Disney's 100th Anniversary: how the Walt Disney Company took over the world

Laying the foundations
It all started with a mouse. Or, more precisely, a house.

Twenty-one year old Walter Elias Disney moved to Los Angeles in July 1923, to be closer to his older brother Roy and make animated shorts from his uncle’s home in Hollywood.

Before he turned 22, the young man from Missouri had persuaded his brother to join him in business, setting up an animation studio in the back room of a nearby real estate office on 16 October 1923. They called it the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio. It would make them both millionaires.

But success would not come quickly. It wasn’t until 1928’s Steamboat Willie, Disney’s first smash hit and one of the first animated films with sound, that audiences started to take notice.

Produced from the new Hyperion Studio, it featured a certain Mickey Mouse, “an icon of generosity and good spirits," according to Disney expert Dr Todd James Pierce. Following the earlier character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Mickey would become a mainstay of childhood the world over.