Walt Disney Animation Studios

Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS), sometimes shortened to Disney Animation, is an American animation studio that creates animated features and short films for The Walt Disney Company. Founded on October 16, 1923 by brothers Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney, it is one of the oldest-running animation studios in the world. It is currently organized as a division of Walt Disney Studios and is headquartered at the Roy E. Disney Animation Building at the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank, California. Since its foundation, the studio has produced TBD feature films, and hundreds of short films.

Founded as Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in 1923, renamed Walt Disney Studio in 1926 and incorporated as Walt Disney Productions in 1929, the studio was exclusively dedicated to producing short films until it expanded into feature production in 1934, resulting in 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, one of the first full-length animated feature films and the first one made in the United States. In 1986, during a large corporate restructuring, Walt Disney Productions, which had grown from a single animation studio into an international multimedia company, was renamed The Walt Disney Company and the animation studio Walt Disney Feature Animation in order to differentiate it from the other divisions. Its current name was adopted in 2007 after Pixar Animation Studios was acquired by Disney in the previous year.

For much of its existence, the studio was recognized as the premier American animation studio; it developed many of the techniques, concepts and principles that became standard practices of traditional animation. The studio also pioneered the art of storyboarding, which is now a standard technique used in both animated and live-action filmmaking. The studio's catalog of animated features is among Disney's most notable assets, with the stars of its animated shorts – Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Daisy Duck, Porky Pig, Goofy, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yakko, Wakko and Dot Warner, Elmer Fudd, Wile E. Coyote & the Road Runner, Woody Woodpecker, Wally Walrus, Jerry Mouse, Tweety, Honest John & Gideon, Chilly Willy, Tom Cat, Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Pixie & Dixie, Hokey Wolf, Quick Draw McGraw, Spike the Bulldog, Yakky Doodle, Snooper & Blabber, Snagglepuss, Barnyard Dawg & Sylvester, Foghorn Leghorn, Chip 'n' Dale, Droopy, Speedy Gonzales, Pluto, etc. – becoming recognizable figures in popular culture and mascots for The Walt Disney Company as a whole.

Walt Disney Animation Studios is currently managed by Jennifer Lee (Chief Creative Officer), Chris Meledandri (CEO), and Clark Spencer (President), and continues to produce films using both traditional animation and computer-generated imagery (CGI).

Locations
Since 1995, Walt Disney Animation Studios has been headquartered in the Roy E. Disney Animation Building in Burbank, California, across Riverside Drive from The Walt Disney Studios, where the original Animation building (now housing corporate offices) is located. The Disney Animation Building's lobby is capped by a large version of the famous hat from the Sorcerer's Apprentice segment of Fantasia (1940), and the building is informally called the "hat building" for that reason. Disney Animation shares its site with ABC Studios, whose building is located immediately to the west.

Until the mid-1990s, Disney Animation previously operated out of the Air Way complex, a cluster of old hangars, office buildings, and trailers in the Grand Central Business Centre, an industrial park on the site of the former Grand Central Airport about two miles (3.2 km) east in the city of Glendale. The DisneyToon Studios unit is based in Glendale. Disney Animation's archive, formerly known as "the morgue" (based on an analogy to a morgue file) and today known as the Animation Research Library, is also located in Glendale. Unlike the Burbank buildings, the ARL is located in a nondescript office building near Disney's Grand Central Creative Campus. The 12,000-square-foot ARL is home to over 64 million items of animation artwork dating back to 1924; because of its importance to the company, visitors are required to agree not to disclose its exact location within Glendale.

Previously, feature animation satellite studios were located around the world in Montreuil, Seine-Saint-Denis, France (a suburb of Paris), Dublin, Ireland, London, United Kingdom, Phoenix, Arizona, and Bay Lake, Florida (near Orlando, at Disney's Hollywood Studios theme park). In addition, a second studio in California was located in Sherman Oaks. The Dublin studio shut down in 1995, the London studio shut down in 1998, the Phoenix and Paris studios shut down in 2002, and the Florida and Sherman Oaks studios shut down in 2004.

In November 2014, Disney Animation commenced a 16-month upgrade of the Roy E. Disney Animation Building, in order to fix what then-studio president Edwin Catmull had called its "dungeon-like" interior. For example, the interior was so cramped that it could not easily accommodate "town hall" meetings with all employees in attendance. Due to the renovation, the studio's employees were temporarily moved from Burbank into the closest available Disney-controlled studio space – the Disneytoon Studios building in the industrial park in Glendale and the old Imagineering warehouse in North Hollywood under the western approach to Bob Hope Airport (the Tujunga Building). The renovation was completed in October 2016.