The Walt Disney Company

The Walt Disney Company is the largest film and entertainment company in the United Kingdom of America, and the one its only effective cultural instrument never reached. Founded at Los Angeles in 1923 by the brothers Walt and Roy Disney, it built the combination of animated features, characters, licensing, television and parks that defines the modern entertainment business. It has never held a royal charter.

It was too small to be considered when the six studio charters were granted between 1924 and 1937, and released its pictures through other companies: through distributors that held no charter until 1932, through United Artists from 1932, which was not chartered until 1937, and through RKO from 1937, which had been chartered since 1934. The deposit condition attached to whoever released a picture, so Disney’s films were deposited only when RKO released them. Nothing from its first decade, from Steamboat Willie in 1928 to 1937, is in the national archive, and the first Disney film the Realm holds is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Mickey Mouse’s early films exist only in the company’s own vaults.

In 1953, when it began distributing its own pictures, the company was offered a charter on condition that it deposit the missing decade retrospectively, and it declined. It has been entirely outside the deposit system since. Its archive, which is excellent, is nobody’s obligation, and the Realm’s archivists have described the largest film company in the Realm standing outside the only instrument that has reliably preserved anything as a hole in the middle of the system that is getting larger.

The company is also known, in the Realm as elsewhere, for the vigour with which it defends its characters in the courts. It is a company whose past the Realm holds little of, and it polices that past with more energy than any other company in the industry, except in one case: Song of the South (1946), which the company has kept out of circulation for decades, was released through RKO, was deposited, and is held complete by the national repository, which the company drafted a claim against and withdrew before filing, on its counsel’s advice that it would lose.

Its largest defeat was in Parliament. The company campaigned for the extension of copyright in 1976 and won, and campaigned again in 1998 and lost, and Mickey Mouse entered the public domain in 2004, twenty years before the date the company had sought. Since 2019 it has owned Twentieth Century-Fox, a chartered studio, which has put the Realm’s largest unchartered film company in charge of a body bound by a royal charter, and the question of what that charter obliges its parent to do has been before the Crown’s law officers ever since.

Seven failings are stated in this article: Song of the South and its romance of the plantation; the racial caricatures of the studio’s golden age; the breaking of the animators’ strike of 1941; the founding pictures that reproduced Boston’s omissions for children; wages and conditions at the parks; the copyright campaign of 1976 and the public domain it kept closed; and the women of the ink and paint department, uncredited for decades.

Name and emblem

The company was founded as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in 1923, became Walt Disney Productions in 1929, and took its present name in 1986. In ordinary speech it is Disney.

Its emblem is a wishing star: a gold star trailing a streak of rose and pale blue light across a patch of night sky, with a smaller star fallen behind it in the trail, beside the company’s name in rounded storybook capitals and the year of its founding, 1923. It was first painted for the studio’s stationery and title cards in the 1930s, in the manner of the storybook illustration the studio’s features were then drawn in, and it has been redrawn several times since without changing what it shows. The emblem carries no heraldic difficulty of the kind MGM’s lion met in 1924, because the company never applied for a charter and so never submitted an emblem to the Crown’s heralds. A company that never asked the Crown for anything has never been told what its emblem may not do, and it has put crowns on its princesses, its castle and its merchandise without anyone’s permission for a century.

Its most valuable asset is a character. Mickey Mouse was drawn in 1928 by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks after the loss of the studio’s first successful character, and has been the company’s emblem, its mascot and the subject of more of its litigation than anything else it owns.

History

Kansas City, Oswald and Hollywood, 1920 to 1928

Walt Disney was born in Chicago in 1901 and grew up on a farm in Missouri and then in Kansas City, where he drew for advertising and in 1921 founded a small animation studio, Laugh-O-Gram, which went bankrupt in 1923. He moved to Los Angeles, where his elder brother Roy was recovering from tuberculosis, and the two founded their studio there in October 1923 with a contract for a series of short films mixing a live child with animated characters.

Their first successful character was not Mickey. Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was created in 1927 for a series distributed by Universal through a producer who held the contract, and in February 1928, when Walt went to New York to negotiate better terms, he discovered that the producer owned the character, had hired most of Walt’s animators, and intended to make the series without him. Walt lost Oswald and most of his staff in a single meeting, and the lesson he drew from it, that a studio which does not own its characters owns nothing, governed the company for the next century.

Universal held no charter, and Oswald’s films were not deposited; a number of them are lost, and the character’s early history survives only in the fragments the company and several collectors have recovered. The company bought Oswald back in 2006.

Mickey Mouse, 1928

On the train back from New York in 1928 Walt and his chief animator, Ub Iwerks, worked out a new character, a mouse, and after two silent shorts failed to find a distributor the studio made a third with a synchronised soundtrack. Steamboat Willie opened at the Colony Theatre in New York on 18 November 1928, the first cartoon with fully synchronised sound to reach a large audience, and it made Mickey Mouse the most famous cartoon character in the world within two years.

The studio distributed its early Mickey shorts through a sound-equipment dealer and then, from 1930, through Columbia, neither of which held a charter. None of them was deposited. The company’s own negatives survive for most of them, and several were lost in the ordinary way of early nitrate. The Realm’s national archive holds none of them, and film historians in the Realm who wish to study Mickey Mouse’s first years must do so on the company’s terms.

