Walt Disney Animation Studios

History

1923–1929: Founding and early years

Kansas City, Missouri, natives Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney founded Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in Los Angeles in 1923 after the bankruptcy of the Laugh-O-Gram Studio. They got their start producing a series of silent Alice Comedies short films, a pioneer of the live-action animated film genre. The Alice Comedies were picked up by Margaret J. Winkler's Winkler Pictures, who handled production and distribution duties of the studio's films. Upon relocating to California, the Disney brothers initially started working in their uncle Robert Disney's garage at 4406 Kingswell Avenue in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, then, in October 1923, formally launched their studio in a small office on the rear side of a real estate agency's office at 4651 Kingswell Avenue. In February 1924, the studio moved next door to office space of its own at 4649 Kingswell Avenue. In 1925, Disney put down a deposit on a new location at 2719 Hyperion Avenue in the nearby Silver Lake neighborhood, which came to be known as the Hyperion Studio to distinguish it from the studio's other locations, and, in January 1926, the studio moved there and took on the name Walt Disney Studio.

The Walt Disney Studio at the time solely handled animation services, while all other aspects of production were handled by Winkler Pictures; Winkler eventually dropped their distribution services and found a distributor in Universal Pictures. The all-animated Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, starting in 1927, was a great success for Universal Pictures, causing the studio's reputation to skyrocket. Charles Mintz wanted to force Disney to accept a lower advance payment for each Oswald short as a cost-cutting measure. Disney refused and, as Universal owned the rights to Oswald rather than Disney, Mintz set up his own animation studio to produce Oswald cartoons. Most of Disney's staff was hired away by Mintz to move over once Disney's Oswald contract expired in mid-1928.

Working in secret while the rest of the staff finished the remaining Oswalds on contract, Disney and his head animator Ub Iwerks led a small handful of loyal staffers in producing cartoons starring a new character named Mickey Mouse, renaming the company Disney Cartoons in the process. The first two Mickey Mouse cartoons, Plane Crazy and The Galloping Gaucho, were previewed in limited engagements during the summer of 1928. For the third Mickey cartoon, however, Disney produced a soundtrack, collaborating with musician Carl Stalling and businessman Pat Powers of Celebrity Productions, who provided Disney with his bootlegged "Cinephone" sound-on-film process. Subsequently, the third Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie, became Disney's first cartoon with synchronized sound and was a major success upon its November 1928 debut at the West 57th Theatre in New York City. The Mickey Mouse series of sound cartoons, distributed by Celebrity Productions, quickly became the most popular cartoon series in the United States.

1929–1940: Reincorporation, Silly Symphonies and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

In 1929, disputes over finances between Disney and Powers led to Disney's animation production company, reincorporated on December 16, 1929, as Walt Disney Productions, signing a new distribution contract with Columbia Pictures. Powers, in return, signed Ub Iwerks' studio, although he would return to Disney in 1940.

Columbia distributed Disney's shorts for two years before the Disney studio entered a new distribution deal with United Artists in 1932. The same year, Disney signed a two-year exclusive deal with Technicolor to utilize its new 3-strip color film process, which allowed for fuller-color reproduction where previous color film processors could not. The result was the Silly Symphony cartoon Flowers and Trees, the first film commercially released in full Technicolor. Flowers and Trees was a major success and all Silly Symphonies were subsequently produced in Technicolor.

By the early 1930s, Walt Disney had realized that the success of animated films depended upon telling emotionally gripping stories that would grab the audience and not let go, and this realization led him to create a separate "story department" with storyboard artists dedicated to story development. With well-developed characters and an interesting story, the 1933 Technicolor Silly Symphony cartoon Three Little Pigs became a major box office and pop culture success, with its theme song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" becoming a popular chart hit.

