Walt Disney

Picture a small farm town in Missouri, more than a hundred years ago. A retired doctor lives down the road. He has a horse. He asks a little boy to draw it, and he pays him for the picture.

That boy was Walt Disney. He was still small. It would not be the last time someone paid him to draw.

The town was called Marceline. Walt lived there for just a few years. Later he said they were some of the happiest years of his life. He watched the trains go by. He copied cartoons out of his dad's newspaper. He played with crayons and paints.

Fifty years later he built a whole street to look like the main street of that town. Millions of people have walked down it. Let's see how he got there, and look at his birth chart on the way.

Walt was born in Chicago on 5 December 1901. He was the fourth son in his family. His big brother Roy would one day run the business side of everything Walt dreamed up.

A birth chart is a map of the sky at the moment someone was born. It shows where the Sun, the Moon and the planets were. Astrologers study that map and say it hints at what a person is like.

Walt's chart uses a birth time of 12:35 in the morning. It comes from his family or from records made at the time, so we can trust it fairly well.

Your Sun sign is the one most people know. It is the star sign the Sun was passing through on your birthday. Walt's Sun was in Sagittarius, the sign of the archer.

Western astrologers say Sagittarius aims high. It is hopeful and restless, and it likes big plans. It does not like being told no. That sounds a lot like Walt.

A chart is cut into twelve slices called houses. Each house stands for a part of life. Walt's Sun sat in the fourth house. Astrologers give that house to home, childhood and roots. Walt kept going back to his childhood for ideas. The trains, the farm animals and the small-town street all ended up in his work.

When Walt was nine, the family moved to Kansas City. His father bought a newspaper round. Walt and Roy got up at 4:30 every morning to deliver papers before school. Then they did it again after school.

He was so tired he often fell asleep in class. His marks were poor. But on Saturdays he went to art classes, and he took a cartoon course by post.

In 1918 he wanted to help in the First World War. He was too young for the army. So he changed the date on his birth certificate and joined the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. By the time he got to France, the war was over. He drew cartoons on the side of his ambulance.

Now for the Moon. Your Moon sign shows your feelings, and what you need to feel safe. Walt's Moon was in Libra, the sign of the scales. Western astrologers say a Libra Moon needs things to be fair, pretty and in balance. It feels best with a partner by its side. Walt almost always had one. First it was Ub Iwerks, an artist he met at his first drawing job. Then it was Roy.

Planets talk to each other through angles in the chart. Astrologers call these angles aspects. A square is a tense angle, like two people pulling on a rope. Walt's Moon makes a very close square to Mars. Mars is the planet of drive and temper. Astrologers say this mix gives strong feelings and a short fuse. People who worked for Walt said he was hard to please. When he said "That'll work," it counted as high praise.

Back in Kansas City, Walt started a small cartoon company called Laugh-O-Gram. Ub came to work there. It ran out of money and went bust in 1923. Walt was 21. He packed up and moved to Hollywood.

There, he and Roy set up the Disney Brothers Studio. Walt hired a young ink artist called Lillian Bounds. They married in 1925.

Soon Walt and Ub made a hit cartoon about a character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Then came a nasty shock. Another company owned Oswald, not Walt. The boss there hired away most of Walt's artists. Walt lost his star and almost all his staff. Only Ub stayed.

So they made up a new character. It was a mouse. Walt wanted to call him Mortimer. Lillian said that sounded too grand. She suggested Mickey. Walt even did Mickey's voice himself, for almost twenty years.

Your rising sign is the sign that was coming up over the eastern horizon at the moment you were born. Astrologers say it shows how you meet the world. Walt had Virgo rising. Western astrologers say Virgo is careful and hard-working, and it notices every small detail.

Walt fussed over details all his life. For Mickey's third cartoon, Steamboat Willie, he lined up every sound with the pictures. It was the first cartoon to have its sound added after the drawing was done. It came out on 18 November 1928, and people loved it.

Here is the most striking part of Walt's chart. Four planets sit together in Capricorn: Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Capricorn is the sign of the mountain goat. Western astrologers say it climbs slowly and steadily, and it builds things to last. It is the sign of business.

All four of those planets sit in the fifth house. Astrologers give that house to fun, play, children and making things up. So picture a serious, hard-working goat whose job is to make children laugh. That is a fair picture of Walt.