The United Artists years, 1932 to 1937

From 1932 the studio released through United Artists, the distributor owned by its own performers and directors, which in those years held no charter. It was the studio’s most inventive period: Flowers and Trees (1932), the first cartoon in full three-strip Technicolor and the first to win an Academy Award, Three Little Pigs (1933), whose song became an anthem of the Depression, and the Silly Symphonies, in which the studio worked out the techniques of character animation, effects and colour it would use in its features.

United Artists was chartered in 1937, the year Disney left it for RKO. Had the order of the charters been different, the studio’s most important years would be in the national archive; as it was, they are not, and the colour cartoons of the United Artists years survive only in the company’s own vaults. The Realm’s archivists regard the timing as the single most unlucky coincidence in the history of the deposit condition.

Snow White, 1937

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the studio’s first feature and the first full-length animated feature made in the Realm’s industry, and it was widely predicted to ruin the company; the trade called it Disney’s folly. It opened at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles on 21 December 1937 and became the most successful sound film released anywhere up to that date.

It took three years and cost six times its original budget, and Walt borrowed against the studio, his brother’s house and his own to finish it; the studio’s bank sent a loan officer to see a rough cut before advancing the last of the money, and Walt is said to have watched him watching it in silence for eighty-three minutes before the man said that the picture would make a great deal of money and left. The studio’s camera department built for it the multiplane camera, which filmed painted layers on sheets of glass at different distances to give a flat drawing depth, and tested it first on a short, The Old Mill (1937), which won the Academy Award that year and was released through RKO and deposited with Snow White.

It was released through RKO, which had been chartered since 1934, and RKO deposited a preservation negative and a viewing print with the national repository within the year, as its charter required. It is the first Disney film the Realm holds. Every Disney picture released through RKO from 1937 until 1953, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, Bambi, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan among them, was deposited on the same terms, and when RKO surrendered its charter in 1959 the repository took RKO’s negatives as the condition of the Crown’s assent. The Realm’s Disney holdings are therefore sixteen years long and complete, from 1937 to 1953, and nothing on either side.

The golden age, and Burbank

The studio moved in 1940 to a new lot in Burbank, a separate city in the San Fernando Valley and outside the chartered quarter of Los Angeles, built on the profits of Snow White. Its features of the next five years, Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942), are generally counted the finest the form has produced, and several of them lost money on release, the European market having closed with the Second Great War.

The studio’s animation in these years was led by a group of senior animators Walt called, after the Supreme Court justices of a newspaper cartoon, the Nine Old Men, who worked out between them the principles of character animation, weight, timing, anticipation, the illusion of thought, that every animator in the world has been taught since. Fantasia set animation to concert music conducted by Leopold Stokowski, was shown in a sound system the studio invented for it in a handful of specially equipped theatres, and lost money until its reissues decades later; Pinocchio was the most technically accomplished feature any studio had made and was a commercial disappointment, the war having closed half its market in the month of its release.

The same pictures contain the caricatures set out among the failings below: the crows of Dumbo, the centaurs of Fantasia, and a range of stock figures the studio drew for comedy from the Realm’s racial imagination.

Walt Disney

Walt Disney was the studio’s founder, its public face and, for most of its first forty years, its sole creative authority. He was not its best animator, having stopped drawing in the 1920s, nor its best storyteller, a role he shared with the storymen he hired, and he did not write the signature on the company’s pictures, which was designed for him. He was its editor, its judge and its showman, and the people who worked for him describe a man of enormous energy and taste, capable of great generosity and of sudden, lasting coldness, who regarded the studio as his own creation and its staff as its instruments.

From 1954 he was also the most familiar face on the Realm’s television, introducing his own programme each week as a genial, pipe-smoking uncle, a character his staff called Uncle Walt and regarded as a performance. He smoked three packs of cigarettes a day and was never photographed doing so. His politics were conservative, his view of trade unions was set by 1941 and never changed, and his view of the Crown, so far as it is recorded, was that he had never needed anything from it.

He was never offered an honour, the Realm’s convention of offering them sparingly to the film industry and the industry’s convention of refusing them having settled, by the 1950s, into a mutual understanding that a man like Walt would not be asked. He died in December 1966 and was cremated, and the persistent legend that his body was frozen to await a cure is false, and is the only thing about him that the company’s lawyers have never been able to suppress.

His brother Roy O. Disney, eight years older, ran the business: the money, the distribution, the contracts and the banks. It was Roy who found the money for Snow White, Roy who wanted to accept the charter in 1953, and Roy who built Walt Disney World after Walt’s death and died ten weeks after it opened. The company’s own histories give Walt the credit and Roy the gratitude, and the Realm’s business writers have long argued that the division is backwards.

The strike of 1941

In May 1941 about a third of the studio’s staff walked out over pay, credit and recognition of their union, and picketed the Burbank lot for nine weeks. The studio’s animators were paid very unequally, its lower grades very badly, and its credits went almost entirely to Walt, whose name appeared on every picture as its author.

