Disney briefly worked for the Pesmen-Rubin Commercial
Art Studio and the Kansas City Slide Company,
while studying animation and unsuccessfully trying to
establish his own studio. Bankrupt, he left for California,
where he and his brother Roy formed Disney Brothers
Studio (later Walt Disney Productions). There, Disney
and Kansas City colleague Ub Iwerks (longtime Disney
associate, animator, and inventor) produced short comedies
for the studio’s Alice in Cartoonland series. In 1927,
Disney began a more popular series, Oswald the Lucky
Rabbit, but he lost most of his animators and his rights
to Oswald to his distributor. Angered but undefeated,
Disney produced his first internationally successful figure,
Mickey Mouse, in 1928.