In 1934, Walt Disney gathered several key staff members and announced his plans to make his first animated feature film. Despite derision from most of the film industry, who dubbed the production "Disney's Folly", Disney proceeded undaunted into the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which would become the first animated feature in English and Technicolor. Considerable training and development went into the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the studio greatly expanded, with established animators, artists from other fields and recent college graduates joining the studio to work on the film. The training classes, supervised by head animators such as Les Clark, Norm Ferguson and Art Babbit and taught by Donald W. Graham, an art teacher from the nearby Chouinard Art Institute, had begun at the studio in 1932 and were greatly expanded into orientation training and continuing education classes. In the course of teaching the classes, Graham and the animators created or formalized many of the techniques and processes that became the key tenets and principles of traditional animation. Silly Symphonies such as The Goddess of Spring (1934) and The Old Mill (1937) served as experimentation grounds for new techniques such as the animation of realistic human figures, special effects animation and the use of the multiplane camera, an invention that split animation artwork layers into several planes, allowing the camera to appear to move dimensionally through an animated scene.

1940–1948: New feature films, strike and World War II

The success of Snow White allowed Disney to build a new, larger studio on Buena Vista Street in Burbank, where the Walt Disney Company remains headquartered to this day. Walt Disney Productions had its initial public offering on April 2, 1940, with Walt Disney as president and Roy Disney as CEO.

The studio launched into the production of new animated features, the first of which was Pinocchio, released in February 1940. Pinocchio was not initially a box-office success. The box office returns from the film's initial release were below both Snow White's unprecedented success and the studio's expectations. Of the film's $2.289 million cost – twice of Snow White – Disney recouped $1 million by late 1940, with studio reports of the film's final original box office take varying between $1.4 million and $1.9 million. However, Pinocchio was a critical success, winning the Academy Award for Best Original Song and Best Original Score, making it the first film of the studio to win not only either Oscar, but both at the same time.

Fantasia, an experimental film produced to an accompanying orchestral arrangement conducted by Leopold Stokowski, was released in November 1940 by Disney itself in a series of limited-seating roadshow engagements. The film cost $2 million to produce and, although the film earned $1.4 million in its roadshow engagements, the high cost ($85,000 per theater) of installing Fantasound placed Fantasia at a greater loss than Pinocchio. RKO assumed distribution of Fantasia in 1941, later reissuing it in severely edited versions over the years. Despite its financial failure, Fantasia was the subject of two Academy Honorary Awards on February 26, 1942 – one for the development of the innovative Fantasound system used to create the film's stereoscopic soundtrack, and the other for Stokowski and his contributions to the film. Fantasia was the final Disney animated film to be completed at the Hyperion Studio of the Walt Disney Studios (Walt Disney Productions) in Los Angeles.

Much of the character animation on these productions and all subsequent features until the late 1970s was supervised by a brain-trust of animators Walt Disney dubbed the "Nine Old Men", many of whom also served as directors and later producers on the Disney features: Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, Woolie Reitherman, Les Clark, Ward Kimball, Eric Larson, John Lounsbery, Milt Kahl, and Marc Davis. Other head animators at Disney during this period included Norm Ferguson, Bill Tytla and Fred Moore. The development of the feature animation department created a caste system at the Disney studio: lesser animators (and feature animators in-between assignments) were assigned to work on the short subjects, while animators higher in status such as the Nine Old Men worked on the features. Concern over Walt Disney accepting credit for the artists' work as well as debates over compensation led to many of the newer and lower-ranked animators seeking to unionize the Disney studio.

1948–1966: Return of feature films, Buena Vista, end of shorts, layoffs and Walt's final years

In 1948, Disney returned to the production of full-length features with Cinderella, a feature film based on the fairy tale by Charles Perrault. At a cost of nearly $3 million, the future of the studio depended upon the success of this film. Upon its release in 1950, Cinderella proved to be a box-office success, with the profits from the film's release allowing Disney to carry on producing animated features throughout the 1950s. Following its success, production on the in-limbo features Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and Lady and the Tramp was resumed. In addition, an ambitious new project, an adaptation of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale "Sleeping Beauty" set to Tchaikovsky's classic score, was begun but took much of the rest of the decade to complete.

