Over the course of the seven years I’ve had this blog I’ve covered Disney a lot, not just because that company has the most extensive history but because it has the most fascinating history. Walt Disney was a dreamer and a visionary who could observe the talents of the people around him and knew how to conduct them like an orchestra. That’s how he turned a drawing of a cartoon mouse into a film star and broadened the horizons of the animation medium. This year, to celebrate the company’s 100th anniversary, I wrote nine “100 Years of Disney” essays over the course of nine months with the articles focusing on Disney’s short films, feature films, characters, music and television as well as all the sad moments, joyful moments, funny moments and scary moments of Disney films. So when figuring out what my tenth and final essay should be about I decided I would focus on Disney’s influence, first as a studio and then as a brand, and it may be even more far-reaching than you think. Thankfully as someone who is not only a Disney history nerd but an animation history nerd, I can talk about this in a way that is comprehensive.

If you look at the history of animation, the way the medium usually grows is that an animator from one studio leaves and creates their own studio. For example, Max and Dave Fleischer worked for Bray Productions before bringing the Out of the Inkwell series to Fleischer Studios. Jay Ward, the creator of TV shows like Crusader Rabbit and Rocky and Bullwinkle, would not have founded Jay Ward Productions if not for the help of experienced animators like Alex Anderson and Bill Scott, the former a TerryToons alum and the latter a UPA alum. But while Barré led to Felix the Cat and Bray led to Betty Boop, no animation studio has a bigger family tree than Disney. The reputation for high quality that Disney built since the 1920s has benefitted the resumes of many an artist who stepped into the Mouse House.

Here are some of the biggest examples of Disney’s influence:

Looney Tunes

This is one of the earliest and clearest examples, and I’m not just saying that because “Looney Tunes” and “Silly Symphonies” have similar names. It is common knowledge among animation fans that Warner Bros. cartoons were cultivated by Disney alums. When Disney was the new studio on the block back when their most successful films were the Alice Comedies and the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit series, animators Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising were among the animators Walt hired to make those films, but when the duo left Disney to create Bosko, Leon Schlesinger brought them to Warner Bros. and they started the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series. Not only that but Disney animator Friz Freleng became one of WB’s most prolific directors as well as the creator of popular characters like Porky Pig, Sylvester the Cat and Yosemite Sam. Freleng would also go on to co-found Warner Bros. Cartoons successor DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, which produced the Looney Tunes series in the sixties, the animated Pink Panther character and a number of TV series and specials before that company eventually got sold to Marvel and morphed into the animation studio Marvel Productions, which produced such shows as Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, G.I. Joe, Muppet Babies, The Transformers and My Little Pony, eventually changing its name once again to New World Animation in 1993 and teaming up with Marvel a year later to form Marvel Films which eventually led to the formation of Marvel Studios, the company Kevin Feige is currently the president of.

Chuck Jones

Disney’s most important animator in the studio’s early days was Mickey Mouse co-creator Ub Iwerks, but Iwerks would eventually leave Disney for MGM to create Flip the Frog, a series of short films that only lasted from 1930 to 1933. Iwerks eventually returned to Disney, but one significant outcome of Iwerks’ tenure at MGM was that Iwerks was the first person to hire a young Chuck Jones before Jones eventually joined Warner Bros. and became one of the most talented and acclaimed Looney Tunes directors. Chuck Jones would later go back to MGM and co-found his own animation studio in 1962 called Sib Tower 12, the studio which would eventually morph into MGM Animation and produce The Dot and the Line (1965), How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966) and The Phantom Tollbooth (1970) before it closed at the end of the sixties. But one of the studio’s animators Phil Roman would go on to found the animation studio Film Roman in 1984. That studio was responsible for such TV shows as Garfield and Friends, Bobby’s World and The Simpsons for which they took over animation duties from Klasky-Csupo in 1992 and have animated every season until 2016.

Hanna-Barbera

After Harman and Ising left WB, they would also produce animated shorts for MGM, including the Tom and Jerry series created by William Hanna and Joe Barbera, two directors who would go on to found the television studio Hanna-Barbera, which produced Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Jonny Quest, Scooby-Doo and much more. Hanna-Barbera itself would also lead to the creation of other studios, such as Ruby-Spears, founded by Scooby-Doo creators Joe Ruby and Ken Spears and producers of several animated series from 1977 to 1996, not to mention Cartoon Network Studios, Adult Swim and with the hiring of Seth MacFarlane on such shows as Dexter’s Laboratory, Cow and Chicken and Johnny Bravo, MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door Productions, the production company behind Family Guy, American Dad!, Ted and The Orville.