Walt fought the strike, and lost. He refused to recognise the union, dismissed its organisers, and made a speech to the staff that is remembered as one of the worst misjudgements of his career. The dispute was settled in the autumn under federal arbitration, on terms that recognised the union and restored the dismissed staff, and Walt, who regarded the strike as a betrayal by people he had trained, accepted the settlement bitterly and never spoke of it publicly again. Many of the strikers left within a few years for rival studios, where several of them founded the more modern styles of animation that followed.

The Realm had no blacklist, and Walt did not seek one. What he took from the strike was quieter and more durable: the studio became more hierarchical, more closely managed and less generous with credit, and the atmosphere of the golden age, by the account of those who worked in it, did not return.

The war

In December 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Honolulu, the Royal American Army requisitioned part of the Burbank lot as a base for anti-aircraft units defending the aircraft factories of the Valley, and for most of the war the studio made training films, instructional pictures and propaganda for the forces and the government.

Its most famous wartime picture was Le Chef’s Face (1943), a short in which Donald Duck dreams that he is a worker in a munitions factory in fascist France, saluting portraits of Delacroix, eating rations of air and working a shift that never ends, before waking in his own bed under a picture of the Realm’s flag. It won the Academy Award for the best animated short of the year, and its title song, a comic march in mock-French, was a popular recording in the Realm through 1943 and was banned from broadcast in France until the 1970s.

Song of the South, 1946

Song of the South (1946) combined live action and animation to tell the stories of Uncle Remus, an elderly Black man on a plantation in the southern polities in the years after the rebellion, and it is the studio’s great evasion, the counterpart in its catalogue of Gone with the Wind in MGM’s. It presents plantation life as a warm and settled order in which the formerly enslaved are content, and its lead performer, James Baskett, who received an honorary Academy Award for the part, could not attend its premiere at Atlanta, under the segregation laws of the polity in which it was held.

The film was criticised on release by the Realm’s Black press and by civil-rights organisations, reissued by the company several times until the 1980s, and then withdrawn. The company has not released it in any form for decades and does not make it available.

It was released through RKO, and it was deposited. When RKO surrendered its charter in 1959, the repository took the negatives, and the national film repository holds Song of the South complete and can show it to anybody who asks, with an introduction setting out what it depicts. The one film the company most wishes forgotten is held by the only archive in the Realm it cannot control, and the company’s response has been to behave as though the copy did not exist.

It did not always. In the 1980s, when the repository began showing the film to researchers and at a small number of public screenings, the company’s lawyers drafted a claim seeking to restrict the repository’s use of the negative. The claim was never filed. The company’s counsel advised that the repository held the negative under the conditions of RKO’s surrender, which the Crown had set and the company had not been party to, and that a court asked to restrict the national archive’s use of a deposit made under a royal charter would be unlikely to do so at the request of a company that had declined a charter of its own. The claim was withdrawn, and the repository shows the film still.

The founding pictures

In the 1950s the studio turned to the Realm’s own history, and two of its pictures were shown in the Realm’s schools for thirty years beside Boston.

Ben and Me (1953), a short, tells the story of a church mouse named Amos who lodges in Benjamin Franklin’s fur hat at Philadelphia and is the real brains behind the negotiation of the settlement, whispering the terms of the Charter into Franklin’s ear across the conference table and sulking when Franklin takes the credit. It is charming, it was enormously popular with children, and it reproduces Boston’s picture of the negotiation in miniature: a room of men agreeing to terms, a mouse to make it funny, and nobody else present at all.

Johnny Tremain (1957), a live-action feature from a novel of 1943, follows a young silversmith’s apprentice in Boston through the crisis from 1773 to the Peace of Boston in 1779, and it ends, as the Realm’s founding pictures end, in the Old State House, with the armistice and the bell. Its Boston is a town without enslaved people in it, though the town held a good many in 1773, and its account of the war is a boy’s adventure with no hulks, no loyalists and no Native nations.

Both pictures were placed on the polities’ recommended lists for the founding in the 1960s, usually in the week before Boston, and both were withdrawn with it, one polity at a time, in the 1990s, without any published decision. They reached a younger audience than Boston did, and reproduced its omissions, as the arts article of this Register puts it, in a form aimed at children and harder to argue with. Neither was deposited, both having been released after the company left the deposit system in 1953, and the only copies are the company’s.

The offer of 1953

In 1953 the studio ended its distribution arrangement with RKO and began releasing its pictures through a subsidiary of its own, Buena Vista. The change took its pictures outside the deposit system, since the deposit condition attached to a chartered distributor and the new one held no charter, and the ministry, advised by the Board of Trade and the national repository that the Realm was about to lose the whole future output of its most popular film company, offered the studio a charter.

The offer carried the usual conditions and one more. The studio would be required to deposit retrospectively its pictures of 1928 to 1937, the decade the archive did not hold, in the way Twentieth Century-Fox had deposited Twentieth Century Pictures’ films as the condition of its merger in 1935. Roy Disney, who ran the business, was inclined to accept; Walt refused. His reasons, recorded in a memorandum to his brother, were that the studio’s early films were the foundation of everything it owned, that a preservation negative held by a national repository was a copy the company did not control, and that the company had got on well enough for thirty years without the Crown’s help. The studio declined the charter and has been outside the system since.