Alice in Wonderland, released in 1951, met with a lukewarm response at the box office and was a sharp critical disappointment in its initial release. Peter Pan, released in 1953, on the other hand, was a commercial success and the fifth highest-grossing film of the year. In 1955, Lady and the Tramp was released to higher box-office success than any other Disney animated feature since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, earning an estimated $6.5 million in rentals at the North American box office in 1955. Lady and the Tramp is significant as Disney's first widescreen animated feature, produced in the CinemaScope process, and was the first Disney animated feature to be released by Disney's own distribution company, Buena Vista Distribution.

By the mid-1950s, with Walt Disney's attention primarily set on new endeavours such as live-action films, television and the Disneyland theme park, production of the animated films was left primarily in the hands of the "Nine Old Men" trust of head animators and directors. This led to several delays in approvals during the production of Sleeping Beauty, which was finally released in 1959. At $6 million, it was Disney's most expensive film to date, produced in a heavily stylised art style devised by artist Eyvind Earle and presented in large-format Super Technirama 70 with six-track stereophonic sound. However, despite being the studio's highest-grossing animated feature since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the film's large production costs and the box-office underperformance of Disney's other 1959 output resulted in the studio posting its first annual loss in a decade for fiscal year 1960, leading to massive layoffs throughout the studio.

1966–1984: Decline in popularity; Don Bluth's entrance and departure

Following Walt Disney's death, Wolfgang Reitherman continued as both producer and director of the studio's feature films. It was Reitherman who was responsible for a noticeable softening of the Disney villains. Over the next two decades, nearly all Disney villains were more comical or pitiful rather than scary. Reitherman's main priority was ensuring that the studio would continue to turn a profit and towards that end, he stressed the importance of making family-friendly films. According to Andreas Deja, Reitherman said that "if we lose the kids, we lose everything".

The studio began the 1970s with the release of The Aristocats, the last film project to be approved by Walt Disney. In 1971, Roy O. Disney, the studio co-founder, died and Walt Disney Productions was left in the hands of Donn Tatum and Card Walker, who alternated as chairman and CEO in overlapping terms until 1978. The next feature, Robin Hood (1973), was produced with a significantly reduced budget and animation repurposed from previous features. Both The Aristocats and Robin Hood were minor box office and critical successes.

The Rescuers, released in 1977, was a success exceeding the achievements of the previous two Disney features. Receiving positive reviews, high commercial returns, and an Academy Award nomination, it ended up being the third highest-grossing film of the year and the most successful and best reviewed Disney animated film since The Jungle Book. The film was reissued in 1983, accompanied by a new Disney featurette, Mickey's Christmas Carol.

The production of The Rescuers signaled the beginning of a changing of the guard process in the personnel at the Disney animation studio, as veterans such as Milt Kahl and Les Clark retired; they were gradually replaced by new talents such as Don Bluth, Ron Clements, John Musker and Glen Keane. The new animators, selected from the animation program at CalArts and trained by Eric Larson, Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston and Woolie Reitherman, got their first chance to prove themselves as a group with the animated sequences in Disney's live-action/animated hybrid feature Pete's Dragon (1977), the animation for which was directed by Bluth. In September 1979, dissatisfied with what they felt was a stagnation in the development of the art of animation at Disney, Bluth and several of the other new guard animators quit to start their own studio, Don Bluth Productions, which became Disney's chief competitor in the animation field during the 1980s.

1984–1989: Restructuring and new projects for prominence

After a series of corporate takeover attempts in 1984, Roy E. Disney, son of Roy O. and nephew of Walt, resigned from the company's board of directors and launched a campaign called "SaveDisney", successfully convincing the board to fire Miller. Roy E. Disney brought in Michael Eisner as Disney's new CEO and Frank Wells as president. Eisner in turn named Jeffrey Katzenberg chairman of the film division, The Walt Disney Studios. Near completion when the Eisner regime took over Disney, The Black Cauldron (1985) came to represent what would later be referred to as the "rock bottom" point for Disney animation. The studio's most expensive feature to that point at $44 million, The Black Cauldron was a critical and commercial failure. The film's $21 million box office gross led to a loss for the studio, putting the future of the animation department in jeopardy.

