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Walt Disney on Faith
“Both my study of Scripture and my
career in entertaining children have taught me to cherish them. But I don’t
believe in playing down to children, either in life or in motion pictures. I
didn’t treat my own youngsters like fragile flowers, and I think no parent
should.”
“In these days of world tensions,
when the faith of men is being tested as never before, I am personally thankful
that my parents taught me at a very early age to have a strong personal belief
and reliance in the power of prayer for Divine inspiration”
“My own concept of prayer is not as a
plea for special favors nor as a quick palliation for wrongs knowingly
committed. A prayer, it seems to me, implies a promise as well as a request; at
the highest level, prayer not only is a supplication for strength and guidance,
but also becomes an affirmation of life and thus a reverent praise of God.”
Walt Disney on Critics, Celebrities and Business
"We are not trying to entertain the critics. I'll take my chances with the
public."
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"You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But
it takes people to make the dream a reality."
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"All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the
very nature of fantasy and fable."
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"When you're curious, you find lots of interesting things to do. And one thing
it takes to accomplish something is courage."
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"I don't like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It's just the wilderness
instinct in me, I guess."
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"We allow no geniuses around our Studio."
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"Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm
of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood."
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"I never called my work an 'art' It's part of show business, the business of
building entertainment."
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"I am not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other motion picture
company."
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"Whenever I go on a ride, I'm always thinking of what's wrong with the thing and
how it can be improved."
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"The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing."
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"Laughter is America's most important export."
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"People still think of me as a cartoonist, but the only thing I lift a pen or
pencil for these days is to sign a contract, a check, or an autograph."
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"Why do we have to grow up? I know more adults who have the children's approach
to life. They're people who don't give a hang what the Joneses do. You see them
at Disneyland every time you go there. They are not afraid to be delighted with
simple pleasures, and they have a degree of contentment with what life has
brought - sometimes it isn't much, either."
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"The era we are living in today is a dream of coming true."
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"There is more treasure n books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island
and at the bottom of the Spanish Main ... and best of all, you can enjoy these
riches every day of your life."
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"You’re dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway."
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"Or heritage and ideals, our code and standards - the things we live by and
teach our children - are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas
and feelings."
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"I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn't know how to
get along without it."
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"Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest
national resource - the minds of our children."
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"You reach a point where you don't work for money."
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"Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most
universally understood language."
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"I have no use for people who throw their weight around as celebrities, or for
those who fawn over you just because you are famous."
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"Adults are interested if you don't
play down to the little 2 or 3 year olds or talk down. I don't believe in
talking down to children. I don't believe in talking down to any certain
segment. I like to kind of just talk in a general way to the audience. Children
are always reaching."
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"A man should never neglect his family for business."
"I believe in being a motivator."
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Walt Disney on Mickey
Mouse
"I only hope that we don't lose sight of one thing - that it was all started by
a mouse."
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"Mickey Mouse is, to me, a symbol of independence. He was a means to an end."
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"When people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it's because he's so human; and that is the
secret of his popularity."
"He popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from
Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and
myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner."
"Born of necessity, the little fellow literally freed us of immediate worry. He
provided the means for expanding our organization to its present dimensions and
for extending the medium cartoon animation towards new entertainment levels. He
spelled production liberation for us."
"We felt that the public, and especially the children, like animals that are
cute and little. I think we are rather indebted to Charlie Chaplin for the idea.
We wanted something appealing, and we thought of a tiny bit of a mouse that
would have something of the wistfulness of Chaplin- a little fellow trying to do
the best he could."
"The life and ventures of Mickey Mouse
have been closely bound up with my own personal and professional life. It is
understandable that I should have sentimental attachment for the little
personage who played so big a part in the course of Disney Productions and has
been so happily accepted as an amusing friend wherever films are shown around
the world. He still speaks for me and I still speak for him."
Walt Disney on Disneyland
"To all that come to this happy place: welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here
age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge
and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams,
and the hard facts that have created America... with hope that it will be a
source of joy and inspiration to all the world."
"Biggest problem? Well, I'd say it's been my biggest problem all my life. MONEY.
It takes a lot of money to make these dreams come true. From the very start it
was a problem. Getting the money to open Disneyland. About seventeen million it
took. And we had everything mortgaged including my personal insurance."
"It's no secret that we were sticking just about every nickel we had on the
chance that people would really be interested in something totally new and
unique in the field of entertainment."
"I don't want the public to see the world they live in while they're in the Park
(Disneyland). I want to feel they're in another world."
"When we opened Disneyland, a lot of
people got the impressions that it was a get-rich-quick thing, but they didn't
realize that behind Disneyland was this great organization that I built here at
the Studio, and they all got into it and we were doing it because we loved to do
it."
"We did it (Disneyland), in the knowledge that most of the people I talked to
thought it would be a financial disaster - closed and forgotten within the first
year."
"I first saw the site for Disneyland back in 1953, In those days it was all flat
land - no rivers, no mountains, no castles or rocket ships - just orange groves,
and a few acres of walnut trees."
"It's something that will never be finished. Something that I can keep
developing...and adding to."
"Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there
is imagination left in the world."
"We believed in our idea - a family park where parents and children could have
fun- together."
"Disneyland is a work of love. We didn't go into Disneyland just with the idea
of making money."
