As previously stated, The Walt Disney Company's early films have innovated how animated films were made, as they become more mainstream with the success of films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Pinocchio (1940). These films help bestow a sense of depth into animated films, as they were now feature-length, fully animated movies with emotional layers, compelling narrative, and shooting techniques that were synonymous to those used for live action films at the time.
An example of a particular piece of technology that impacted the movies that Disney and his company were producing was the three-color technicolor process, which was utilized in the making of Flowers and Trees (1932), a short that was a part of the Silly Symphonies series. This process created different colored strips from black and white film by having a camera lens and a beam-splitting optic capturing different colors of light beams, producing a color palette that looks very natural. This helped shine some color on Disney's animated films, and may be attributed as the reason why Flowers and Trees (1932) won an academy award, being the first animated short-film to do so.
As the years went on, Disney and the studios it continued to converge with increased their experimentation with computer generated images and CG animation. Toy Story (1995), which was developed in accordance with Pixar Animation Studios, used computer animation for its creation, which turned out to be a success, leading to Pixar to develop several sequels and more computer animated films for Disney. Other live action films that Disney later developed also relied on CGI to bring the imagery of their films to life. After mergers with Marvel Entertainment and Lucasfilm Ltd. , Disney was now responsible to create films from popular franchises, those being movies based off of Marvel's comic books and Star Wars, respectively, with these big action movies requiring insane spectacle to make them visually appealing for the audience's expectations. Thus, Disney incorporated more visual effects into these big-budget films, such as Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017), which led to critics praising the films for their visual flare.
Finally and most recently, Disney was impacted and affected by another technological evolution of media distribution: streaming services. These subscription services allow for anyone with an internet connection the ability to stream content, often exclusive to different platforms to make them more marketable, to most electronic devices in one's household. This was a way to watch a myriad of content from one's own home on multiple devices, and this trend started with Netflix in 2009. Since then, many other companies have tried their hand at this type of service, and Disney+ launched in 2019 to relative success. Disney is also using their service to distribute films in a time where the COVID-19 virus has prevented many theaters from selling movie tickets, which shows how Disney has been impacted as technology has evolved, as both their films, television shows and distribution methods have benefited from the increase in technological developments.