Between the 1950s and 1980s, the significance of animation to Disney's bottom line was significantly reduced as the company expanded into further live-action production, television and theme parks. As new CEO, Michael Eisner strongly considered shuttering the feature animation studio and outsourcing future animation. Roy E. Disney intervened, offering to head the feature animation division and turn its fortunes around, while Eisner established the Walt Disney Pictures Television Animation Group to produce lower-cost animation for television. Named Chairman of feature animation by Eisner, Roy E. Disney appointed Peter Schneider president of animation to run the day-to-day operations in 1985.

On February 1, 1985, Disney executives began to move the animation department from the Disney studio lot in Burbank to a variety of warehouses, hangars and trailers located about 2 mi (3.2 km) east at 1420 Flower Street in nearby Glendale, California. About a year later, the growing computer graphics (CG) group would move there too.

The animation department's first feature animation at its new location was The Great Mouse Detective (1986), begun by John Musker and Ron Clements as Basil of Baker Street after both left production of The Black Cauldron. The film was enough of a critical and commercial success to instill executive confidence in the animation studio. Later the same year, however, Universal Pictures and Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment released Don Bluth's An American Tail, which outgrossed The Great Mouse Detective at the box office and became the highest-grossing first-issue animated film to that point.

1989–1994: Beginning of the Disney Renaissance, success & impact

A second satellite studio, Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida, opened in 1989 with 40 employees. Its offices were located within the Disney-MGM Studios Theme Park theme park at Walt Disney World in Bay Lake, Florida, and visitors were allowed to tour the studio and observe animators at work. That same year, the studio released The Little Mermaid, which became a keystone achievement in Disney's history as its largest critical and commercial success in decades. Directed by John Musker and Ron Clements, who had been co-directors on The Great Mouse Detective, The Little Mermaid earned $84 million at the North American box office, a record for the studio. The film was built around a score from Broadway songwriters Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, who was also a co-producer and story consultant on the film. The Little Mermaid won two Academy Awards, for Best Original Song and Best Original Score.

The Little Mermaid vigorously relaunched a profound new interest in the animation and musical film genres. The film was also the first to feature the use of Disney's Computer Animation Production System (CAPS). Developed for Disney by Pixar, which had grown into a commercial computer animation and technology development company, CAPS/ink-and-paint would become significant in allowing future Disney films to more seamlessly integrate computer-generated imagery and achieve higher production values with digital ink and paint and compositing techniques. The Little Mermaid was the first of a series of blockbusters that would be released over the next decade by Walt Disney Feature Animation, a period later designated by the term Disney Renaissance. The Renaissance era also saw the studio return to making films with darker themes and scarier villains, similar to the films it had made when Walt Disney was alive.

Accompanied in theaters by the Mickey Mouse featurette The Prince and the Pauper, The Rescuers Down Under (1990) was Disney's first animated feature sequel and the studio's first film to be fully colored and composited via computer using the CAPS/ink-and-paint system. However, the film did not duplicate the success of The Little Mermaid. The next Disney animated feature, Beauty and the Beast, had begun production in London but was moved back to Burbank after Disney decided to shutter the London satellite office and retool the film into a musical-comedy format similar to The Little Mermaid. Alan Menken and Howard Ashman were retained to write the songs and score, though Ashman died before production was completed.

1994–1999: Late Disney Renaissance and declining returns

Concerns arose internally at the Disney studio, particularly from Roy E. Disney, about studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg taking too much credit for the success of Disney's early 1990s releases. Disney Company president Frank Wells was killed in a helicopter accident in 1994, and Katzenberg lobbied CEO Michael Eisner for the vacant president position. Instead, tensions between Katzenberg, Eisner and Disney resulted in Katzenberg being forced to resign from the company on August 24 of that year, with Joe Roth taking his place. On October 12, 1994, Katzenberg went on to become one of the founders of DreamWorks SKG, whose animation division became Disney's key rival in feature animation, with both computer animated films such as Antz (1998) and traditionally-animated films such as The Prince of Egypt (1998). In December 1994, the Animation Building in Burbank was completed for the animation division.

