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.