The Story of Disney: 100 Years of Wonder

The ultimate coffee table book for every Disney fan’s collection! Dive into the enchanting world of Disney and relive the magic that has captivated generations. This beautifully crafted keepsake reflects on Disney’s rich history and legacy with vibrant text, rare concept art, and hundreds of photographs. It''s also the official companion book to In 1923, Walt Disney and his brother Roy founded what we now know to be The Walt Disney Company. Walt’s passion and vision has been--and continues to be--an inspiration. This magical compendium commemorates 100 years of Disney--the characters, the stories, the films, and the parks, all of which have touched the lives of generations of fans and encouraged a belief that dreams really can come true. Fans will delight at the treasures found inside: Disney history , from the birth of Walt Disney all the way up to the latest park innovations. photos and illustrations (including rare concept art), interviews , and detailed looks at the parks. stories , behind-the-scenes secrets , and a peek inside the Walt Disney Archives collection . As the official companion to the touring exhibition by Walt Disney Archives and SC Exhibitions, this gorgeous coffee table book is a treasure trove for pop culture enthusiasts, artists, art collectors, and Disney fans. Searching for more ways to connect with the Disney films and parks? Explore these books from Disney Editions: ...

Auteur

JOHN BAXTER has written both fiction and nonfiction for a number of publishers, including HarperCollins, Berkley, and Hearst. He has been a featured comedy blogger for the Huffington Post, and is the author of four books for Disney Publishing Worldwide on a number of subjects. The first, Disney During World War II: How the Walt Disney Studio Contributed to Victory During the War (2014), came about as a result of the author's lifelong fascination with the studio. In addition to co-authoring the present volume, Baxter also authored The Disney Conservation Fund: Carrying Forward a Conservation Legacy (2016) and ABC News: 75 Years in The Making (2021).

BRUCE C. STEELE, editor in chief of Disney twenty-three magazine and supervisor of the digital Disney Newsreel and D23.com, is a journalist and Disney fan with a long career of profiling the famous and the unheralded, from the pastry chefs at the Biltmore Estate to the stars of Disney's Mary Poppins Returns. A Pennsylvania native and University of Alabama graduate, he started his career at a daily newspaper in Louisiana and most recently worked at the paper in his current home of Asheville, North Carolina. In between he was the executive editor of Out magazine and the editor in chief of The Advocate newsmagazine and also took time to get an MFA in film studies from Columbia University. He has lived in New York City and Los Angeles, where his husband was a Disney animator. Apart from his book One Day at Disney: Meet the People Who Make the Magic Across the Globe (2019), some of his favorite past interviews have been Emma Watson, Sir Ian McKellen, Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson and crawfish farmers in the Louisiana bayou.

THE WALT DISNEY ARCHIVES was established by Roy O. Disney, Walt Disney's brother and Chairman of Board, who determined that significant assets and documents relating to the history of The Walt Disney Company should be gathered and preserved, and that the recollections of key employees should be documented. Chief Archivist Emeritus Dave Smith was officially hired for this purpose on June 22, 1970, and since then, the Walt Disney Archives has curated millions of historic items, including books, art, awards, photographs, merchandise, props, costumes, and much more. The Archives team has assisted in research and review of hundreds of scholarly and documentary works in varied media and produced numerous exhibits for the presentation of the The Walt Disney Company's respected and beloved history to the public.

Échantillon de lecture
“Everyone working on the film has the same goal in mind—to tell a wonderful story for the ages, filled with heart and humor, about something that is important to us.”
—Osnat Shurer
Producer, Raya and the Last Dragon and Moana
 
CHAPTER 3: WHERE DO THE STORIES COME FROM?
 
THE POWER OF SEVEN
 
From the beginning, almost every Disney creation has been grounded in storytelling—and for good reason: Walt was himself a uniquely gifted storyteller who could hold a roomful of people spellbound for hours as he narrated and acted out his detailed visions. Spirited story-pitch meetings became a routine at the studio, but nobody could do it quite like Walt.
 
Yet even more critical to his success was his innate ability to recognize a strong story that would resonate with people. His story-mindedness led him to revolutionize early animation by shifting away from merely presenting a series of stand-alone sight gags toward in-depth storytelling that established an emotional connection with audiences. The gags would remain, but in the service of the story.
 
As a storyteller, Walt Disney was drawn to material that had already demonstrated its broad appeal, like popular fairy tales, folklore, mythology, and fables—literary forms that were the direct descendants of the oral tradition dating back to the Bronze Age (and possibly even earlier). It reflected a common need to define, explain, and appreciate the moral dimensions of the human experience. Over the years Walt had adapted a number of fairy tales and fables for his Laugh-O-gram, Silly Symphony, and character-based short cartoons, and when it came time to take on the enormous artistic and financial challenge of producing the first-ever feature-length animated film, he decided to use the Brothers Grimm classic “Snow White.”
 
But why did he choose the story “Snow White” in particular as the basis for the riskiest creative endeavor of his career? According to Disney biographer Bob Thomas, as a teenager in Kansas City, Missouri, Walt saw a silent film version of the story starring Marguerite Clark, and it formed “the most vivid memory of his moviegoing childhood.” Both the story and the storytelling power of film as he experienced it that day resonated deeply with Walt, and twenty years later, he had positioned himself and his studio to do for “Snow White” what he had done for the fledgling animation industry and what he would later do for the amusement park: take a good thing and make it exponentially better through superior storytelling.
 
The standard running time of a cartoon short was eight to nine minutes, and thus audiences had been conditioned to see animation as diverting filler before the main event of the live-action feature. The idea of paying to see a feature-length cartoon struck critics and potential distributors as absurd. As Walt’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was being prepared to roll out to various markets, Central Press staff writer Obera H. Rawles noted in a January 12, 1938, article that industry professionals were referring to the seven-reel animated project as “Disney’s Folly.” The anecdote was later widely picked up by newspapers across the country. But Walt had pushed ahead undaunted because he had the vision and resources to create something that he knew would forever change animation as an art form. He had built a stunningly detailed and layered animated world requiring the talents of the best artists and animators in the business and the illusion of three-dimensional depth afforded by the Disneys’ new multiplane camera.
 
Still, none of that would matter without a strong story capable of engaging the sympathies of an audience for over an h…