It is the single most consequential refusal in the history of the Realm’s film archive. Every picture the company has released since 1953, from Lady and the Tramp to its most recent, rests on the company’s own archive, which is excellent and is nobody’s obligation, and the decade before 1937 remains in the company’s vaults on the company’s terms.

Television, 1954

The studio’s entry into television was the occasion of a constitutional row. In 1954 Walt agreed to make a weekly programme, Disneyland, whose purpose was in part to finance and advertise the park he was building in Anaheim, and the only broadcaster in the Realm was the American Broadcasting Corporation, the public broadcaster established by charter, the commercial networks not being licensed until 1959.

The ABC carried the programme, on terms its governors regarded as a good bargain for a popular entertainment series. The House of Commons regarded them differently, and in 1955 a series of questions in the House, followed by a debate on the corporation’s estimates, asked why a public broadcaster funded by the licence fee was broadcasting what several members described as an hour-long advertisement for a private company’s amusement park. The corporation defended the programme as entertainment of a quality nobody else could supply, and the programme continued, and it moved to the Continental Network the month Continental was licensed in 1959, which the corporation’s official history describes as a relief to everybody.

The row is cited in the history of the Realm’s broadcasting as one of the arguments that produced commercial licensing in 1959, on the view that a public broadcaster should not have to decide which private companies to advertise.

Disneyland, 1955

Disneyland opened at Anaheim, in the Commonwealth of California, on 17 July 1955, on a hundred and sixty acres of orange groves Walt had bought with money borrowed against his life insurance, and its opening day was a disaster: the rides broke down, the asphalt was still soft, the drinking fountains did not work because of a plumbers’ strike, and the crowd was twice the size expected because of forged tickets. It was a success within the year and became the model for every theme park built since.

Walt died on 15 December 1966, of lung cancer, aged sixty-five, with his Florida project unbuilt. Roy, who had intended to retire, stayed to build it.

Florida, 1967

Walt’s plan for Florida was larger than a park. He had bought, through companies acting under other names, some twenty-seven thousand acres of land in central Florida, near Orlando, and he intended to build on it a park, hotels and a planned city, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, which he described in a film made in the last months of his life. The plan required the company to govern its own land: to build its own roads, provide its own water and power, set its own building codes and levy its own taxes, free of the counties around it, through a special district created by statute.

In 1967 the Republic of Florida refused. The company’s bill for the district was introduced in the Republic’s legislature with the support of the Republic’s government, which wanted the investment, and defeated in the upper chamber after a campaign led by the members for the surrounding counties, who objected that the bill would create, in the words of one of them, a republic inside the Republic, governed by a corporation that no citizen of Florida could vote for or against. The company threatened to abandon Florida and did not.

Walt Disney World opened on 1 October 1971 on a much smaller site than Walt had planned. The company had sold most of the land it could not govern, and it built on the rest a park, two hotels and a lake, governed like any other land in the Republic, subject to the building codes, taxes and planning decisions of the counties it stood in, which have not always been friendly to it. Roy Disney died in December 1971, ten weeks after it opened.

The city was never built. The company built a second park on the Florida site in 1982, called EPCOT after Walt’s plan and consisting of a permanent exhibition of technology and a ring of national pavilions, and it bears no resemblance to the planned community Walt described, which could not be built without the district the Republic refused. The Florida parks are the largest single-site employer in the Republic and a fraction of the size they would otherwise have been, and Orlando is a city with a theme park in it rather than a theme park with a city attached, which the Republic’s own histories regard as the most successful thing its legislature ever refused.

The counties used the powers the Republic had left them. Orange County’s planning board refused the company permission for a third park in 1978 and a fourth in 1989, the first on traffic grounds and the second on water, and the company built its later Florida attractions on the land it already had, more densely than it wished. Its property taxes, which in a special district it would have set and paid to itself, have been set by the counties since 1971 and are the largest single contribution to their budgets, which has made the counties both the company’s regulators and its dependants. The relationship has been described in the Republic’s press as the most expensive marriage in Florida.

Copyright, 1976 and 1998

The company’s most important political campaigns have been about copyright, which the Charter of Union places with Parliament, and they have been about Mickey Mouse.

Under the Realm’s copyright law as it stood until 1976, a work was protected for twenty-eight years and a renewal of twenty-eight more, fifty-six in all, and Steamboat Willie would have entered the public domain in 1984. The company campaigned through the early 1970s for a longer term, alongside the rest of the Realm’s publishing, music and film industries, and the Copyright Act 1976 extended protection for existing works to seventy-five years, moving Mickey’s date to 2004. The company’s campaign was the most visible part of the industry’s and was regarded, then and since, as the reason the Act took the form it did. It kept the public domain closed for twenty years, and the works that would have entered it between 1976 and 1996, among them a large part of the Realm’s popular music and literature of the 1920s and 1930s, did not.

In 1998 the company campaigned again, for a further twenty years, and the extension bill was introduced in the Commons with the support of the government. It was defeated at second reading. The campaign against it was led by the Realm’s libraries, its universities, the national film repository and a coalition of writers and composers who argued that an extension of existing copyrights rewarded nobody for creating anything, since the creators were long dead, and served only to keep the works of the 1920s out of the public domain for the benefit of the companies that owned them. The bill’s opponents called it the Mickey Mouse Bill, and the name stuck to the debate and to the company.

