Walt Disney has won the most Academy Awards. Walter Elias Disney (December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) was an American animator, film producer, voice actor, and entrepreneur. A pioneer of the American animation industry, he introduced several developments in the production of cartoons.
As a film producer, he holds the record for most Academy Awards earned and nominations by an individual. In this article, we’ll be going through most of the awards won by movie Producer, Walt Disney.
Walt Disney
Disney was born on December 5, 1901, at 1249 Tripp Avenue, in Chicago’s Hermosa neighborhood. He was the fourth son of Elias Disney—born in the Province of Canada, to Irish parents—and Flora (née Call), an American of German and English descent.
Aside from Walt, Elias and Flora’s sons were Herbert, Raymond and Roy; and the couple had a fifth child, Ruth, in December 1903. In 1906, when Disney was four, the family moved to a farm in Marceline, Missouri, where his uncle Robert had just purchased land.
In Marceline, Disney developed his interest in drawing when he was paid to draw the horse of a retired neighborhood doctor. Elias was a subscriber to the Appeal to Reason newspaper, and Disney practiced drawing by copying the front-page cartoons of Ryan Walker.
He also began to develop an ability to work with watercolors and crayons. He lived near the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway line and became enamored with trains. Disney and his younger sister Ruth started school at the same time at the Park School in Marceline in late 1909. The Disney family were active members of a Congregational church.
The Early Stages of Disney’s Career (1920-1928)
In January 1920, as Pesmen-Rubin’s revenue declined after Christmas, Disney, aged 18, and Iwerks were laid off. They started their own business, the short-lived Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists.
Failing to attract many customers, Disney and Iwerks agreed that Disney should leave temporarily to earn money at the Kansas City Film Ad Company, run by A. V. Cauger; the following month Iwerks, who was not able to run their business alone, also joined.
The company produced commercials using the cutout animation technique. Disney became interested in animation, although he preferred drawn cartoons such as Mutt and Jeff and Max Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell.
With the assistance of a borrowed book on animation and a camera, he began experimenting at home. He concluded that cel animation was more promising than the cutout method. Unable to persuade Cauger to try cel animation at the company, Disney opened a new business with a co-worker from the Film Ad Co, Fred Harman.
Their main client was the local Newman Theater, and the short cartoons they produced were sold as “Newman’s Laugh-O-Grams”. Disney studied Paul Terry’s Aesop’s Fables as a model, and the first six “Laugh-O-Grams” were modernized fairy tales.
In May 1921, the success of the “Laugh-O-Grams” led to the establishment of Laugh-O-Gram Studio, for which he hired more animators, including Fred Harman’s brother Hugh, Rudolf Ising and Iwerks.
The Laugh-O-Grams cartoons did not provide enough income to keep the company solvent. So Disney started production of Alice’s Wonderland—based on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—which combined live action with animation; he cast Virginia Davis in the title role.
The result, a 12½-minute, one-reel film, was completed too late to save Laugh-O-Gram Studio, which went into bankruptcy in 1923.
When Did Disney move to Hollywood?
Disney moved to Hollywood in July 1923 at 21 years old. Although New York was the center of the cartoon industry, he was attracted to Los Angeles because his brother Roy was convalescing from tuberculosis there, and he hoped to become a live-action film director.
Disney’s efforts to sell Alice’s Wonderland were in vain until he heard from New York film distributor Margaret J. Winkler. She was losing the rights to both the Out of the Inkwell and Felix the Cat cartoons and needed a new series.
In October, they signed a contract for six Alice comedies. Also, with an option for two further series of six episodes each Disney and his brother Roy formed the Disney Brothers Studio.
Which later became The Walt Disney Company—to produce the films; they persuaded Davis and her family to relocate to Hollywood to continue production, with Davis on contract at $100 a month. In July 1924, Disney also hired Iwerks, persuading him to relocate to Hollywood from Kansas City.
In 1926, the first official Walt Disney Studio was established at 2725 Hyperion Avenue; the building was demolished in 1940.
By 1926, Winkler’s role in the distribution of the Alice series had been handed over to her husband, the film producer Charles Mintz, although the relationship between him and Disney was sometimes strained.
Producing the Oswald Series
The series ran until July 1927, by which time Disney had begun to tire of it. He wanted to move away from the mixed format to all animation. After Mintz requested new material to distribute through Universal Pictures, Disney and Iwerks created Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Its a character Disney wanted to be “peppy, alert, saucy and venturesome, keeping him also neat and trim”.
In February 1928, Disney hoped to negotiate a larger fee for producing the Oswald series but found Mintz wanting to reduce the payments. Mintz had also persuaded many of the artists involved to work directly for him, including Harman, Ising, Carman Maxwell, and Friz Freleng.
Disney also found out that Universal owned the intellectual property rights to Oswald. Mintz threatened to start his own studio and produce the series himself if Disney refused to accept the reductions. Disney declined Mintz’s ultimatum and lost most of his animation staff, except Iwerks, who chose to remain with him.
Walt Disney’s Academy Awards
Walt Disney (1901–1966) received a total of twenty-six Academy Awards and holds the record for most Academy Awards in history. He won twenty-two competitive Academy Awards from a total of fifty-nine nominations. This also holds the records for most wins and most nominations for an individual in history.
Disney won his first competitive Academy Award and received his first Honorary Academy Award at the 5th Academy Awards (1932). He received the Honorary Academy Award for the creation of Mickey Mouse. More so, he won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoon) for the film Flowers and Trees.
In the seven Academy Award ceremonies that followed (6th–12th), Disney consecutively earned nominations and won in the same category.
Summary
Disney received three more Honorary Academy Awards, one in 1939 and two in 1942. At the 26th Academy Awards (1954), Disney won the Academy Award in all four categories in which he was nominated: Best Short Subject (Cartoon), Best Short Subject (Two-reel), Best Documentary (Feature), and Best Documentary (Short Subject).
In 1965, Disney earned his sole Best Picture nomination, for the film Mary Poppins. He was posthumously awarded his final Academy Award in 1969 for Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day.
