Disney Golden Age

Th Disney Golden Age refers to he beginning of the Disney Animated Canon when Walt Disney was still alive and all the films received critical acclaims despite struggles at the box office due to World War II and other problems. It is predicted that the era started when Disney made his first full-length animated feature, beginning with the film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, and ending in 1970 with The Aristocats, which is also said to be the start of another era known as The Disney Dark Age.

The animated films released during this period include Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942), Saludos Amigos (1942), The Three Caballeros (1944), Make Mine Music (1946), Fun and Fancy Free (1947), Melody Time (1948), The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949), Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955), Sleeping Beauty (1959), One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), The Sword in the Stone (1963), and The Jungle Book (1967).

History
In 1934, Walt Disney gathered several key staff members and announced his plans to make his first feature animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The production was dubbed "Disney's Folly" due to many doubting its success. The film became the first animated feature in English and Technicolor. Silly Symphonies such as The Goddess of Spring (1934) and The Old Mill (1937) served as experimentation grounds for new techniques for the production.

Walt Disney introduced each of the Seven Dwarfs in a scene from the original 1937 Snow White theatrical trailer.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs cost Disney an expensive sum of $1.4 million to complete (including $100,000 on story development alone), and was an unprecedented success when released in February 1938 by RKO Radio Pictures, which had assumed distribution of Disney product from United Artists in 1937. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was briefly the highest grossing film of all time before the success of Gone with the Wind two years later, grossing over $8 million on its initial release, the equivalent of $134,033,100 in 1999 dollars. The studio launched into the production of new animated features, the first of which was Pinocchio, released in February 1940. Pinocchio was not initially a box office success. Of the film's $2.289 million cost – twice of Snow White – Disney only recouped $1 million by late 1940, with studio reports of the film's final original box office take varying between $1.4 million and $1.9 million. However, Pinocchio was a critical success, winning the Academy Award for Best Original Song and Best Original Score, making it the first film of the studio to win not only either Oscar, but both at the same time. Fantasia, was released in November 1940 by Disney itself in a series of limited-seating roadshow engagements. The film cost $2 million to produce, and although the film earned $1.4 million in its roadshow engagements, the high cost ($85,000 per theater) of installing Fantasound placed Fantasia at an even greater loss than Pinocchio. Despite its financial failure, Fantasia was the subject of two Academy Honorary Awards on February 26, 1942, one for the development of the innovative Fantasound system used to create the film's stereoscopic soundtrack, and the other for Leopold Stokowski and his contributions to the film.

Much of the character animation on these productions and all subsequent features until the late 1970s was supervised by a brain-trust of animators Walt Disney dubbed the "Nine Old Men," many of whom also served as directors and later producers on the Disney features. Other head animators at Disney during this period included Norm Ferguson, Bill Tytla, and Fred Moore. The development of the feature animation department created a caste system at the Disney studio: lesser animators (and feature animators in-between assignments) were assigned to work on the short subjects, while animators higher in status such as the Nine Old Men worked on the features. Concern over Walt Disney accepting credit for the artists' work as well as debates over compensation led to many of the newer and lower- ranked animators seeking to unionize the Disney studio.

Dumbo, in production during the midst of the animators' strike, premiered in October 1941, and proved to be a financial success. The film only cost $950,000 to produce, half the cost of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, less than a third of the cost of Pinocchio, and two-fifths of the cost of Fantasia. Dumbo eventually grossed $1.6 million during its original release. In August 1942, Bambi was released, and as with Pinocchio and Fantasia, did not perform well at the box office. Out of its $1.7 million budget, it only grossed $1.64 million. Production of full-length animated features was temporarily suspended after the release of Bambi. Given the financial failures of some of the recent features and World War II cutting off much of the overseas cinema market, the studio's financiers at the Bank of America would only loan the studio working capital if it temporarily restricted itself to shorts production. Then in-production featureswere therefore put on hold until after the war.[60] Other issues affecting the studio at the time included the drafting of several Disney animators to fight in World War II, and the necessity for the studio to focus on producing wartime content for the U.S. Army, particularly military training and civilian propaganda films. From 1942 to 1943, 95 percent of the studio's animation output was for the military.[61] During the war, Disney produced the live-action/animated military propaganda feature Victory Through Air Power (1943),[62] and a series of Latin culture-themed shorts resulting from the 1941 Good Neighbor trip were compiled into two features, Saludos Amigos (1942) and The Three Caballeros (1944).[62]

Saludos and Caballeros set the template for several other 1940s Disney releases of "package films": low-budgeted films composed of animated short subjects with animated or live-action bridging material.[63][64] These films were Make Mine Music (1946), Fun and Fancy Free (1947), Melody Time (1948), and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad(1949). The studio also produced two features, Song of the South (1946) and So Dear to My Heart (1948), which used more expansive live-action stories which still included animated sequences and sequences combining live-action and animated characters. Shorts production continued during this period as well, with Donald Duck, Goofy, and Plutocartoons being the main output accompanied by cartoons starring Mickey Mouse, Figaro, and in the 1950s, Chip 'n Dale and Humphrey the Bear.[65]