The Mouse That Saved a Studio

In the spring of 1928, a young man and his wife sat on a train rolling west from New York to California. Outside the window, the wide country slid past.

He had come to New York to ask for a little more money for his cartoons. He was going home with nothing. He had lost his most popular character, and most of the artists who drew it.

His name was Walt Disney. He was twenty-six years old, and this was the second time his business had collapsed.

The paper boy

Walter Elias Disney was born on 5 December 1901 in Chicago. When he was small, his family moved to a farm near Marceline, Missouri, where he loved the animals and the open fields, and first began to draw.

The farm did not last, and the family moved to Kansas City. There, Walt's strict father ran a newspaper delivery route, and Walt and his older brother Roy had to help. For years, Walt got up long before dawn to deliver papers, in summer heat and winter snow. He later said he sometimes had nightmares about it as an adult.

He loved drawing more than anything, and he took art classes whenever he could.

The first failure

After the First World War, Walt found work at a commercial art studio in Kansas City, where he met a quiet, gifted young artist named Ub Iwerks. The two became friends and partners.

Walt became fascinated by animation, the art of making drawings move. In 1921 he started his own small studio, Laugh-O-Gram, making short cartoons based on fairy tales. He hired young artists, full of energy and ideas.

But Walt was better at making films than at managing money. The company that distributed his cartoons went out of business without paying him. Laugh-O-Gram ran out of money and, in 1923, went bankrupt. Walt was so poor for a time that he was sleeping in his office and eating whatever he could afford.

He sold his camera, bought a train ticket, and went to Hollywood with very little in his suitcase.

The rabbit

In Los Angeles, Walt and Roy started a new studio together in 1923. Roy, steady and careful, looked after the money. Walt looked after the stories. Ub Iwerks soon joined them.

They made short films that mixed a real girl with cartoon characters. Then, in 1927, they created a cheerful cartoon character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit for a distributor in New York. Oswald was popular, and things were finally going well. Walt married Lillian Bounds, who had worked at the studio as an ink artist.

In early 1928, Walt went to New York to agree a new contract. Instead, the distributor offered him less money, not more. Then came the shock. The distributor revealed that he had quietly hired away most of Walt's animators. And under the old contract, the rights to Oswald belonged not to Walt, but to the film company.

Walt could stay and work for less, without control of his own studio. Or he could walk away and lose Oswald.

He walked away.

A mouse on the train

On the train home, he needed a new character, one that he would own himself.

The story Walt later told was that he thought of a mouse during that journey, and wanted to call him Mortimer. Lillian, it is said, felt the name sounded too grand and suggested Mickey instead. Historians note that the details of how the character was born vary between tellings, and that Ub Iwerks did much of the actual design and drawing. What is certain is that, back in Los Angeles, Walt, Roy, Ub and the few artists who had stayed loyal worked on the new character in secret.

Their first two Mickey Mouse cartoons were silent, and no distributor wanted them. Walt did not give up. The first films with recorded sound had just begun to appear. Walt decided that the third Mickey cartoon would have music and sound effects perfectly matched to the action on screen. It was a risky and expensive idea, and the studio had little money left.

The film was called Steamboat Willie. It opened in New York on 18 November 1928. Audiences had never seen anything quite like it: a cartoon that whistled, played music and moved in time with every sound. It was a great success.

What came after

Mickey Mouse saved the studio. With the money he earned, Walt kept experimenting: with colour, with music, and, in 1937, with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length animated feature film made in America. People called it "Disney's Folly" before it opened. It became one of the most successful films of its time.

Walt Disney was not an easy man to work for, and he made mistakes along the way. But he never forgot the lesson of Oswald. From then on, the characters his studio created belonged to the studio.

He died on 15 December 1966. The mouse who was born on a train is still known around the world.

Want to read more?

Neal Gabler's Walt Disney is a detailed, balanced biography. Bob Thomas's Walt Disney: An American Original is an older, warm account written with the cooperation of the family. The Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco tells his story through his own letters and drawings.