Once upon a time, as old Jakob Grimm used to say in telling his tales, there was a newsreel cinematographer. His name was Walter Ellis Disney, and he lived in Kansas City, where he filmed news stories for Pathe, Selznick and most of the other silentday newsreels. In addition to grinding a camera, Cinematographer Disney liked to draw. Eventually he harnessed his camera and his pencil together, and began to make animated cartoons.
A dozen years later, in Hollywood, this same Walt Disney is still making animated cartoons. Whenever and wherever there are awards or honors offered for outstanding achievement in making animated films, Disney smilingly steps up and annexes them as a matter of course. Throughout the lengthening history of the Academy Awards the golden statuette for the best in cartoon films has never been bestowed on any other producer.
The intervening years have changed animated cartoons — and particularly the Disney cartoons — almost beyond recognition, but they have not touched Walt Disney. He is still the same, breezy, informal fellow who used to grind out news films for Pathe, and between times sketched amusing caricatures of the office mouse. […]
