D. Smith and S. Clark, Disney: The First 100 Years (1999).

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16 of the Best Books and Articles on: Disney

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World and America » Read Now
by Stephen M. Fjellman. 492 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

...Vinyl Leaves Walt Disney World and America -iii- VINYL LEAVES Walt Disney World and America STEPHEN M. FJELLMAN WESTVIEW...Data Fjellman, Stephen M. Vinyl leaves: Walt...
2.

Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World » Read Now
by Stanley Fish, Fredric Jameson. 252 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

...Jameson Inside The Mouse Work And Play At Disney World The Project on Disney Series Editors : Stanley Fish and Fredric...247 Members of the Project on Disney 251 Acknowl...
3.

Disney and His Worlds » Read Now
by Alan Bryman. 222 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library
4.

Walt Disney: Its Persuasive Products and Cultural Contexts, in Journal of Popular Film and Television » Read Now
by Kathy Merlock Jackson. 3 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

...INTRODUCTION Walt Disney Its Persuasive Products and Cultural Contexts By KATHY...1996 marks the 30year anniversary of the death of Walt Disney. Nevertheless, the Disney...
5.

Beyond the Mouse-Ear Gates: The Wonderful World of Disney Studies, in Afterimage » Read Now
by Cynthia Chris. 5 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library
6.

Disney and Its Conservative Critics, in Journal of Popular Film and Television » Read Now
by Ronald E. Ostman. 8 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

...Disney and Its Conservative Critics By RONALD E. OSTMAN I n...and aural subliminals are out there, even in the Walt Disney Companys animated feature films. The Criticisms...
7.

Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood (Chap. 2 "Are Disney Movies Good for Your Kids?") » Read Now
by Shirley R. Steinberg, Joe L. Kincheloe. 274 pgs.

Collections: Education, Entire Library

Children and their parent's money are subject to an almost constant marketing pitch that sells games, videos, and a large volume of merchandise. The authors examine this modern consciousness changing culture in a multidisciplinary manner.
8.

Impure Acts: The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies (Chap. Five "Teaching the Cultural with Disney") » Read Now
by Henry A. Giroux. 166 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

Henry A. Giroux challenges the contemporary politics of cynicism by addressing a number of issues including the various attacks on cultural politics, the multicultural discourses of academia, the corporate attack on higher education, and the cultural politics of the Disney empire.
9.

The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture ("Disney Defines Innocence" begins on p. 111) » Read Now
by Gary Cross. 259 pgs.

Collections: Education, Psychology, Entire Library

The twentieth century was, by any reckoning, the age of the child in America. Today, we pay homage at the altar of childhood, heaping endless goods on the young, reveling in memories of a more innocent time, and finding solace in the softly backlit memories of our earliest years. We are, the...
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The twentieth century was, by any reckoning, the age of the child in America. Today, we pay homage at the altar of childhood, heaping endless goods on the young, reveling in memories of a more innocent time, and finding solace in the softly backlit memories of our earliest years. We are, the proclamation goes, just big kids at heart. And, accordingly, we delight in prolonging and inflating the childhood experiences of our offspring. In images of the naughty but nice Buster Brown and the coquettish but sweet Shirley Temple, Americans at mid-century offered up a fantastic world of treats, toys, and stories, creating a new image of the child as "cute." Holidays such as Christmas and Halloween became blockbuster affairs, vehicles to fuel the bedazzled and wondrous innocence of the adorable child. All this, Gary Cross illustrates, reflected the preoccupations of a more gentle and affluent culture, but it also served to liberate adults from their rational and often tedious worlds of work and responsibility. But trouble soon entered paradise. The "cute" turned into "cool" as children, following their parental example, embraced the gift of fantasy and unrestrained desire to rebel against the saccharine excesses of wondrous innocence in deliberate pursuit of the anti-cute. Movies, comic books, and video games beckoned to children with the allures of an often violent, sexualized, and increasingly harsh worldview. Unwitting and resistant accomplices to this commercial transformation of childhood, adults sought-over and over again, in repeated and predictable cycles-to rein in these threats in a largely futile jeremiad to preserve the old order. Thus, the cute child-deliberately manufactured and cultivated--has ironically fostered a profoundly troubled ambivalence toward youth and child rearing today. Expertly weaving his way through the cultural artifacts, commercial currents, and parenting anxieties of the previous century, Gary Cross offers a vibrant and entirely fresh portrait of the forces that have defined American childhood.
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10.

