Walter Elias Disney

Walt Disney was an American motion-picture and television producer and showman, famous as a pioneer of cartoon films and as the creator of Disneyland.

Synopsis

Walter Elias "Walt" Disney was born on December 5, 1901, in Hermosa, Illinois. He and his brother Roy co-founded Walt Disney Productions, which became one of the best-known motion-picture production companies in the world. Disney was an innovative animator and created the cartoon character Mickey Mouse. He won 22 Academy Awards during his lifetime, and was the founder of theme parks Disneyland and Walt Disney World.

Early Life

Walter Elias "Walt" Disney was born on December 5, 1901, in the Hermosa section of Chicago, Illinois. His father was Elias Disney, an Irish-Canadian, and his mother, Flora Call Disney, was German-American. Disney was one of five children, four boys and a girl. He lived most of his childhood in Marceline, Missouri, where he began drawing, painting and selling pictures to neighbors and family friends. In 1911, his family moved to Kansas City, where Disney developed a love for trains. His uncle, Mike Martin, was a train engineer who worked the route between Fort Madison, Iowa and Marceline. Later, Disney would work a summer job with the railroad, selling snacks and newspapers to travelers.

Disney attended McKinley High School in Chicago, where he took drawing and photography classes and was a contributing cartoonist for the school paper. At night, he took courses at the Chicago Art Institute. When Disney was 16, he dropped out of school to join the Army but was rejected for being underage. Instead, he joined the Red Cross and was sent to France for a year to drive an ambulance.

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Richard Edmund Williams

Synopsis

Richard Edmund Williams (born March 19, 1933) is a Canadian–British animator, voice artist, and writer, best known for serving as animation director on Disney/Amblin's Who Framed Roger Rabbit and for his unfinished feature film The Thief and the Cobbler. He was also a film title sequence designer and animator; his most famous works in this field included the title sequences to What's New, Pussycat? (1965) and title and linking sequences in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968). He also animated the eponymous cartoon feline for two of the later Pink Panther films.

Life and Career

Williams was born in Toronto, the son of Kathleen (Bell) and Kenneth D. C. Williams. Williams emigrated to Ibiza in 1953 and then to London in 1955. In 1958 he produced the work that boosted his career and won the 1958 BAFTA Award for Animated Film, The Little Island. In the Thames Television documentary "The Thief Who Never Gave Up" (1982), Williams credits animator Bob Godfrey with giving him his start in the business, "Bob Godfrey helped me...I worked in the basement and would do work in kind, and he would let me use the camera...[it was] a barter system". After his early work in the mid-1960s he directed the Academy Award-winning A Christmas Carol (1971), the full-length feature Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977) and the Emmy-winning television film Ziggy's Gift (1982). He was director of animation on Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), winning two more Oscars for his work. He has written an acclaimed animation how-to book, The Animator's Survival Kit, published in 2002 (expanded edition, 2009). Following this, he completed a 9-minute short film titled Circus Drawings. The silent film, with live accompaniment, premiered at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in Italy in September 2010.

In 1947, Miyazaki began school at Utsunomiya City elementary, completing the first through third grades before his family moved back to Suginami-ku, where he completed the fourth grade at Omiya Elementary School. For fifth grade, he went to the new Eifuku Elementary School.[9] Miyazaki graduated from Eifuku and attended Omiya Junior High. During this time, Miyazaki's mother suffered from spinal tuberculosis and was bedridden from 1947 until 1955. She spent the first few years mostly in the hospital, but was eventually able to be nursed from home.[b] Miyazaki aspired to become a manga author from an early age. He read the illustrated stories in boys' magazines and acknowledges the influences of creative artists of the medium, such as Tetsuji Fukushima (福島鉄次?), Soji Yamakawa and Osamu Tezuka. It was as a result of Tezuka's influence that Miyazaki would later destroy much of his early work, believing it was "bad form" to copy Tezuka's style because it was hindering his own development as an artist.

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Hayao Miyazaki (宮崎 駿)

Synopsis

Hayao Miyazaki (宮崎 駿 Miyazaki Hayao?, born January 5, 1941) is a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter, animator, author, and manga artist. Through a career that has spanned five decades, Miyazaki has attained international acclaim as a masterful storyteller and as a maker of anime feature films and, along with Isao Takahata, co-founded Studio Ghibli, a film and animation studio.

