Walt Disney’s early entrepreneurial experience took him to Kansas City to start a company called Laugh-O-Gram. The two Disney brothers learned early that owning the character and controlling intellectual property was essential. In 1926, the Alice Adventure cartoons (mixed live and animation) were put to rest as they weren’t gaining traction so Iwerks and Disney created a new character called Oswald The Lucky Rabbit.

With the help of Iwerks, Disney began to see great success with Oswald The Lucky Rabbit, which was created under licensing through Winkler Pictures. Unfortunately, the copyright contract was up for renewal within a year and so Walt Disney headed to New York in order to renew ownership of Oswald but Charles Mintz who worked at Winkler Pictures had already stolen the Oswald The Lucky Rabbit character from Walt Disney. Mintz started his own cartoon production with most of Disney’s staff. Mintz figured he could do the cartoons just as well as the Disney studio for cheaper and also cut out the middle-men. In those days, the distributor owned the rights to the character and they outsourced the creative to studios such as Laugh-O-Gram. Mintz ended up doing a favour for Disney since Iwerks immediately developed another character called Mortimer Mouse later Mickey Mouse.

So after this lesson in licensing, Disney would go forward ensuring that he owned the distribution rights. Disney later on would actually re-release films like Snow White and Pinocchio regularly every 7 years after their original release since these films could be deemed timeless and Disney could control access. Disney engaged in mass merchandise sales using his film characters to build idolized characters. Only after the release of Little Mermaid was home viewing of Disney content expanded significantly. Controlling who can view and how they viewed Disney content was essential for generating reliable revenue streams for Disney as demonstrated from his early experience with intellectual property.

Animators in the 1920s were taking live action and adding cartoons to them. Walt Disney with (Kansas City-based) Laugh-O-Gram reversed this idea and had cartoons with one live action character in his Alice Adventures series. Ub Iwerks was the actual artists, Walt Disney was the visionary and Roy Disney was the finance guy all collectively working towards innovating. Disney believed in realism but also believed in constantly improving. After some modest success and then brutal failure, Disney headed to where all movie makers go: Hollywood.

In 1929, Steam Boat Willy was the first sound based cartoon with Walt providing the voice of Mickey. This short animation was a hugely successful production for Disney. In addition, the Silly Symphony was a colour based cartoon with sound that expand Disney’s scale as a business. Walt Disney took animation forward but it was never about completely re-inventing ideas. The steps and innovation were secondary to the discipline of delivering the film.

From the start, Disney would take contemporary fair tales and provide a modern spin on them rather than do something completely different. The idea is that he was borrowing from the past the way the Beatles borrowed from Blues. Colour was introduced in 1932 and then the first feature length Disney movie Snow White was released in 1937. Learning by trial and error was trying to figure out how to create something creative. Adding multi-layered images, adding colour served as later innovations that would put Disney at the top of innovation nonetheless the innovation was incremental and logical. The Multi-Plain Camera allowed Disney to have multiple layers on the screen, which was essential after the success of Snow White. It provided dimensionality to standard images. This addition of depth to an image was another innovation that was quickly developed within Disney.