Disney Quiz
Mickey Mouse almost went by a different name, and the studio's early years are full of such near misses.
A Disney quiz with answers about the studio behind the films: lost characters, camera tricks, sound experiments and the inventions that changed animation. No princess line-ups, just the stories fans rarely hear.
Did you know?
- Walt Disney still holds the record for the most Academy Awards won by one person: 22 competitive awards from 59 nominations, plus several honorary ones. Most were for short films, a category his studio dominated through the 1930s with its Silly Symphonies series.
- While making 'Bambi', the studio kept two live fawns on its lot so that animators could study how young deer move, stand up and balance. Artists also attended anatomy lectures, because earlier cartoon animals had bent like rubber hoses rather than moving on real bones and joints.
- Tokyo Disneyland is not owned by Disney. It belongs to a Japanese firm, the Oriental Land Company, which builds and runs the resort under licence and pays royalties. Disney's designers plan the attractions, but the land, staff and daily operation are the Japanese company's own.
How the Disney studio changed animation
Walt Disney and his brother Roy founded their studio in Hollywood in October 1923 as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio. Its first series, the Alice Comedies, placed a real girl inside a cartoon world. Over the next fifteen years the small company moved from short black-and-white gags to sound, colour and feature films, and many of the working methods it invented along the way are still standard practice in animation studios around the world.
Inventing the tools
Much of what the studio is remembered for was technical. Its 1932 short 'Flowers and Trees' was the first cartoon released in full three-strip Technicolor and won the first Academy Award given to an animated short. Around the same time its artists began pinning rough story sketches to a wall in order, the origin of the storyboard now used for films, adverts and games. Two veteran animators, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, later set out the studio's craft rules in a 1981 book as the twelve principles of animation.
From paint to pixels
The films from 'The Little Mermaid' in 1989 onwards are often called the Disney Renaissance. Behind the songs was a quiet technical change: a digital ink-and-paint system developed with Pixar, which coloured scanned drawings by computer. 'The Rescuers Down Under' in 1990 was the first feature completed entirely with it. Hand-drawn lines stayed, but painted cels disappeared, and the same decade brought fully computer-animated features.
Stories you can walk through
Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California, in July 1955 and applied film techniques to real streets. Buildings on its Main Street use forced perspective: upper floors are built smaller than ground floors so that they seem taller. The 1963 Enchanted Tiki Room introduced Audio-Animatronics, figures moved by recorded signals. Walt Disney World followed in Florida in 1971, and Tokyo Disneyland, the first park outside the United States, in 1983.