Inventing the Child: Culture, Ideology, and the Story of Childhood (Chap. 5 "Walt Disney, Ideological Transposition, and the Child") » Read Now
by Joseph L. Zornado. 234 pgs.

Collections: Education, Entire Library

Tracing the historical roots of Western culture's stories of childhood, this book looks at those texts in which the child is subjugated to the adult. Going back 400 years, it looks at Hamlet, the Brothers Grimm and Walt Disney cartoons.
11.

Who Owns the Media? Competition and Concentration in the Mass Media Industry (Includes discussion of Disney in multiple chapters) » Read Now
by Benjamin M. Compaine, Douglas Gomery. 604 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

This thorough update to Benjamin Compaine's original 1979 benchmark and 1982 revisit of media ownership tackles the question of media ownership, providing a detailed examination of the current state of the media industry. Retaining the wealth of data of the earlier volumes, Compaine and his...
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This thorough update to Benjamin Compaine's original 1979 benchmark and 1982 revisit of media ownership tackles the question of media ownership, providing a detailed examination of the current state of the media industry. Retaining the wealth of data of the earlier volumes, Compaine and his co-author Douglas Gomery chronicle the myriad changes in the media industry and the factors contributing to these changes. They also examine how the media industry is being reshaped by technological forces in all segments, as well as by social and cultural reactions to these forces. This third edition of Who Owns the Media? has been reorganized and expanded, reflecting the evolution of the media industry structure. Looking beyond conventional wisdom and expectations, Compaine and Gomery examine the characteristics of competition in the media marketplace, present alternative positions on the meanings of concentration, and ultimately urge readers to draw their own conclusions on an issue that is neither black nor white. Appropriate for media practitioners and sociologists, historians, and economists studying mass media, this volume can also be used for advanced courses in broadcasting, journalism, mass communication, telecommunications, and media education. As a new benchmark for the current state of media ownership, it is invaluable to anyone needing to understand who controls the media and thus the information and entertainment messages received by media consumers.
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12.

Growing Up Girls: Popular Culture and the Construction of Identity (Chap. 7 "Disney's Pocahontas: Conversations with Native American and Euro-American Girls") » Read Now
by Sharon R. Mazzarella, Norma Odom Pecora. 228 pgs.

Collections: Education, Psychology, Entire Library

...Feminine Hygiene Advertising Debra L. Merskin 113 7. Disneys Pocahontas: Conversations with Native American and Euro-American...womens bodies." While generally considered a...
13.

Redesigning Pocahontas, in Journal of Popular Film and Television » Read Now
by Gary Edgerton, Kathy Merlock Jackson. 9 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

...Thomas Schumacher, senior vice president of Disney Feature Animation (Pocahontas35) The...fun. - Peter Schneider, president of Disney Feature Animation...
14.

Bambi and the Hunting Ethos, in Journal of Popular Film and Television » Read Now
by A. Waller Hastings. 7 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

...working on a paper about Walt Disney Bambi ( 1942 ) and hunting...for food. The only carnivores in the Disney film are Friend Owl, the young animals...In one of the most...
15.

Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration ("Troupe Disney" begins on p. 31) » Read Now
by Warren Bennis, Patricia Ward Biederman. 240 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

In this "most riveting management book ever" (Stewart Brand's Global Business Network Book Club), "Warren Bennis (and) coauthor Biederman describe hallmarks that distinguish extraordinary groups from groups whose performance is strictly so-so" ("Fortune").
16.

Be Sure You're Right, Then Go Ahead, in Journal of Popular Film and Television » Read Now
by J. G. O'Boyle. 13 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

...Disney heroes such as Davy Crockett were embodiments of fair play...THEN GO AHEAD" By J. G. OBOYLE The Early Disney Westerns The folktale is told and retold, losing...