When Walt announced his decision to his family, he was dressed in black-and-white-checked trousers, a mismatched checkered jacket, a gabardine raincoat, and an old brown cardigan—a look suggesting that he’d slipped into a clown’s closet and dressed in the dark. He didn’t own a suit of his own, and those close to Disney always remembered him as an eccentric dresser. His brother Herbert’s mother-in-law looked him up and down as he announced his news, then slipped out of the room and returned with an outgrown suit of her son’s. She also had three bags of meals for him to eat on the train; she hoped the food would help him regain some of the weight he had lost while struggling to start his studio. Disney was driven to the train depot by another Kansas City acquaintance, his name lost to time. The man’s family would later joke about how his main boast in life was telling everybody in Kansas City, “I took Walt Disney to the station when he went to Hollywood.”
Several months after starting his studio in Los Angeles, Walt Disney hired an inker named Lillian Bounds. She was not particularly enamored of show business, nor would she ever be. Around her, Walt would stay grounded; she was a source of valuable, non-Hollywood perspective. He was shy toward her at first, politely giving her rides home from work, but he clearly liked her, and she him. In 1925, the two were married. When they returned from their honeymoon, they were in a glow, and their wave of good fortune continued. It had been more than a year since Disney had started making Alice shorts for Margaret Winkler—a long, shaky beginning—but he’d finally found a groove, earning positive reviews from the trade papers. “Here is a clever cartoon novelty . . . and should lend an acceptable variety to your program,” Film Daily advised theater owners looking for material. Walt and Roy’s growing success made them feel comfortable about putting down a $400 deposit on an office building located on Hyperion Avenue near Griffith Park. The new studio was the size of a small supermarket, a spacious upgrade compared with the two cramped rooms they had previously been using.
Still, a few positive trade reviews notwithstanding, the Alice shorts were not a knockout hit. Throughout 1926 they rarely made more than $300 profit per installment, and sometimes even lost money. The series’ success had plateaued, putting the studio in a shaky financial position. This was clear to Charles Mintz, a film producer who had married Margaret Winkler in 1924 and took over her business once she was pregnant. Mintz began pushing Disney to create a character that looked “more like Felix,” prompting a shift to focus on Julius as much as Alice. But Disney was never comfortable with what felt like plagiarism, telling his staff, “You’d better watch that stuff, fellows, you’re going to run into copyright problems.” Nor was Julius ever particularly popular—there were just too many Felix knockoffs on the market, none nearly as good as the original. Disney’s work was also hamstrung by the brutal production schedule demanded by his contract with Mintz: one new cartoon every two weeks, a breakneck pace that valued quantity over quality. There simply wasn’t enough time to allow for proper creativity, and this lack bothered Disney. After four years in Los Angeles, he was hitting a ceiling and burning out. As he said later, “I was ambitious and wanted to make better pictures.”
By 1927, Disney was not only searching for new characters and ideas; he was searching for new staff. Upon hearing that Otto Messmer, not Pat Sullivan, was actually the creative force behind Felix, he tried to hire him away. Because Sullivan was taking all the money anyway, Disney probably figured he could get a steal. “He begged and pleaded,” Messmer remembered. “It was pressure!” But Disney’s offer came with a catch that Messmer wasn’t ready for: move to California. Messmer turned him down, recalling, “My home, family, and roots were in New York.” It was an attitude shared by many animators, native New Yorkers who thought of animation as a homegrown industry.
The surplus of Felix clones indicated that any new breakout stars would need to be original. This was clear to Carl Laemmle, head of Universal, who spread the word that his studio wanted to reenter animation after a ten-year absence—he, like many, had been skeptical of animation, but he was starting to come around. He wanted his new cartoon star to be an animal, although he couldn’t say exactly what kind of animal. Mintz had heard of Laemmle’s desire for new material and took the prospect to Disney. But all he could tell Disney about Universal was that “they seem to think that there are too many cats on the market.”
Disney began brainstorming with an employee, Ub Iwerks, with whom he had worked in Kansas City and whom he later convinced to move to California. Then they started designing a rabbit with long ears and, for some reason, a monocle. Universal liked the initial design but wanted some adjustments, starting with losing that monocle—the result was basically a character resembling Felix with rabbit ears. Disney knew better than to just copy Felix’s look, however; he knew the cat’s success was due to a unique personality—all the gags and everything else were just an extension of that. “I want the characters to be somebody,” he explained. “I don’t want them just to be a drawing.” Happy with the result after seeing it, Universal signed an agreement with Mintz for twenty-six shorts, which the Walt Disney Studio would make, receiving an advance of $2,250 for each cartoon.
“I am the LUCKY rabbit,” a promotional poster read when Disney and Iwerk’s new character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, debuted in 1927. Universal was confident the “Krazy Kartoon Knockout” would “set the industry on its rabbit ears,” it announced in an advertisement. As Oswald began flickering up on screens across the nation, reviewers tended to agree. Motion Picture News called the series “clearly drawn, well-executed, brimful of action and fairly abounding in humorous situations.” Film Daily mused that it was “funny how cartoon artists never hit on a rabbit before,” as if the animators had discovered a new element in the Periodic Table. Not only was the character novel, it had charm and personality lacking in so many of its competitors. In the contest to oust Felix from his throne, the paper declared that “Oswald looks like a real contender.”
Walt Disney developed Oswald’s personality by closely studying films of comedians whose gags were extensions of their personalities: Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton, among others. He also observed the actor Douglas Fairbanks, a master of expressing personality purely through movement. These lessons, alongside creative camera effects, angles, and editing, made the Oswald shorts stand out from the competition.
Movie poster for an early Oswald cartoon, released shortly after Walt Disney struck a fortunate business arrangement with distributor Margaret Winkler.
The Oswald series was successful enough to improve the studio’s financial footing. Walt’s salary was only $100 a week and Roy’s $65, but yearly profits beyond that were $8,935, split sixty-forty between them—solidly middle-class incomes, although nothing extravagant. By the end of the year, the number of staff increased to twenty-two, a large portion of it new inkers and painters.
Before the Oswald series was even a year old, however, Disney fell out with Charles Mintz. Located far away in New York, Mintz had little insight into exactly how the studio was run. He questioned how it was operated without knowing the full details. Since cartoon studios were organized like factories, he extended that comparison, forgetting they made art, not widgets. To him, Disney was just another cog in the machine, one that drew a higher-than-average salary and was always haggling with Mintz for more money and control. He was a headache.
Looking to raise his take and rid himself of this problem child, Mintz devised a plan: he would take over. He sent his brother-in-law, George Winkler, to California to begin quietly hiring away Disney’s animators. Once they were all hired, so went the plan, the Disney brothers would be cut loose, in a quick and silent coup. What Mintz didn’t