In contrast to the early 1990s productions, not all the films in the second half of the renaissance were successful. Pocahontas, released in the summer of 1995, was the first film of the renaissance to receive mixed reviews from critics. It was still popular with audiences and commercially successful, earning $346 million worldwide. The film won two Academy Awards for its music by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz.

The next film, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) was partially produced at the Paris studio. Although it is considered Disney's darkest film, The Hunchback of Notre Dame performed better critically than Pocahontas and grossed $325 million worldwide.

The following summer, Hercules (1997) did well at the box office, grossing $252 million worldwide, but underperformed in comparison to Disney's previous films. It received positive reviews for its acting but the animation and music were mixed. Hercules was responsible for beginning the decline of traditionally-animated films. The declining box-office success became doubly concerning inside the studio as wage competition from DreamWorks had significantly increased the studio's overhead, with production costs increasing from $79 million in total costs (production, marketing, and overhead) for The Lion King in 1994 to $179 million for Hercules three years later. Moreover, Disney depended upon the popularity of its new features in order to develop merchandising, theme park attractions, direct-to-video sequels and television programming in its other divisions. The production schedule was scaled back and a larger number of creative executives were hired to more closely supervise production, a move that was not popular among the animation staff.

1999–2005: Experimentation & corporate disorder

Fantasia 2000, a sequel to the 1940 film that had been a pet project of Roy E. Disney's since 1990, premiered on December 17, 1999, at Carnegie Hall in New York City as part of a concert tour that also visited London, Paris, Tokyo and Pasadena, California. The film was then released in 75 IMAX theaters worldwide from January 1 to April 30, 2000, making it the first animated feature-length film to be released in the format; a standard theatrical release followed on June 16, 2000. Produced in pieces when artists were available between productions, Fantasia 2000 was the first animated feature produced for and released in IMAX format. The film's $90 million worldwide box office total against its $90 million production cost resulted in it losing $100 million for the studio.

Peter Schneider left his post as president of Walt Disney Feature Animation in 1999 to become president of The Walt Disney Studios under Joe Roth. Thomas Schumacher, who had been Schneider's vice president of animation for several years, became the new president of Walt Disney Feature Animation. By this time, competition from other studios had driven animators' incomes to all-time highs, making traditionally-animated features even more costly to produce. Schumacher was tasked with cutting costs, and massive layoffs began to cut salaries and bring the studio's staff – which peaked at 2,200 people in 1999 – down to approximately 1,200 employees.

In October 1999, Dream Quest Images, a special effects studio previously purchased by the Walt Disney Company in April 1996 to replace Buena Vista Visual Effects, was merged with the computer-graphics operation of Walt Disney Feature Animation to form a division called The Secret Lab. The Secret Lab produced one feature film, Dinosaur, which was released in May 2000 and featured CGI prehistoric creatures against filmed live-action backgrounds. The $128 million production earned $349 million worldwide, below studio expectations, and The Secret Lab was closed in 2001.

In December 2000, The Emperor's New Groove was released. It had been a musical epic called Kingdom of the Sun before being revised mid-production into a smaller comedy. The film earned $169 million worldwide on release, though it was well-reviewed and performed better on video; That same year, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, an attempt to break the Disney formula by moving into action-adventure, received mixed reviews and earned $186 million worldwide against production costs of $120 million.

2006–2009: Reorganization

Iger later said, "I didn't yet have a complete sense of just how broken Disney Animation was." He described its history since the early 1990s as "dotted by a slew of expensive failures" like Hercules and Chicken Little; the "modest successes" like Mulan and Lilo & Stitch were still critically and commercially unsuccessful compared to the earlier films of the Disney Renaissance.