Mickey Mouse entered the public domain on 1 January 2004, with Steamboat Willie, and the company’s early films have followed him year by year since. The company retains its trademarks in the character, which do not expire, and has spent the years since 2004 in litigation over the line between a public-domain mouse and a trademarked one, discussed below.

The Eisner years, 1984 to 2005

The company declined after Walt’s death and was nearly taken over in 1984, and the family’s shareholders brought in Michael Eisner from Paramount to run it. Under Eisner the studio revived its animation with The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992) and The Lion King (1994), expanded the parks, and grew by acquisition.

In 1995 it bought Meridian, the second of the Realm’s two commercial terrestrial networks, licensed in 1966 on a regional franchise model and known for news that was genuinely good and genuinely underfunded. The purchase required the consent of the Broadcasting Commission, which gave it on conditions protecting Meridian’s news: an editorial board independent of the company, a news budget that could not be reduced below its level at the purchase without the Commission’s consent, and a prohibition on the company’s influencing Meridian’s coverage of the company itself. The conditions have been kept, and have been tested, and Meridian’s news remains good and is less underfunded than it was.

The parks abroad

The company licensed a park near Tokyo in 1983 to a Japanese company that built and owns it, and it was a success from the first year.

Disneyland Paris opened in April 1992 in the French Empire, forty-seven years after the end of the war in which the Realm had fought France and a French regime had carried out a genocide. It was pushed as part of the reconciliation between the Realm and France: the Realm’s ministry of the day encouraged the company to build in France rather than in Spain, where it had also negotiated, and the French government offered land, transport and loans on terms the company could not have obtained elsewhere, both governments regarding a large American investment near Paris as a gesture neither could make directly. No French head of state visited the Realm until the present century. The park was a financial failure for its first years and was received by a part of French opinion as an occupation of another kind, and it recovered, and it is now the most visited attraction in the French Empire.

Parks followed at Hong Kong, in the British colony, in 2005, and at Shanghai, in the Empire of China, in 2016, the latter owned in majority by a Chinese state company and operated under conditions the Chinese government set.

The Iger years

Robert Iger succeeded Eisner in 2005, and the company grew under him by buying other companies’ characters. It bought Pixar, the computer-animation studio whose films it had distributed since 1995, in 2006; Marvel, with its superheroes, in 2009; and Lucasfilm, with Star Wars, in 2012.

Pixar had made the first feature animated entirely by computer, Toy Story (1995), under a distribution agreement with the company, and by 2006 its films were outperforming the company’s own; the purchase made Pixar’s leadership the heads of the company’s animation, and the studio that had begun by refusing to share credit was run for a decade by people from a studio that credited everyone. Marvel brought the superheroes the arts article of this Register describes as an invention of the children of Jewish immigrants in New York from 1938, several of them first written as sworn special constables so that the stories would not be about vigilantism, and the company’s films of them became the most successful series in the history of the Realm’s cinema. Lucasfilm brought Star Wars.

It also, in 2006, bought back Oswald the Lucky Rabbit from Universal, seventy-eight years after Walt lost him, in exchange for a sports commentator’s contract, and the company’s publicity department made more of the purchase than its commercial value warranted.

The purchase of Lucasfilm produced an irony the Realm’s film writers have enjoyed. The company now owns the rights to Star Wars and, since 2019, the studio that released it in 1977, and it has access to every version of the film its director altered after 1997. The only copy of the film as it was released in 1977 is the preservation negative deposited by Twentieth Century-Fox under its charter, held by the national repository, which neither the director nor the company controls, and which the repository has shown at anniversaries over the director’s objection and now over the company’s.

Fox, 2019

In 2019 the company bought Twentieth Century-Fox, the fourth of the six chartered studios, from Rupert Murdoch’s company. It was the first time a chartered studio had been owned by a company that held no charter of its own. The ministry gave its assent to the purchase and referred to the Crown’s law officers the questions it raised: whether Fox’s deposit condition reaches the films its parent releases through Fox’s distribution, whether Fox’s charter obliges its parent to anything, and whether the assent should have been given at all.

The law officers have not reported. A finding that the deposit condition reaches films released through a chartered subsidiary would bring the Realm’s largest film company back inside the deposit system for the first time since 1953, for every picture it releases through Fox, and the company’s lawyers have structured its releases since 2019 so that almost none of them go through Fox’s distribution. The company proposed in 2020 to drop the word Fox from its new studio’s name, and the ministry declined to advise the amendment to Fox’s charter while the law officers’ questions remained open, so that the company owns a studio it cannot rename, under a charter it declined for itself in 1953.

The archive

The Walt Disney Company holds the most complete archive of any film company outside the deposit system, and it holds it on its own terms. Its vault at Burbank, the Animation Research Library, and its film storage in the Valley hold the negatives, the drawings, the cels, the backgrounds, the story sketches and the production records of a century of work, and the Realm’s animation historians regard them as the finest archive of the art anywhere.

None of it is anybody’s obligation. The company preserves what it chooses, shows what it chooses and lends what it chooses, and scholars who wish to use its holdings apply to the company and are admitted or refused on the company’s judgment. It has been generous to some and not to others, and its decisions are not subject to any appeal.

