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."

on Walt Disney World & Epcot...

"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.""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 twill 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."
on Fantasia..."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."
on Animation..."Animation offers a medium of story telling 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."

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 filmaking, 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."General Comments...

"I am interested in entertaining people, in bringing pleasure, particularly laughter, to others, rather than being concerned with 'expressing' myself with obscure creative impressions.""We are not trying to entertain the critics. I'll take my chances with the public."

"You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality."
"All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.""When you're curious, you find lots of interesting things to do. And one thing it takes to accomplish something is courage."

"I don't like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It's just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.""Somehow I can't believe there are any heights that can't be scaled by a man who knows the secret of making dreams come true. This special secret, it seems to me, can be summarized in four C's. They are Curiosity, Confidence, Courage, and Constancy and the greatest of these is Confidence. When you believe a thing, believe it all the way, implicitly and unquestionably.""We allow no geniuses around our Studio.""Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood."

"I never called my work an 'art' It's part of show business, the business of building entertainment."
"I am not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other motion picture company."

"Whenever I go on a ride, I'm always thinking of what's wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.""The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing."

"Laughter is America's most important export."
"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.""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.""The era we are living in today is a dream of coming true.""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."

"Your dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.""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.""I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn't know how to get along without it."-"Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource - the minds of our children."
"You reach a point where you don't work for money."

"Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.""I have no use for people who throw there weight around as celebrities, or for those who fawn over you just because you are famous.""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."
"A man should never neglect his family for business."
"When we consider a project, we really study it--not just the surface idea, but everything about it. And when we go into that new project, we believe in it all the way. We have confidence in our ability to do it right. And we work hard to do the best possible job.""I believe in being an modivator."