Flowers and Trees, a Silly Symphony and the first full-color cartoon, won the Academy Award ® for Best Cartoon for 1932, the first year that the Academy offered such a category. Eventually the Silly Symphonies turned into the training ground for all Disney artists as they prepared for the advent of animated feature films. It featured different casts of characters in each film and enabled animators to experiment with stories that relied less on the gags and quick humor of the Mickey cartoons and more on mood, emotion, and musical themes. Not one to rest on his laurels, Walt Disney soon produced another series-the Silly Symphonies-to go with the Mickey series. The new character was immediately popular, and, a lengthy series of Mickey Mouse cartoons followed. So, they made a third Mickey Mouse cartoon, this time with fully synchronized sound, and Steamboat Willie opened to rave reviews at the Colony Theater in New York November 18, 1928. Ub animated two Mickey Mouse cartoons, but Walt was unable to sell them because they were silent films, and sound was revolutionizing the movie industry. With his chief animator, Ub Iwerks, Walt designed the famous mouse and gave him a personality that endeared him to all. It was at the Hyperion Studio, after the loss of Oswald, that Walt had to come up with a new character, and that character was Mickey Mouse. He found an ideal piece of property on Hyperion Avenue in Hollywood, built a studio, and in 1926, moved his staff to the new facility.

That small studio was sufficient for a couple of years, but the company eventually outgrew it, and Walt had to look elsewhere. The original Disney Studio had been in the back half of a real estate office on Kingswell Avenue in Hollywood, but soon Walt had enough money to move next door and rent a whole store for his studio. From then on, he saw to it that he owned everything that he made. It was a painful lesson for the young cartoon producer to learn.

On rereading his contract, Walt realized that he did not own the rights to Oswald-the distributor did. Within a year, Walt made 26 of these Oswald cartoons, but when he tried to get some additional money from his distributor for a second year of the cartoons, he found out that the distributor had gone behind his back and signed up almost all of his animators, hoping to make the Oswald cartoons in his own studio for less money without Walt Disney. To star in this new series, he created a character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Walt Disney made his Alice Comedies for four years, but in 1927, he decided to move instead to an all-cartoon series.

Disney's virtual magic kingdom campaign