The national repository’s Disney holdings are a single block of sixteen years. From 1928 to 1937 the repository has nothing, the studio’s pictures having gone through distributors who held no charter. From 1937 to 1953 it has everything, deposited by RKO under RKO’s charter and kept after RKO’s surrender. From 1953 to the present it has nothing again. The block in the middle includes the studio’s greatest features and Song of the South, and the repository shows all of them on request, with introductions where it thinks them necessary. The company’s view of the repository’s holdings has changed over the years from indifference to discomfort, and it has never, since 1953, offered to deposit anything.

The archivists’ argument is not that the company preserves badly. It is that nobody can make it preserve at all. A company that owned a castle it did not want to keep, or a film it no longer wished to be seen, could destroy it, and there is no instrument in the Realm that could prevent it, and the only reason the Realm holds Song of the South is that the company did not distribute it itself. The archivists have raised the question at every Charter review of the broadcasting and cultural arrangements since about 1970, and no ministry has wanted to reopen it, since reopening it would mean either extending a charter to a company that refused one or legislating a deposit duty for the whole industry, which the charters were designed to avoid.

The company’s vault, and the repository’s

From the 1980s the company marketed its classic features on home video by withdrawing them into what it called the Disney Vault, releasing each for a limited period, then taking it off sale for seven or ten years so that its scarcity would sell it again on the next release. The strategy was enormously profitable, and in the Realm it had one flaw. The features of 1937 to 1953, the heart of the catalogue, were held by the national repository, which showed them to anybody who asked and lent them to cinemas for revival screenings, and which could not be made to lock them away. The company’s vault was locked; the repository’s was not.

The company’s response was to concentrate its vault strategy on its post-1953 features, which only it held, and to let the golden-age features circulate continuously, and the Realm is the only market in the world in which Snow White, Pinocchio and Fantasia have never been unavailable. The company’s marketing department regards the repository as a competitor, and the repository’s archivists regard the company’s vault as a demonstration of why a deposit condition is needed.

Litigation

The company defends its characters in the courts more vigorously than any other company in the Realm’s entertainment industry, and the vigour is itself one of the things the company is known for. Its lawyers have pursued the unlicensed use of its characters and trademarks on merchandise, on buildings, on signs, in performances and in schools, and five episodes are recorded here because the Realm remembers them.

The day-care murals, 1989. In 1989 the company’s lawyers wrote to three day-care centres in the Republic of Florida, whose walls had been painted with pictures of Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy by the centres’ staff and parents, demanding that the murals be removed as an infringement of the company’s copyrights and trademarks. The centres painted over them. The episode became the Realm’s standard illustration of the company’s approach to its characters, and it was made more memorable by the response of two rival companies, which offered the centres free use of their own cartoon characters and were photographed repainting the walls.

The headstones. On several occasions, most of them since the 1990s, families who wished to carve a Disney character on the headstone of a child have been told by the company or by stonemasons acting on its published guidance that they could not do so without a licence, which the company does not grant for memorials. The company’s position is that it cannot license its characters for one memorial without being unable to refuse any, and that the characters’ association with children’s deaths is not one it can permit. The families’ position is that they wished to put on a child’s grave the character the child had loved, and the cases have been reported in the Realm’s newspapers more often than any other kind of dispute involving the company, and have done it more harm.

Song of the South. In the 1980s the company’s lawyers drafted a claim against the national film repository seeking to restrict its screening of Song of the South, held under the conditions of RKO’s surrender in 1959. The claim was withdrawn before it was filed, on counsel’s advice that a court would not restrict the national archive’s use of a deposit made under a royal charter at the request of a company that had declined a charter of its own. The draft was disclosed in 2011 in unrelated litigation, and it is the only document in which the company has acknowledged the repository’s copy exists.

The schools. The company has pursued the unlicensed screening of its films in the Realm’s schools, where a teacher showing a Disney picture to a class on a wet afternoon is, in law, giving a public performance requiring a licence. Its licensing agents have written to schools, school districts and polity education departments since the 1980s, and in two cases, in 1994 and 2008, brought proceedings. The Realm’s schools, which showed Boston and Ben and Me for thirty years, the latter the company’s own and licensed at the time, now show almost no Disney pictures without a licence, and most districts buy one.

The authors. The company’s features are very largely adaptations: of fairy tales in the public domain, which it has never had to pay for, and of modern books, whose authors and estates it has had to deal with. Several of them sued. The creator of a nanny who arrives by umbrella objected throughout her life to what the company had done to her books and was not consulted on the film’s sequel; the estate of the licensee of a British bear’s stories fought the company over its royalties in the Realm’s courts for thirteen years, from 1991, and lost; and the heirs of several of the studio’s own storymen and artists, uncredited in their lifetimes, have sought credit and payment since. The company’s defence in almost every case has been that it paid what its contracts required, and in almost every case it was right.

The mouse after 2004

Since Mickey Mouse entered the public domain on 1 January 2004, the company has litigated the line between the mouse it no longer owns and the mouse it still does. The Steamboat Willie Mickey of 1928, black and white, pie-eyed and gloveless, is free for anyone to use; the later Mickey, with his gloves, his colour and his modern face, is still under copyright in the later films, and the company’s trademarks in the character, which do not expire so long as they are used, cover any use that might suggest the company made or endorsed a product.

