Filmography
As shown in Steamboat Willie, music and animation made a winning combination, and Disney proceeded to create a series of shorts called Silly Symphonies, the most famous of which was The Three Little Pigs (1933), which introduced the hit tune, "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" In addition to turning his shorts into mini musicals, Disney also experimented with color, working hand-in-hand with Technicolor to implement their new three-color process in his animated short, Flowers and Trees (1933). It was a huge success and soon Disney's Technicolor Silly Symphonies were outgrossing his black-and-white Mickey Mouse films, which were later made in Technicolor as well. Disney than decided to try his hand in feature-length animated films.
Though it cost more than Walt had, the making of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 was a huge success and luckily was followed by yet another hit, Pinocchio in 1940. In the hopes of expanding his audience and gaining even greater popularity, Disney then joined with conductor Leopold Stokowski to create an animated feature built around classical music. The result was Fantasia in 1940, a hugely ambitious work that flopped in its initial release, scorned by the music elite and ignored by children who found it really boring. It was only later, when reissued, that a more sophisticated audience than young children discovered the film and its beauty. It has since become one of Disney's most profitable early features.
Disney continued making animated features, but with generally lesser ambition as the years rolled on. His more memorable efforts were in the 1940s and early 1950s with films such as Dumbo in 1941, Bambi in 1942, Peter Pan in 1953, and The Lady and the Tramp in 1956. Among his later animated features only The Jungle Book in 1967 had any particular flair. Though he had done so in the past, in the 1960s Disney began to combine live action and animation as never before, most memorably in Mary Poppins (1964), one of the biggest hits of his last decade.