After Iger became CEO, Jobs resumed negotiations for Pixar with Disney. On January 24, 2006, Disney announced that it would acquire Pixar for $7.4 billion in an all-stock deal, with the deal closing that May. Consequently, the Circle 7 studio launched to produce Toy Story 3 was shut down. Most of that studio's employees returned to Feature Animation and Toy Story 3 returned to Pixar's control. Iger later said that it was "a deal I wanted badly, and [Disney] needed badly." He believed that Disney Animation needed new leadership and, as part of the acquisition, Edwin Catmull and John Lasseter were named president and Chief Creative Officer, respectively, of Feature Animation as well as Pixar.

While Disney executives had discussed closing Feature Animation as redundant, Catmull and Lasseter refused and instead resolved to try to turn things around at the studio. Lasseter said, "We weren't going to let that [closure] happen on our watch. We were determined to save the legacy of Walt Disney's amazing studio and bring it back up to the creative level it had to be. Saving this heritage was squarely on our shoulders." Lasseter and Catmull set about rebuilding the morale of the Feature Animation staff, and rehired a number of its 1980s "new guard" generation of star animators who had left the studio, including Ron Clements, John Musker, Eric Goldberg, Mark Henn, Andreas Deja, Bruce W. Smith and Chris Buck.

To maintain the separation of Walt Disney Feature Animation and Pixar despite their now common ownership and management, Catmull and Lasseter "drew a hard line" that each studio was solely responsible for its own projects and would not be allowed to borrow personnel from or lend tasks out to the other. Catmull said that he and Lasseter would "make sure the studios are quite distinct from each other. We don't want them to merge; that would definitely be the wrong approach. Each should have its own personality."

Catmull and Lasseter also brought to Disney Feature Animation the Pixar model of a "filmmaker-driven studio" as opposed to an "executive-driven studio"; they abolished Disney's prior system of requiring directors to respond to "mandatory" notes from development executives ranking above the producers in favor of a system roughly analogous to peer review, in which non-mandatory notes come primarily from fellow producers, directors and writers. Most of the layers of "gatekeepers" (midlevel executives) were stripped away, and Lasseter established a routine of personally meeting weekly with filmmakers on all projects in the last year of production and delivering feedback on the spot.

2010–2019: New leadership and return to success

After The Princess and the Frog, the studio released Tangled in 2010, a CGI adaptation of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale "Rapunzel" with a score by Alan Menken and songs by Glenn Slater. In development since 2002 under Glen Keane, Tangled, directed by Byron Howard and Nathan Greno, became a significant critical and commercial success nominated for several accolades. The film earned $592 million in worldwide box office revenue, becoming the studio's third most successful release to date. The hand-drawn feature Winnie the Pooh, a new feature film based on the eponymous stories by A. A. Milne, followed in 2011 to positive reviews; it remains the studio's most recent hand-drawn feature. The film was released in theaters alongside the hand-drawn short The Ballad of Nessie.

Wreck-It Ralph, directed by Rich Moore, was released in 2012 to critical acclaim and commercial success. The film follows a video-game villain who redeems himself as a hero. It won numerous awards, including the Annie, Critics' Choice and Kids' Choice Awards for Best Animated Feature Film, and received Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations. The film earned $471 million in worldwide box office revenue.

In addition, the studio won its first Academy Award for a short film in forty-four years with Paperman, which was released in theaters with Wreck-It Ralph. Directed by John Kahrs, Paperman utilized new software developed in-house at the studio called Meander, which merges hand-drawn and computer animation techniques within the same character to create a unique "hybrid". According to Producer Kristina Reed, the studio was at the time continuing to develop the technique for future projects, including an animated feature.

In 2013, the studio laid off nine of its hand-drawn animators, including Nik Ranieri and Ruben A. Aquino, leading to speculation on animation blogs that the studio was abandoning traditional animation, an idea that the studio dismissed. Later that same year, in November, Frozen, a CGI musical film inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Snow Queen", was released to widespread acclaim and became a blockbuster hit. Directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee with songs by the Broadway team of Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, it was the first Disney animated film to earn over $1 billion in worldwide box office revenue. Frozen also became the first film from Walt Disney Animation Studios to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature (a category started in 2001), as well as the first feature-length motion picture from the studio to win an Academy Award since Tarzan and the first to win multiple Academy Awards since Pocahontas. It was released in theaters with Get a Horse!, a new Mickey Mouse cartoon combining black-and-white hand-drawn animation and full-color CGI animation.

