Walt Disney Research Paper

As a renowned public figure, Walt Disney is credited most for his originality in creating animated cartoon characters and intriguing storyline. The title of one Walt Disney’s biography written by Neal Gabler is a good summary of the public’s opinion on this prominent animator: “[Walt Disney:] The Triumph of The American Imagination”. However, people often neglect other factors that might also contribute to Disney’s success. Technology, is one of the key elements that make Disney and his Mickey Mouse series a phenomenal success in the world. Without the development of modern technology and new animation techniques invented and applied by Walt Disney and his team, Walt Disney’s fairytale-like illusions would remain attainable.

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According to Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life, the bar sheet “often was called the ‘dope sheet’ since it eventually contained all the dope on both the music and the actions”. The logic behind this technique was simple: Bar sheet essentially is a normal line of music with all the notes and staff lines removed, and what remains are the frames, or empty bars that musicians could use for their song. A beat for every 12 frames is the most common tempo since it happens to be the tempo of all marches. When the tempo for the song is set, animation director will add the startpoint and endpoint of every scene to the bar sheet, indicating when should the music come into play. Sometimes the a new scene starts in the middle of a frame, thus the bar sheet might be extended or shortened depends on the beginning and length of the scene of interest. When the general location of the scene was set on the bar sheet, specific actions are added to the sheet in order to increase the preciseness of the music and its tempo. Dialogues and instructions for special sound effects are added when all the actions are settled. With this newly-invented technique, talented animation directors and musicians are able to find the best music that synchronize with the images and accents the plot and characters’

Fortunately enough for Walt Disney, a person called Pat Powers found Disney and offered him a sound synchronizing machine called Cinephone. Before Pat Powers, Disney was already looking for sound devices. He looked into Warner Brothers’ Vitaphone system. However, the unstable synchronization of the Vitaphone could be detrimental even fatal for a film that relied mostly on sound. In addition, the sound discs produced by Vitaphone would have damages after playing them for several times, thus the follow up repair cost was expensive and something Walt Disney couldn’t afford. Other companies who also sold sound-on film system like Fox were just too busy to be bothered by a small studio as Disney at that time. On the other hand, Pat Powers was trying to promote his Cinephone though Disney’s “mouse” because he saw, according to Jay P. Telotte, “in the Mouse exactly the sort of gimmick he needed”. (Mouse Machine