With an uncertain future, will Disney pull off yet another magic trick?

As Walt Disney Studios turns 100, investors worry it's beginning to show its age. The share price dropped to its lowest level in nearly nine years as the company stumbles in the age of streaming.

But adapting to the times is not a new challenge for Disney, rather it’s been a point of survival throughout the company’s history.

A century ago when “Disney” was a single person, not a global company worth over $150 billion, emerging sound and color technologies rattled the silent film industry.

But Walt Disney

had a strong motivation

for embracing these new tools…

...to capture the audience.

“He wanted his animation to be believable, he wanted it to transcend what we typically think of as animation,” said Chris Pallant, professor of animation and screen studies at Canterbury Christ Church University in the United Kingdom.

Disney Studios opened in Hollywood in 1923 – geographically and conceptually distant from the animation powerhouses in New York. Disney envisioned a future in which animated features would garner the same respect as the live-action films being shot down the street.

He obsessed over quality and poured money into producing cartoons that would resonate with his audience. He wrote that observing the real world was key and animation must have, “a foundation of fact, in order that it may more richly possess sincerity.”

The studio formalized 12 principles of animation which transformed static sketches into lively characters on a screen. Veteran animators taught the principles to each of the new artists who joined the studio to ensure consistency.

Straight-ahead action
and pose-to-pose

Follow through and
overlapping action

Walt Disney entered the animation scene as a young businessman, well positioned to capitalize on existing techniques and embrace new tools. He and his studio harnessed sound, color and 3D camera technology with an organized and scalable approach, which was not necessarily cost-effective but produced high-quality animations.

Seemingly each time Disney’s projects were financially successful, he would use the money to double his aspirations for the next film. “In a way,” Pallant said, “Disney survives his own ambition.”

Disney was not the first to introduce sound to animation, but his sound debut “Steamboat Willie” was widely considered the first cartoon to blend sound and screen meaningfully. The Studio understood music’s ability to communicate emotion and wove it into the production process.

The musician and animation director fused musical tone with character action before any of the animation began. Bar sheets brought a character’s steps and musical notes onto the same page, allowing animators and musicians to adjust their medium to fit the other.

“Mickeymousing” became a widely used term in animation – the inseparable tie between movement and sound. As Mickey Mouse climbs a staircase, so do the notes on a musical scale. A metronome kept musicians in sync with the exact frame of an animated sequence.

Real-world observations were essential to Disney’s fantastical stories. He wrote that studying the real world gave animators “a basis upon which to go into the fantastic, the unreal, the imaginative.”

Entire scenes were filmed for animators to trace (rotoscope) and achieve accurate quality of movement. Animators brought comedians and actors into the studio to film as reference for personality and movement.

Observing, photographing and even feeling animals’ bones, muscles and joints helped the artists draw animals to move in a believable way.

Women were given a narrow role in the creative process under Walt Disney. Despite being limited to the Ink and Paint department, they made significant innovations to save the company money and bring the drawings to life with color.

Disney secured exclusive rights to Technicolor’s three-color technology, limiting other animation studios to using two-color options. Women ground custom pigments that appeared more natural on the screen.

New pigments adhered better to cells and saved the company money. Hundreds of women meticulously traced the animators’ drawings and painted the characters.

Even with sound effects, entertaining characters and color breathing life into animations like never before, the scenes still lacked the third dimension of the real world. Disney was not the only studio to identify this missing piece, but it was the first to find a scalable solution.

In 1937 Disney implemented the multiplane camera which captured scenes that appeared more similar to live-action film, with the scene’s background moving at a different pace from the foreground. The multiplane filmed not one cell but multiple cells stacked on top of one another. Together, the stacked cells formed one illustration in which the background, foreground and every layer in between could move independently of one another.

A scene is divided into foreground, middle-ground and background. Each element is placed on a different level of the machine. Separating layers allows the camera to capture the scene as it would behave in real life with subjects closer to the camera moving faster than those further away.

Disney Studios managed to lead the Western animation industry for decades through its innovations and dedication to captivating stories. But its reign would not last as a new technology arrived and Disney was late to greet it.

By the turn of the century, Pixar’s progress in computer-generated animations had eclipsed Disney’s traditional hand-drawn style, namely with the first totally computer-generated animation “Toy Story”. But Disney didn’t need to innovate its way out of its problems this time. It could rely on a new tool: money. Merchandise, theme parks and cable TV had filled the company’s pockets for decades. Disney bought Pixar in 2006 for $7.4 billion, and with it, Pixar’s ability to enchant audiences with pixels.

As a hand-drawn studio, Disney’s eventual recognition of computer animation is an important moment, said Pallant who is also the president for the Society for Animation Studies. “I think that is an echo back to an earlier life,” Pallant said. “They were not afraid to move with the times. That shows you the willingness to reinvent themselves as a 75- or 80-year-old company.”

Operating losses of Disney’s streaming business

Now at the 100-year mark, streaming poses yet another challenge. Disney’s early gambles in new technology produced quality films that distinguished the studio from its competitors. Later, embracing computers preserved the studio as a major player in animation. Now, stockholders are closely watching what Disney will do as it moves into its next century.

Demystifying Disney: A history of Disney Feature Animation; The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation; Wild Minds: The artists and rivalries that inspired the Golden Age of animation; Out of the Inkwell: Max Fleischer and the animation revolution

Julia Wolfe, Lisa Shumaker