2019–present: Ongoing changes and struggles

In August 2019, it was announced that Andrew Millstein would be stepping down from his role as president, before moving on to become co-president of Blue Sky Studios alongside Robert Baird, while Clark Spencer was named president of Disney Animation, reporting to Walt Disney Studios chairman Alan Bergman and working alongside chief creative officer Jennifer Lee.

The sequel Frozen 2 was released in November 2019. The film grossed over $1 billion worldwide and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song.

From 2020 to 2022, Disney Animation produced a series of experimental shorts called Short Circuit for the Disney+ streaming service. The first pack of shorts was released in January 2020, and a second pack was released in August 2021. During that period, Disney Animation returned to work on hand-drawn animation once again, having released the hand-drawn "At Home with Olaf" web short "Ice," as well as three hand-drawn animated Goofy shorts for Disney+, and a hand-drawn animated "Short Circuit" titled "Dinosaur Barbarian". In April 2022, Eric Goldberg confirmed plans within the studio to develop hand-drawn animated films and series. That year saw the release of the hand-drawn shorts Mickey in a Minute, released as part of the Disney+ documentary Mickey: The Story of a Mouse, and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, which marked the title character's first animated short produced by Disney Animation since Disney acquired the rights for the character in 2006.

In December 2020, the studio announced that it was expanding into producing television series – a business usually handled by the Disney Television Animation division. Most of the projects in development were for Disney+. The CG series produced included Baymax! (a spin-off of Big Hero 6), Zootopia+ (an anthology series set in the Zootopia universe), and Iwájú (an original long-form science fiction anthology series co-produced with British-based Pan-African entertainment company Kugali Media). In addition, employees from Disney Animation were involved on the Disney Television Animation series Monsters at Work, based on Pixar's Monsters, Inc. franchise.

Raya and the Last Dragon, a fantasy-adventure film, was released in March 2021. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was released simultaneously in theaters and on Disney+ with Premier Access. The film was accompanied in theaters with the animated short Us Again. Raya and the Last Dragon grossed over $130 million at the box office and became a hit on the streaming charts after its Premier Access charge expired on Disney+. The film became the third most streamed film title of 2021. The film also received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Production logo

Until 2007, Walt Disney Animation Studios did not use a traditional production logo, using the standard Walt Disney Pictures logo instead. Starting with the 2007 film Meet the Robinsons, an on-screen production logo based on Steamboat Willie was added. The logo has had variants, such as pixilation for the 2012 film Wreck-It Ralph.

Despite Steamboat Willie entering the public domain in 2024, as it was published in 1928, the logo remains in use.

Studio

Leadership

Jared Bush, Chief Creative Officer (September 2024 – present)

Clark Spencer, President (August 2019 – present)

John Nallen, Chief Operating Officer

Viet Dinh, Chief Legal Officer

Steve Tomsic, Chief Financial Officer

John Gelke, Vice President, Global Operations

J. Young, Sr. Vice President, Growth

Gerard Devan, Group Executive APAC

Stephanie Gruber, Group Executive Television

Christopher Greavu, Vice President of Sales

Andrew Millstein, President (November 2014 – July 2019)

Edwin Catmull, President (June 2007 – July 2019)

David Stainton, President (January 2003 – January 2006)

Thomas Schumacher, President (January 1999 – December 2002)

Peter Schneider, President (1985 – January 1999)

John Lasseter, Chief Creative Officer (January 2006 – June 2018)

Jennifer Lee, Chief Creative Officer (June 2018 – September 2024)

Roy E. Disney, Chairman (1984 – 2009)

Locations

Since 1995, Walt Disney Animation Studios has been headquartered in the Roy E. Disney Animation Building in Burbank, California, across Riverside Drive from the Walt Disney Studios, where the original Animation building (now housing corporate offices) is located. The Disney Animation Building's lobby is capped by a large version of the magic sorcerer hat from the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment of Fantasia (1940), and the building is informally called the "hat building" for that reason.

