How it started
1923–1929: Founding and early years
Kansas City, Missouri, natives Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney founded Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in Los Angeles in 1923 after the bankruptcy of the Laugh-O-Gram Studio. They got their start producing a series of silent Alice Comedies short films, a pioneer of the live-action animated film genre. The Alice Comedies were picked up by Margaret J. Winkler's Winkler Pictures, who handled production and distribution duties of the studio's films. Upon relocating to California, the Disney brothers initially started working in their uncle Robert Disney's garage at 4406 Kingswell Avenue in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, then, in October 1923, formally launched their studio in a small office on the rear side of a real estate agency's office at 4651 Kingswell Avenue. In February 1924, the studio moved next door to office space of its own at 4649 Kingswell Avenue. In 1925, Disney put down a deposit on a new location at 2719 Hyperion Avenue in the nearby Silver Lake neighborhood, which came to be known as the Hyperion Studio to distinguish it from the studio's other locations, and, in January 1926, the studio moved there and took on the name Walt Disney Studio.
The Walt Disney Studio at the time solely handled animation services, while all other aspects of production were handled by Winkler Pictures; Winkler eventually dropped their distribution services and found a distributor in Universal Pictures. The all-animated Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, starting in 1927, was a great success for Universal Pictures, causing the studio's reputation to skyrocket. Charles Mintz wanted to force Disney to accept a lower advance payment for each Oswald short as a cost-cutting measure. Disney refused and, as Universal owned the rights to Oswald rather than Disney, Mintz set up his own animation studio to produce Oswald cartoons. Most of Disney's staff was hired away by Mintz to move over once Disney's Oswald contract expired in mid-1928.
Working in secret while the rest of the staff finished the remaining Oswalds on contract, Disney and his head animator Ub Iwerks led a small handful of loyal staffers in producing cartoons starring a new character named Mickey Mouse, renaming the company Disney Cartoons in the process. The first two Mickey Mouse cartoons, Plane Crazy and The Galloping Gaucho, were previewed in limited engagements during the summer of 1928. For the third Mickey cartoon, however, Disney produced a soundtrack, collaborating with musician Carl Stalling and businessman Pat Powers of Celebrity Productions, who provided Disney with his bootlegged "Cinephone" sound-on-film process. Subsequently, the third Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie, became Disney's first cartoon with synchronized sound and was a major success upon its November 1928 debut at the West 57th Theatre in New York City. The Mickey Mouse series of sound cartoons, distributed by Celebrity Productions, quickly became the most popular cartoon series in the United States.
A second Disney series of sound cartoons, Silly Symphonies, debuted in 1929 with The Skeleton Dance. In total, five different shorts from the Silly Symphonies series were released by the end of 1929. All were scored by Stalling and involved animation by Iwerks.
1929–1940: Reincorporation, Silly Symphonies and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
From Wikipedia’s article on Walt Disney Animation Studios, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2