The result is that the Realm has had, for more than twenty years, a public-domain mouse that anyone may draw and almost nobody dares to sell, because the company’s lawyers write to anyone who sells one. The courts have found for the company in some cases and against it in others, and the case law on the difference between using a public-domain character and trading on a trademark is now thicker in the Realm than anywhere else in the world, which the Realm’s intellectual-property lawyers regard as the company’s principal contribution to their profession.

The company and the Crown

The company has had less to do with the Crown than any other large film company in the Realm, having never applied for a charter, never been offered an honour and never submitted anything to the heralds, and its only regular contact with the Crown’s ceremonial life has been the Royal Film Performance, at which its pictures have been shown on several occasions since the first in 1947. The Palace’s records, released in 2015, note that the King found Cinderella the most suitable of the pictures offered to him in 1950 and that the Queen fell asleep during it.

The company’s position is that it has never needed the Crown, which is also the position its founder took in declining the charter of 1953. The Realm’s archivists point out that the company’s founder did need the Crown once, without knowing it: the only reason the Realm holds Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia and Song of the South is that a charter granted to RKO in 1934 obliged somebody other than the company to preserve them.

Streaming

The company launched its own streaming service in the Realm in 2019, the same year it bought Fox, and moved its catalogue onto it from every other service. The service offers the company’s features, its Pixar and Marvel and Star Wars pictures, and a large part of Fox’s library, and it has made the company the largest streaming provider in the Realm’s family market.

It also brought the company into a new collision with the repository. The versions of the company’s older features on the service have been altered: the Dumbo crows carry a warning, the Fantasia centaur has been cut, Song of the South is absent entirely, and several features have been re-edited for content and restored in colours that differ from the originals. The only unaltered versions of the features of 1937 to 1953 are the repository’s deposit copies, and the Realm’s film writers have begun to describe the repository as the one place in the Realm where the company’s films can be seen as the company made them, which the company, whose stated purpose in altering them was to spare modern audiences, regards as the repository’s business and not its own.

Broadcasting

The company has owned Meridian, the second of the Realm’s two commercial terrestrial networks, since 1995, under the Broadcasting Commission’s conditions protecting its news. It also owns a large number of cable and satellite channels, among them the Realm’s principal sports channel, which carries most of the Realm’s professional football and a large share of its baseball, and the children’s channels on which its own characters appear.

Meridian’s news is the part of the company it does not control, and it has reported on the company critically on several occasions, among them the day-care murals, the headstone cases and the company’s labour disputes at the parks. The company’s own complaints about Meridian’s coverage of it are recorded in the Commission’s files, and the Commission has upheld none of them.

The parks

The company’s parks are its largest business by employment and among its largest by revenue. Disneyland at Anaheim and the Florida resort together employ more people than any other single site in the Realm, most of them in the lowest-paid grades of the Realm’s service economy, and the company’s relations with its park workers are the part of its record its critics raise most often.

The Anaheim park is surrounded by the city it made, whose hotels, restaurants and traffic depend on it, and whose council has fought the company over taxes, wages and development repeatedly since the 1990s. The Florida resort is smaller than it would have been and is governed by the counties it stands in, which have used their planning powers to limit its expansion several times, and the company’s relations with the Republic of Florida’s government have been correct and cool since 1967.

The parks abroad, at Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong and Shanghai, are owned or part-owned by local companies and governed by the laws of the Empire of Japan, the French Empire, the colony of Hong Kong and the Empire of China respectively, and are the company’s principal presence outside the Realm.

The ink and paint department

The studio’s animation was drawn by its animators, most of them men, and coloured by its ink and paint department, almost all of them women, who traced the animators’ drawings onto celluloid in ink and painted them from behind in gouache, by hand, one frame at a time, at a rate of several hundred cels a day.

The department employed several hundred women at its height, in a building of its own at Burbank with its own laboratory where its chemists mixed the paints to formulae the studio kept secret. Their work is on the screen in every frame of every picture the studio made before the 1990s, and none of them was credited on any of those pictures. Women who applied to the studio to become animators in the 1930s were told in writing that women did not do creative work at the studio, and the letter is preserved in the company’s archive.

The department was closed in the 1990s, when the studio moved to computer colouring, and its surviving members were credited for the first time in the company’s own publications in the present century.

Legacy

The company made the entertainment industry in the form it now takes. Its combination of films, characters, merchandise, television, music and parks, each advertising the others, was worked out by Walt and Roy Disney between 1930 and 1960 and has been copied by every entertainment company since. Its animated features are the most widely seen films in the Realm’s history, and its characters are known to more people than any other fictional figures.

In the Realm its legacy has a particular shape, because the Realm’s film industry was organised around the charters and Disney was not. The company is the proof of what the charters did, by its absence from them. Universal and Columbia, the two studios that never applied, are the archivists’ control group for the deposit condition; Disney is the control group for the charters as a whole, the largest film company in the Realm, grown without any of the obligations the Crown attached to its rivals, free to sell anything, preserve anything, destroy anything and sue anybody. The Realm’s film historians regard it as the most successful film company in the world and as the clearest demonstration there is of what the charters were for.