Born in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Miyazaki began his animation career in 1963, when he joined Toei Animation. From there, Miyazaki worked as an in-between artist for Gulliver's Travels Beyond the Moon, where he pitched ideas that eventually became the movie's ending. He continued to work in various roles in the animation industry until he directed his first feature film, Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, released in 1979. After the success of his next film, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), he co-founded Studio Ghibli, where he continued to produce many feature films. While Miyazaki's films have long enjoyed both commercial and critical success in Japan, he remained largely unknown to the West until Miramax Films released Princess Mononoke (1997). Princess Mononoke was briefly the highest-grossing film in Japan until it was eclipsed by another 1997 film, Titanic, and it became the first animated film to win Picture of the Year at the Japanese Academy Awards. Miyazaki's next film, Spirited Away (2001), won Picture of the Year at the Japanese Academy Awards, and was the first anime film to win an American Academy Award.

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Miyazaki's films often contain recurrent themes, like humanity's relationship with nature and technology, and the difficulty of maintaining a pacifist ethic. His films's protagonists are often strong girls or young women. While two of his films, The Castle of Cagliostro and Castle in the Sky, involve traditional villains, his other films like Nausicaä and Princess Mononoke present morally ambiguous antagonists with redeeming qualities. He co-wrote films The Secret World of Arrietty, released in July 2010 in Japan and February 2012 in the United States; and From Up on Poppy Hill released in July 2011 in Japan and March 2013 in the United States. Miyazaki's newest film The Wind Rises was released on July 20, 2013 and screened internationally in February 2014. The film would go on to earn him his third American Academy Award nomination and first Golden Globe Award nomination. Miyazaki announced on September 1, 2013 that The Wind Rises would be his final feature-length movie. In November 2014, Miyazaki was awarded an Honorary Academy Award for his impact on animation and cinema. He is the second Japanese filmmaker to win this award, after Akira Kurosawa in 1990. In 2002, American film critic Roger Ebert suggested that Miyazaki may be the best animation filmmaker in history, praising the depth and artistry of his films.

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Timothy Walter "Tim" Burton

Synopsis

Timothy Walter "Tim" Burton (/ˈbɜːrtən/; born August 25, 1958) is an American film director, producer, artist, writer and animator. He is known for his dark, gothic and quirky fantasy films such as Beetlejuice (1988), Edward Scissorhands (1990), the animated musical The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), the biographical film Ed Wood (1994), the horror fantasy Sleepy Hollow (1999), and later efforts such as Corpse Bride (2005), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), Dark Shadows (2012) and Frankenweenie (2012). He is also known for blockbusters such as the adventure comedy Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985), the superhero films Batman (1989) and its first sequel Batman Returns (1992), the sci-fi film Planet of the Apes (2001), the musical adventure film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) and the fantasy film Alice in Wonderland (2010), which garnered a worldwide gross of over $1 billion.

Burton has worked repeatedly with Johnny Depp, who has become a close friend of Burton since their first film together. He has also worked with musician Danny Elfman, who has composed scores for all but three of the films Burton has directed. Actress Helena Bonham Carter, Burton's former domestic partner, has appeared in many of his films. He also wrote and illustrated the poetry book The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories, published in 1997 by Faber and Faber, and a compilation of his drawings, sketches and other artwork, entitled The Art of Tim Burton, was released in 2009. A follow-up to The Art of Tim Burton, entitled The Napkin Art of Tim Burton: Things You Think About in a Bar, containing sketches made by Burton in napkins at bars and restaurants he occasionally visits, was released in 2015. Both compilations were published by Steeles Publishing.

Early Life

Burton was born in 1958, in the city of Burbank, California, to Jean Burton (née Erickson), the owner of a cat-themed gift shop, and Bill Burton, a former minor league baseball player who would later work for the Burbank Park and Recreation Department. As a preteen, Burton would make short films in his backyard on Evergreen Street using crude stop motion animation techniques or shoot them on 8 mm film without sound (one of his oldest known juvenile films is The Island of Doctor Agor, that he made when he was 13 years old). Burton studied at Burbank High School, but he was not a particularly good student. He was a very introspective person, and found his pleasure in painting, drawing and watching films. His future work would be heavily influenced by the works of such childhood heroes as Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl. After graduating from Burbank High School with Jeff Riekenberg, Burton attended the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, to study character animation. As a student at CalArts, Burton made the shorts Stalk of the Celery Monster and King and Octopus.

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