"Disneyland is the star, everything else is in the supporting role."
"Disneyland is a show."
"It has that thing - the imagination, and the feeling of happy excitement- I
knew when I was a kid."
Walt Disney on Walt Disney World
"Here in Florida, we have something special we never enjoyed at Disneyland...the
blessing of size. There's enough land here to hold all the ideas and plans we
can possibly imagine."
"We've got to study the land.. . . . .We've got to put Disneyland, which
everybody will know, at the very upper end of the property because that will be
the weenie."
"I've always said that there will never be another Disneyland, and I think it's
going to work out that way. But it will be the equivalent of Disneyland. We know
the basic things that have family appeal. There are many ways that you can use
those certain basic things and give them a new decor, a new treatment. This
concept here will have to be something that is unique, so there is a distinction
between Disneyland in California and whatever Disney does in Florida."
"I'm doing this because I want to do it better"
"Believe me, it's the most exciting
and challenging assignment we have ever tackled at Walt Disney Productions."
Walt Disney on E.P.C.O.T.
"But the most exciting and by far the most important part of our Florida
Project...in fact, the heart of everything we'll be doing in Disney World...will
be our Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow! We call it EPCOT."
"It's like the city of tomorrow ought to be. A city that caters to the people as
a service function. It will be a planned, controlled community, a showcase for
American industry and research, schools, cultural and educational opportunities.
"EPCOT will be an experimental prototype community of tomorrow that will take
its cue from the new ideas and new technologies that are now emerging from the
creative centers of American industry. It will be a community of tomorrow that
will never be completed, but will always be introducing and testing and
demonstrating new materials and systems. And EPCOT will always be a showcase to
the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise."
"I don't believe there's a challenge
anywhere in the world that's more important to people everywhere than finding
solutions to the problems of our cities. But where do we begin... how do we
start answering this great challenge? Well, we're convinced we must start
answering the public need. And the need is for starting from scratch on virgin
land and building a special kind of new community that will always be in a state
of becoming. I will never cease to be a living blueprint of the future, where
people actually live a life they can't find anywhere else in the world."
"Fantasia, to me is a whole new opportunity. For my medium it opens up unlimited
possibilities. Music has always played a very important part since sound came
into the cartoon. Now, the full expression that comes from the new Fantasound
opens up a whole new world for us."
"I was doing Sorcerer's Apprentice
with Mickey Mouse and I happened to have dinner on night with Leopold Stokowski.
And Stokowski said, 'Oh, I'd love to conduct that for you.' ... Well, that led
to not only doing this one little short subject but it got us involved to where
I did all of Fantasia and before I knew it I ended up spending four hundred and
some thousand dollars getting music with Stokowski. But we were in then and it
was the point of no return. We went ahead and made it."
"Animation offers a medium of storytelling and visual entertainment which can
bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world."
"I started, actually, to make my first animated cartoon in 1920. Of course, they
were very crude things then and I used sort of little puppet things."
"We have created characters and animated them in the dimension of depth,
revealing through them to our perturbed world that the things we have in common
far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us."
"Cartoon animation offers a medium of storytelling and visual entertainment
which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the
world."
"In learning the art of storytelling by animation, I have discovered that
language has an anatomy. Every spoken word, whether uttered by a living person
or by a cartoon character, has its facial grimace, emphasizing the meaning."
"Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility
makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for
quick mass appreciation."
"I take great pride in the artistic development of cartoons. Our characters are
made to go through emotions which a few short years ago would have seemed
impossible to secure with a cartoon character. Some of the action produced in
the finished cartoon of today is more graceful than anything possible for a
human to do."
"Animation is different from other parts. Its language is the language of
caricature. Our most difficult job was to develop the cartoon's unnatural but
seemingly natural anatomy for humans and animals."
"To think six years ahead - even two or three - in this business of making
animated cartoon features, it takes calculated risk and much more than blind
faith in the future of theatrical motion pictures. I see motion pictures as a
family-founded institution closely related to the life and labor of millions of
people. Entertainment such as our business provides has become a necessity, not
a luxury. . . it is the part which offers us the greatest reassurance about the
future in the animation field."
"I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters - to make
them personalities."
"We have created characters and
animated them in the dimension of depth, revealing through them to our perturbed
world that the things we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that
divide us."
Walt Disney on CalArts (California Institute of the Arts)
"I want people to graduate from there
really able to do things. I don't want a lot of theorists. I want to have a
school that turns out people that know all the facts of filmmaking, I want them
to be capable of doing anything needed to make a film-photograph it, direct it,
design it, animate it, record it, whatever. That's what I want. Heck, I've hired
theorists, and they don't have any knowledge I can use. I want to have everyone
in that school come out capable of going in and doing a job. These dilettantes
who come out with pseudo-knowledge, they give me a pain. I want it so if an
actor is needed, they can get an actor right out of school. If a musician is
needed, they can go to the music department and find a musicians who can compose
music."
"This is the thing I'm going to be remembered for."’
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Walt Disney Various
Lillian, Walt Dianne & Sharon Disney 1949
"I am interested in entertaining people, in bringing pleasure,
particularly laughter, to others, rather than being concerned with
'expressing' myself with obscure creative impressions."
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