In the service he kept drawing, and when he was mustered out, he set up a shop as a commercial artist in Kansas City, Mo. There he discovered animation, a new field, wide open to an ambitious young man determined to escape his father's sorry fate (Schickel).
Walt returned home from France in the fall of 1919, determined to become an artist. He wanted to pursue a career in commercial art, which soon lead to his experiments in animation. He began producing short animated films for local businesses, in Kansas City. By the time Walt had started to create The Alice Comedies, which was about a real girl and her adventures in an animated world, Walt ran out of money, and his company Laugh-O-Grams went bankrupted. Instead of giving up, Walt packed his suitcase and with his unfinished print of The Alice Comedies in hand, headed for Hollywood to start a new business. He was not yet twenty-two (A., Brad). He moved into the old Disney house in Kansas City with his brothers, Roy and Herbert, and tried unsuccessfully to get a job as an artist at the Kansas City "Star." Roy helped him get a position as an apprentice at the Pesmen-Rubin Commercial Art Studio, where he drew horses, cows, and bags of feed for farm-equipment catalogues.
Unfortunately, just before Christmas, there wasn't enough business to keep him on the payroll, and Walt was laid off. So he and another laid-off artist, Ub Iwerks, decided to .
start a commercial-art business together, called Iwerks-Disney. He wanted to improve upon the clumsy means of animation used at Kansas City Film Ad. He read books about animation and discovered how the leading New York animators worked. Then he started making his own cartoons ("Walt's Story: Episode One"). After work, Walt stayed up late into the night working on animation. At the time, Kansas City theaters rented cartoons from East Coast animators. Walt decided he could compete with them by creating his own with a local twist.