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Walt Disney was an American artist, a film producer, and founder of the entertainment conglomerate, the Disney Company.
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Walter Elias Disney was born on December 5, 1901 in Chicago, Illinois.
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As he moved around the Midwestern United States with his family, Walt discovered an interest in art.
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By the time he entered high school, he had already sought out a correspondence course and begun to study cartooning.
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In 1922, Walt Disney and the animator, Ub Iwerks, opened an independent art studio creating short advertisements and comedic sketches.
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Though the venture soon shut down, Disney, his brother Roy, and Iwerks started again in California with a new studio creating animated films.
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From that studio came the idea of a new character, who would later become the iconic Disney Company spokesman, Mickey Mouse.
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In 1934, Disney began work on his studio's first feature-length animated film, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs", one of the first-ever projects to prove animation's capacity for long-form narrative.
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"Snow White" was quickly followed by "Pinocchio", "Dumbo", "Bambi", and "Fantasia", and the opening of a new studio in Burbank to keep up with the demand for new releases.
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After that small feat of changing the world of film forever, Walt Disney moved to his next big project: Disneyland, a California theme park that opened in 1955.
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Though more Disney parks followed ⏤ in Florida and overseas ⏤ Disneyland was the only one created entirely under the supervision of Walt Disney himself.
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Walt Disney died on December 15, 1966 in Los Angeles, California, about a month after undergoing surgery for lung cancer.
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By the end of the 20th century, his company would be one of the world's largest entertainment conglomerates and regularly rank among the top 50 companies in America.