The film "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" set one of the highest standards for animation. It was the most successful film of 1939 and no one was able to top it. Because the film won eight Academy Awards, the period was known as the "Golden Age of Animation". Walt Disney went to California with just $40 in his pocket and came out with so much more. There isn't a lot of celebrities out there that can say they went from 0 to 100 that quick. Not a lot of celebrities can build themselves up from being bankrupt that fast and methodically. Walt Disney set an exceptionally high standard for other cartoons by finding groundbreaking technological innovations like technicolor and sound.
An animation device that created an illusion of motion, the phenakistoscope, was the first kind of animation invented and it didn't get much better after that. Then Walt Disney was born and started sketching and drawing for school. He liked it so much he chose that as his career. After driving an ambulance for Red Cross for a year, Disney started working with cameras and made Laugh-O-Grams with his brother, Roy. Their animations were the first ones to actually make an impact on the world. According to biography.com, because of the income from the Laugh-O-Grams cartoons, the Disney brothers were able to open their own studio, which is when they made Alice in Cartoonland, a live action and animation series of fairy tales. Disney kept growing up his business after that in Hollywood and looked for new ways to pool in money.
After Laugh-O-Grams, Disney took a bold leap and tried to put faint sound in the background of a Mickey Mouse film called Steamboat Willie. The music was played at two beats per second according to galegroup.com. That film was animation's version of the first steps on the moon. People doubted the outcome of the film and film distributors poked fun at Disney's ideas. But Disney took one step for cartoons and one giant leap for animation kind and released it anyway with Pat Powers.