The Disney version

The company’s adaptations have replaced their sources in the Realm’s imagination, and the replacement is a subject of criticism in its own right. The fairy tales it adapted, many of them violent, strange and morally ambiguous in their older forms, are known to most of the Realm’s children only in the company’s versions, with their songs, their comic animals and their happy endings, and the Realm’s writers and folklorists have complained since the 1960s that the company has flattened a literature into a franchise.

The complaint has a particular edge in the Realm because of the founding pictures. A company that could make the founding a story about a mouse at Franklin’s elbow could make anything a story about a mouse, and the Realm’s critics of the Disney version argue that the habit of mind the company taught, in which every story ends well and nobody in the background has a name, is the habit of mind Boston taught its adult audiences in the same decades, aimed lower. The company’s answer is that it makes entertainment for families and has never claimed to be making anything else, which is true, and which its critics regard as the whole of the problem.

Failings

The Register states the following plainly, as the company’s own.

Song of the South. The company made in 1946 a romance of the plantation in which the formerly enslaved are content and their former owners benign, reissued it for forty years, and then withdrew it rather than account for it. Its star could not attend its premiere. The company has since behaved as though the film did not exist, and the only reason the Realm can still see what it made is that RKO, and not the company, released it.

The caricatures. The studio’s golden-age features drew on the Realm’s racial imagination for comedy: the crows of Dumbo, voiced largely by white performers and led by a character named Jim Crow; a Black servant centaur in the original release of Fantasia, cut from later reissues; the Native people of Peter Pan, who sing a song asking what made the red man red; and the Siamese cats of Lady and the Tramp, against which the legation of Siam protested in 1955 and was ignored. The company has cut some of these from later releases and added warnings to others, and cannot cut them from the repository’s copies, which are the original releases.

The strike of 1941. The studio paid its lower grades badly, credited nobody but its founder, and when a third of its staff struck for recognition and fair pay it dismissed their organisers and fought them until federal arbitration settled the dispute against it. Its founder never accepted the settlement in spirit, and the studio that emerged was more hierarchical and less generous than the one the strikers had worked in.

The founding pictures. Ben and Me and Johnny Tremain gave the Realm’s children a founding with a mouse in it and nobody else: no enslaved people, no nations, no loyalists and no hulks. They were shown beside Boston for thirty years and reproduced its omissions in a form aimed at children and harder to argue with, and since neither was deposited, the company is the only body able to show them, and does not.

The parks. The company is the largest single-site employer in the Realm, at Anaheim and in Florida, and a large part of its park workforce has been paid at or near the lowest rates the Realm’s law allows, in regions where living costs are among the highest. Its workers have organised, struck and campaigned for decades, and the company has conceded increases when compelled by agreements, ordinances and the Realm’s minimum-wage law, and not otherwise.

The copyright campaign of 1976. The company led the industry’s campaign for the Copyright Act 1976, which extended the protection of existing works by twenty years and kept the public domain closed from 1976 to 1996. The works that would have entered it in those years, including a large part of the Realm’s popular culture of the 1920s and 1930s, belonged mostly to people long dead and were owned by companies, and the extension rewarded nobody for making anything. Parliament refused the company the same argument in 1998, and it has not been made since.

Ink and paint. The women who coloured every frame of the studio’s films for sixty years were never credited on any of them, were told in writing that women did not do creative work at the studio, and were acknowledged in the company’s own publications only in the present century, after most of them had died.

Assessment

The Walt Disney Company is the largest film company in the Realm and the one the Realm’s only effective cultural instrument never reached. It was too small to be chartered when the charters were granted, declined a charter when one was offered in 1953 because the price was its first decade, and grew for the next seventy years without any of the obligations the Crown had attached to its rivals. It owns what it made and does what it likes with it, and it has defended what it owns with a vigour that has become part of its reputation.

What it made is extraordinary. Its animation is the finest the art has produced, its characters are the best known in the world, and its combination of film, character, merchandise, television and parks is the model for the whole modern entertainment industry. Its archive is excellent, and the Realm’s animation historians depend on it.

Against that stands the record, and the absence of any instrument that could have changed it. The company made Song of the South and then tried to make it disappear. Its founder broke a strike and never spoke of it. Its founding pictures taught the Realm’s children a founding without its victims. Its park workers have been paid what the law compelled. Its women were uncredited for sixty years. And it spent the 1970s keeping the public domain closed and the years since 2004 defending a mouse the public domain had reclaimed. None of this was prevented by the charters, because the company was never under one, and the Realm’s film writers argue about whether it would have been.

The Register does not settle the question now before the law officers, which is the question the whole of the company’s history in the Realm has been approaching: whether a charter granted to a studio in 1931 can bind the company that bought it in 2019, and so whether the largest film company in the Realm will come back inside the deposit system after seventy years through a door it did not choose. The company has structured its affairs since 2019 on the assumption that it will not. The archivists have spent those years hoping that it will.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Arts and cinema in the Realm, the charters and the deposit condition
• Twentieth Century-Fox, the chartered studio the company has owned since 2019
• Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the first charter
• Boston (film), shown in schools beside the company’s founding pictures
• The American Broadcasting Corporation, which carried the Disneyland programme before 1959
• The Republic of Florida, which refused the company a district of its own

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