Walt Disney Animation Studios

Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS), also referred to as Disney Animation, headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California, is an American animation studio that creates animated feature films, short films and television specials for The Walt Disney Company. Founded on October 16, 1923, it is a division of The Walt Disney Studios. The studio has produced 56 feature films, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) to Moana (2016).

It was founded as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in 1923 and incorporated as Walt Disney Productions in 1929. The studio was exclusively dedicated to producing short films until it expanded into feature production in 1934. In 1983, Walt Disney Productions named its live action film studio Walt Disney Pictures. During a corporate restructuring in 1986, Walt Disney Productions was renamed The Walt Disney Company and the animation division, renamed Walt Disney Feature Animation, became a subsidiary of its film division, The Walt Disney Studios. In 2007, Walt Disney Feature Animation took on its current name, Walt Disney Animation Studios after Pixar was acquired by Disney in the same year.

For much of its existence, the studio was recognized as the premier American animation studio; it developed many of the techniques, concepts and principles that became standard practices of traditional animation. The studio also pioneered the art of storyboarding, which is now a standard technique used in both animated and live-action filmmaking. The studio's catalog of animated features is among Disney's most notable assets, with the stars of its animated shorts – Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Daisy Duck, Goofy and Pluto – becoming recognizable figures in popular culture and mascots for The Walt Disney Company as a whole.

Walt Disney Animation Studios continues to produce films using both traditional animation and computer-generated imagery (CGI). At the present, Andrew Millstein is the general manager of the studio for day-to-day business affairs, under the direction of Edwin Catmull (who also manages Pixar) and Jennifer Lee.

Management
Walt Disney Animation Studios is currently managed by Edwin Catmull (President), Jennifer Lee (Chief Creative Officer), and Andrew Millstein (President and General Manager). Since 2006, while continuing to live in the San Francisco Bay Area (where he also manages Pixar), Catmull and former chief creative officer John Lasseter regularly commuted to Burbank every week to spend at least two days (usually Tuesdays and Wednesdays) at Disney Animation. They initially appointed Millstein as general manager and executive vice president to handle day-to-day business operations on their behalf. Millstein was promoted to the title of president in November 2014, along with his counterpart at Pixar, general manager Jim Morris. Both Millstein and Morris continue to report to Catmull, who retains the title of president of both studios.

Former presidents of the studio include David Stainton (January 2003 – January 2006), Thomas Schumacher (January 2000 – December 2002) and Peter Schneider (1985 – December 1999).

Other Disney executives who also exercised much influence within the studio were Roy E. Disney (1985–2003, Chairman, Walt Disney Feature Animation), Jeffrey Katzenberg (1984–94, Chairman, The Walt Disney Studios), Michael Eisner (1984–2005, CEO, The Walt Disney Company), and Frank Wells (1984–94, President and COO, The Walt Disney Company). Following Roy Disney's passing in 2009, the WDAS headquarters in Burbank was re-dedicated as The Roy E. Disney Animation Building in May 2010.

Locations
Since 1995, Walt Disney Animation Studios has been headquartered in the Roy E. Disney Animation Building in Burbank, California, across Riverside Drive from The Walt Disney Studios, where the original Animation building (now housing corporate offices) is located. The Disney Animation Building's lobby is capped by a large version of the famous hat from the Sorcerer's Apprentice segment of Fantasia (1940), and the building is informally called the "hat building" for that reason. Disney Animation shares its site with ABC Studios, whose building is located immediately to the west.

Until the mid-1990s, Disney Animation previously operated out of the Air Way complex, a cluster of old hangars, office buildings, and trailers in the Grand Central Business Centre, an industrial park on the site of the former Grand Central Airport about two miles (3.2 km) east in the city of Glendale. The Disneytoon Studios unit was based in Glendale. Disney Animation's archive, formerly known as "the morgue" (based on an analogy to a morgue file) and today known as the Animation Research Library, is also located in Glendale. Unlike the Burbank buildings, the ARL is located in a nondescript office building near Disney's Grand Central Creative Campus. The 12,000-square-foot ARL is home to over 64 million items of animation artwork going back to 1924; because of its importance to the company, it requires visitors to agree to not disclose its exact location within Glendale.

Previously, feature animation satellite studios were located around the world in Montreuil, Seine-Saint-Denis, France (a suburb of Paris), and in Bay Lake, Florida (near Orlando, at Disney's Hollywood Studios, one of the four theme parks at Walt Disney World). The Paris studio was shut down in 2002, while the Florida studio was shut down in 2004. The Florida animation building survives as an office building, while the former Magic of Disney Animation section of the building is home to Star Wars Launch Bay.

In November 2014, Disney Animation commenced a 16-month upgrade of the Roy E. Disney Animation Building, in order to fix what Catmull had called its "dungeon-like" interior. For example, the interior was so cramped that it could not easily accommodate "town hall" meetings with all employees in attendance. Disney did not disclose the renovation's cost, but Lasseter revealed that "[t]he whole center of the second floor will have an atrium that will go up two stories[;] we want to make this building so beautiful that it's worthy of the artistic talent that's there." In addition, it was revealed that the large sorcerer's hat would become the building's main entrance. Lasseter stated, "There will be a gorgeous stairway that goes up into the hat, it's a really great symbol like you're entering the building through the magic of Mickey Mouse's hat." Due to the renovation, the studio's employees were temporarily moved from Burbank into the closest available Disney-controlled studio space – the Disneytoon Studios building in the industrial park in Glendale and the old Imagineering warehouse in North Hollywood under the western approach to Bob Hope Airport (the Tujunga Building). Director Don Hall analogized the studio's relocation to the end of The Empire Strikes Back, where "you know they're going to get back together." The renovation was completed in October 2016.

Feature films
Walt Disney Animation Studios has produced animated features in a series of animation techniques, including traditional animation, computer animation, and animation combined with live-action scenes. The studio's first film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, was released on December 21, 1937, and their most recent film, Moana, was released on November 23, 2016.

Short films
Since Alice Comedies in the 1920s, Walt Disney Animation Studios has produced a series of prominent short films, including the Mickey Mouse cartoons and the Silly Symphonies series. Many of these shorts provided a medium for the studio to experiment with new technologies that they would use in their filmmaking process, such as the synchronization of sound in Steamboat Willie (1928), the integration of the three-strip Technicolor process in Flowers and Trees (1932), the multiplane camera in The Old Mill (1937), the xerography process in Goliath II (1960), and the hand-drawn/CGI hybrid animation in Off His Rockers (1992), Paperman (2012), and Get a Horse! (2013).

On August 18, 2015, Disney released twelve short animation films entitled: Walt Disney Animation Studios Short Films Collection which includes among others Tick Tock Tale (2010) directed by Dean Wellins and Prep & Landing - Operation: Secret Santa (2010) written and directed by Kevin Deters Stevie Wermers-Skelton. On March 22, 2017 the set is running on Netflix Watch Instantly.

Documentary films about Disney animation

 * A Trip Through the Walt Disney Studios (1937, short)
 * The Reluctant Dragon (1941, a staged "mockumentary")
 * Frank and Ollie (1995)
 * Dream On Silly Dreamer (2005)
 * Waking Sleeping Beauty (2009)