UPA

After the Disney Strike, where Disney animators picketed the studio in the early 1940s for Walt’s refusal to unionize, dissatisfied animators went on to found United Productions of America aka UPA, a more stylized and experimental studio than Disney’s which became most famous for introducing the world to Mr. Magoo and Gerald McBoing Boing and featured a long list of animation legends as its alumni, including Bill Scott (Rocky and Bullwinkle, George of the Jungle), Gene Deitch (Tom Terrific), George Dunning (Yellow Submarine), Fred Wolf (The Point, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), Phil Kimmelman (Schoolhouse Rock!) and former Disney animator John Hubley (Moonbird, Watership Down) who himself would end up giving Michael Sporn his big animation break in the 1970s before the indie animator went on to find success working for Sesame Street and HBO.

Other examples of Disney’s influence on the animation industry: Filmation, the studio behind Fat Albert and He-Man, was co-founded by Hal Sutherland, a former Disney animator; the success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a movie Disney produced with Richard Williams and Amblin, led to the formation of Amblimation, a studio founded by Steven Spielberg that would create only three animated films for Universal in the 1990s before the team brought their talents to The Prince of Egypt following the formation of DreamWorks and Amblimation morphed into DreamWorks Animation; Don Bluth quit Disney in the 1970s and went independent creating classics like The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail and The Land Before Time before co-founding Fox Animation Studios in 1994 and directing Anastasia and Titan A.E., the latter’s box office failure prompting Fox to switch Ice Age from hand-drawn animation at Fox Animation Studios to computer animation at Blue Sky Studios, which became Fox’s primary animation house and whose president Chris Meledandri would later go on to found the animation studio Illumination; even CalArts, a school co-founded by Walt Disney, housed students who would go on to become the creative forces behind companies like Pixar, Klasky-Csupo and Rough Draft as well as some of the most popular animated series like The Simpsons, King of the Hill, SpongeBob SquarePants, Dexter’s Laboratory, The Powerpuff Girls, Adventure Time and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.

So when I say Disney is historically the most important animation studio, I’m not just talking about the technical innovations like the sound of Steamboat Willie and the feature length runtime of Snow White. It’s also the ripple effect that it caused in the industry.

And then there is the other kind of influence the company has on life in general as the most trusted family brand in entertainment. Disney’s popularity really took off during the Great Depression because Disney cartoons were the films that did the best job of cheering people up. Mickey Mouse and the Silly Symphonies, what may seem like corny and overly sentimental films to the modern audiences of today, were exactly what audiences needed back then, and the escapism that Disney has offered ever since then, not just in film but at theme parks, is a large part of why the company continues to appeal to the public to this day. Speaking for myself as a lifelong Disney fan since I was a child, Disney is like the ultimate fantasy in a way. Sure, when you grow up and look behind the curtain, The Walt Disney Company is just another typical giant corporation, but it’s selling something highly enticing to a lot of people: a romanticized vision of life. That is what Walt Disney was selling to the public and it is what the company continues to sell to the public. A fairy tale version of the world where the bad guy loses, where romance has happy endings, where magic is real, where pumpkins turn into carriages, where you get to dance on stage at the music concert with Powerline, and where dreams actually do come true. And it’s not hard to see why the fantasy world of Disney continues to be so popular as the real world gets worse and worse.

People who know me know that I am a pretty cynical realist. I watch the news, I follow politics, I am not religious, I constantly complain about the state of the world and I am an opinionated left-leaning pragmatist. In other words, I am the last person you might suspect of being a fan of something like Disney. But here’s a secret. Just because I am a realist doesn’t mean I am a masochist. In fact one of the reasons why my favorite genres are sci-fi and fantasy and why I love animation so much is because I enjoy getting out of my head and escaping reality. Although I admit that some of Disney’s appeal is based on nostalgia, it is much more than that. Sometimes I just want to stop worrying about the real world and focus on a world of Heigh Ho, Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo, Chim Chim Cher-ee and Hakuna Matata. Sometimes I want to see a world where the people with kind hearts are the ones who get to wear the glass slippers. Sometimes I just want to feel a modicum of joy in this world before I die. Yes it is fantasy. But for a brief moment, it is real.

This is why I am a Disney fan!

Yeah, I know this article may come off corny. This is Disney we’re talking about. But also, why does fantasizing about an idealized world have to be corny anyway? Do I think we will ever achieve world peace and sing “It’s a Small World” together? Hell no. But there’s no reason why we can’t aspire to be the best we can be. If there’s one thing Walt Disney believed in, it was working hard to achieve your goals and not giving up on impossible dreams.