Until the mid-1990s, Disney Animation previously operated out of the Air Way complex, a cluster of old hangars, office buildings, and trailers in the Grand Central Business Centre, an industrial park on the site of the former Grand Central Airport about two miles (3.2 km) east in the city of Glendale. The Disneytoon Studios unit was based in Glendale. Disney Animation's archive, formerly known as "the morgue" (based on an analogy to a morgue file) and today known as the Animation Research Library, is also located in Glendale. Unlike the Burbank buildings, the ARL is located in a nondescript office building near Disney's Grand Central Creative Campus. The 12,000-square-foot ARL is home to over 64 million items of animation artwork dating back to 1924; because of its importance to the company, visitors are required to agree not to disclose its exact location within Glendale.

Previously, feature animation satellite studios were located around the world in Montreuil, Seine-Saint-Denis, France (a suburb of Paris), and in Bay Lake, Florida (near Orlando, at Disney's Hollywood Studios theme park). The Paris studio was shut down in 2002, while the Florida studio was shut down in 2004. The Florida animation building survives as an office building, while the former Magic of Disney Animation section of the building is home to Star Wars Launch Bay.

In the wake of Roy E. Disney's death in 2009, the Burbank headquarters were re-dedicated the Roy E. Disney Animation Building in May 2010.

In November 2014, Disney Animation commenced a 16-month upgrade of the Roy E. Disney Animation Building, in order to fix what then-studio president Edwin Catmull had called its "dungeon-like" interior. For example, the interior was so cramped that it could not easily accommodate "town hall" meetings with all employees in attendance. Due to the renovation, the studio's employees were temporarily moved from Burbank into the closest available Disney-controlled studio space – the Disneytoon Studios building in the industrial park in Glendale and the old Imagineering warehouse in North Hollywood under the western approach to Bob Hope Airport (the Tujunga Building). The renovation was completed in October 2016.

Filmography

Feature films

Walt Disney Animation Studios has produced animated features in a series of animation techniques, including traditional animation, computer animation, combination of both and animation combined with live-action scenes. The studio's first film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, was released on December 21, 1937, and their most recent film, Zootopia 2, was released on November 26, 2025.

Starting with Chicken Little (2005), most of their films have cost between $150–175 million. Tangled (2010) is the studio's most expensive film, with a budget of $260 million.

The studio's next film will be the original film Hexed, scheduled for release on November 25, 2026. In addition, sequel Frozen 3 is scheduled to be released on November 24, 2027. Another original film titled Clay is scheduled to be released on November 22, 2028.

Short films

Since Alice Comedies in the 1920s, Walt Disney Animation Studios has produced a series of prominent short films, including the Mickey Mouse cartoons and the Silly Symphonies series, until the cartoon studio division was closed in 1956. Many of these shorts provided a medium for the studio to experiment with new technologies that they would use in their filmmaking process, such as the synchronization of sound in Steamboat Willie (1928), the integration of the three-strip Technicolor process in Flowers and Trees (1932), the multiplane camera in The Old Mill (1937), the xerography process in Goliath II (1960), and the hand-drawn/CGI hybrid animation in Off His Rockers (1992), Paperman (2012), Get a Horse! (2013), and Feast (2014).

Television programming

Walt Disney Animation Studios announced its expansion into television programming in 2020 and produced original shows for Disney+. However, in March 2025, the studio announced that all television series in production and development had been shelved as the studio pivoted away from longform content for streaming in favor of returning their focus to theatrical feature films.

Franchises

This list includes film series and/or franchises featuring theatrical films, short films, and television series produced by either Walt Disney Animation Studios or follow-ups of them made by Disney's direct-to-video/television units such as Disney Television Animation or Disneytoon Studios through the years, as well as live-action films, and other media like books or video games, as well as theme park attractions.