Two of those planets, Jupiter and Saturn, are joined almost exactly. When two planets sit very close, astrologers call it a conjunction. Jupiter is the planet of growth and big hopes. Saturn is the planet of hard work and limits. Together, astrologers say, they make big dreams that also come with big bills.

That is just what happened next. In 1934 Walt decided to make a full-length cartoon film. Nobody had made one in full colour with sound. People in Hollywood called it "Disney's Folly". They thought it would ruin him.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs took four years. It cost three times what was planned. Walt brought real animals into the studio so his artists could study how they moved. His team built a new kind of camera to give the pictures depth.

It came out on 21 December 1937. It became the most successful sound film made up to that time. Walt got a special Oscar for it. It was one normal-sized statue and seven tiny ones, one for each dwarf.

I think Snow White was the bravest bet of his whole life.

Then the money ran short. Pinocchio and Fantasia both lost money in 1940, partly because the war in Europe cut off a lot of cinemas. The studio was deep in debt.

To save money, Walt and Roy cut wages hard. Walt could also be bossy and unkind with his staff. In 1941 his animators went on strike for five weeks. Walt blamed the strike on communists, and later he named some of the former strike leaders in front of a government committee. Many workers left. Things at the studio were never quite the same.

Over the years, people have also said Walt was unfair to Jewish people and to Black people. Many who worked closely with him said that was not true. One biographer, Neal Gabler, read the studio's files and found the proof did not back up the claim about Jewish people. Gabler also said that, like many white Americans of his time, Walt could be thoughtless about race, and some old Disney films show that. It is fair to know all of this when you think about him.

Walt had two daughters, Diane and Sharon. He took them to a big park in Los Angeles. It was not very clean. He wished for a tidy, happy park where children and parents could both have fun.

He also loved trains. He built a little steam railway in his own back garden. He named the engine Lilly Belle, after his wife.

So he planned a park with a train running around it. He paid a team of designers with his own money. He called them Imagineers. Disneyland was opened to guests and TV cameras on 17 July 1955. Main Street was made to look like the one in Marceline. Within its first year, 3.6 million people came.

Chinese astrology looks at the year you were born. Each year has an animal and an element. Walt was born in a Metal Ox year. Chinese astrologers say the Ox is patient and strong. It keeps pulling the plough long after others stop. Metal makes it even more stubborn.

Chinese astrologers also look at the day you were born. The element of that day is called your Day Master. Walt's is yin Fire. They picture yin Fire as a candle or a lamp, a small warm light you can see in the dark. Think of a cinema, where the lights go down and a bright picture glows on the screen.

Numerology is another old system. You add up the numbers in your birth date until you get one digit. That is your Life Path number. Walt's is 1. Numerologists say 1 is the starter, the one who goes first. Walt did a lot of firsts. The first cartoon with its sound added after the drawing. The first full-length cartoon in colour and sound.

The far-off planets move very slowly. Saturn takes about 29 years to go once round the sky. Pluto takes much longer. Astrologers look at where they sit on big days and see which spots in a birth chart they touch.

On the day Steamboat Willie came out, Pluto sat opposite Walt's Jupiter. Pluto is the planet of power and big change. Jupiter is his planet of growth. Astrologers would call that a turn of fate in his fortunes, and Mickey was exactly that.

The night Snow White opened, the slow planets were quiet for him. They made no close angles to his chart. Sometimes the biggest night of a life happens under a calm sky.

On the day Disneyland opened, Saturn made a friendly angle to its own place in his chart. Astrologers would say the hard work of many years was paying off.

On camera, Walt was warm and chatty. In private he was shy. He once told a friend: "I'm not Walt Disney." He meant the cheerful man on TV. "Walt Disney does not smoke. I smoke."

That smoking caught up with him. In 1966 he found out he had lung cancer. He died on 15 December 1966, aged 65. He was planning a new park in Florida at the time. Roy finished it and named it Walt Disney World, after his brother.

Walt won 22 Oscars. Nobody has won more. There is even a small planet named after him, 4017 Disneya.

If you want to try this on your own chart, start with three things. Find your Sun, your Moon and your rising sign. Then think about the place you grew up. Walt took his childhood town and turned it into a street the whole world visits. What would you build from yours?