The "language" of the cinema began development when Edison first introduced the film camera to the Americas. One can even point to the previous, jarring work of the Lumiere Brothers in France, who began recording films possibly as early as 1895. Max and Emil Skladanowsky had begun showing projected images on the first of November that year in Berlin, but because the Skladanowsky's projection system was considered primitive, the official birth of the cinema as we know it today occured on December 1, 1895 in Paris. That day, at the Salon Indien du Grand Cafe, the Lumieres showed ten short films to a paying audience using a projection device called the Cinematographe, which was invented by Leon Bouly.
(Scene from "The Arrival of the Train")The audience was said to have jumped back in their seats at the sight of the approaching train, in a short film entitled "The Arrival of the Train". Because the jarring nature of "cutting" was still years (and countries) away*, these films weren't much more than moving images of singular events projected onto the wall of the cafe.
*Sergei Eisenstein discovered the concept of Montage in the early 1920s. He and Lev Kuleshov pioneered the concept, and Eisenstein called it "the very essence of the cinema".
As the cinema evolved, so did its interpretations and its interpreters. By the time D.W. Griffith began making films like Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), the form was well on the way to becoming a "master" art form; that is, a form that combines all others for the most powerful tool of communication ever discovered. More than any others, these two Griffith epics were the ones that paved the way for narrative cinema.
As the Cinema evolved, it led to yet another combination of forms: the drawing or painting and the moving image itself. When combined and projected at any steady rate, it made the drawings capable of movement. Since drawings didn't have to be subjected to the laws of captured footage, animation was born as an art form. With animation's birth comes into the picture a young man born in Chicago at the beginning of the last century, and raised on farms and in small towns across the midwestern united states. This man began drawing at a young age, and though he was never very good at it, he had a talent of creative leadership that few have been able to meet and none have been able to surpass.
Walter Elias Disney started to become interested in drawing and particularly in animation for many reasons. He stated many stories to reporters and television shows- most notably his own, which aired its first broadcast on October 27, 1954. We can only speculate, but like so many other American Dreamers of his generation, he came to Hollywood with nothing in his pockets but a few quarters and some lint, and built an entertainment empire that rose first from the green hills of Glendale, and later from the orange groves of Anaheim.
Walt was constantly interested in the next thing. He cared never to repeat himself, because he saw this as fear, and said that fear usually meant failure. Because Animation nearly drove him to the brink of insanity, Disney moved down a new path, and into a new form. As he had revolutionized short cartoons, invented and then revolutionized feature length animated films, and was in the process of revolutionizing television, Disney wanted to revolutionize the idea of family amusement. He wanted to build a new concept in the form, called a "Theme Park".
Before Walt Disney, Amusement parks consisted of dirty, unkempt ride supervisors and noisy, unsafe machinery. They often attracted unsavory elements, and many of these unsavory elements stayed on long after the show had left any particular town. Disney wanted to provide a place where people could have fun in a safe, quiet, controlled environment. In short, he wanted to bring the same language and form he had used to create animated films for the entire family and apply it to a three-dimensional space. This being Walt Disney, of course, that wasn't enough.
Walt, without knowing it, created the new "master form". The way that cinema had become the ultimate form of expression, his theme park would find a way to bring the screen to startling life, and to place people in the middle of a true cinematic experience. Disney formed WED Enterprises, which later became Walt Disney Imagineering, on December 16, 1952. WED's designers had begun life in the grammar of film. Most were set designers and craftsmen from rival studios, and a few story men came from Walt's own studio.
These were the men that would take the roadside carnival and reinvent it. They would give new life to an ancient form of fun, and making fun would, by their hand, become far more than a national pastime. Human beings are storytellers by nature. To take the physical world we live in and bring the stories that make our souls more soulful out into it was an art form that had yet to be explored. It was a combination of film and architecture, and the languages of those two worlds meshed in a way they never had before.
If we trace the roots of the word itself, "Imagineering", we find numerous uses throughout history. The first recorded usage comes from a rural Alabama newspaper article from January 1942. It references the word in presenting the idea that "war brings new words-- or atleast brings old ones back in new attire". Another early reference comes from an advertisement for the artist Arthur C. Radebaugh in an Ohio newspaper in 1947.
(The work of Arthur Radebaugh, who called himself the first "Imagineer".)Walt Disney never claimed to be a master of invention, but he was quite the entrepreneur when it came to reinvention. Here was a man who spent his life doing two things. He would attempt feverishly to outrun himself and then attempt to reinvent the work he had just outrun. Time and again he pronouced to his brother and his family that he was done with animation or with television or especially with striking workers or money men, and time and again he turned his energies to his frustrations and literally outdid them. When he became frustrated with the state of his animated short cartoons, Disney created the world's first animated feature-length motion picture. When he grew incensed at the Hollywood Studios' view of television, he created "Disneyland" (later Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color), which in turn saved his dying business results at the box office.
When Walt became agitated over his sunday outings with daughters Sharon and Diane, he turned his energies to creating a perfect environment where "children and parents can have fun- together".
Or so the story goes.
Much like the persona of Walt beamed into viewer's living rooms every sunday night on his television program, much of the myth surrounding Disneyland was as concocted as the place itself. We'd all like to believe that this was the truth, but the real truth is actually shrouded in a somewhat more abstract and indescribable emotion. Walt Disney created Disneyland for the same reason the Lumiere Brothers projected images of "The Arrival of the Train". As all humans do, he had an intrinsic need to create.
Disneyland was the one project that Walt never became upset enough to outrun. He loved it from its very inception, in a locked room at the Studio. He loved it through the difficult times during its construction and especially the financing of the park, which Disney nearly broke the bank attempting to secure. It was Walt's love that created this new art form, and the people he lovingly chose to carry out his dream that invented the language to carry the new master form through the next half century, and with a little luck, beyond.
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