January 5, 2026, 9:56 PM ·
If you ever wished you could go back in time to see the creation of Disneyland, clear an evening later this month. You are about to get an opportunity to do the next best thing.”Disneyland Handcrafted,” a new documentary by Leslie Iwerks, will debut on Disney+ and Disney’s YouTube channel on January 22. No other family has as deep a connection to the Disneys as the Iwerks. Ub Iwerks was Walt’s original chief animator and co-created Mickey Mouse with Walt. His son, Don, is also a Disney Legend and Oscar winner who helped create Disney’s CircleVision attractions. And Leslie is an award-winning documentary filmmaker who told Ub’s story in the 1999 film, “The Hand Behind the Mouse: The Ub Iwerks Story.”Disney fans also might know her from her 2019 series on Disney+, “The Imagineering Story,” which detailed the beginning and growth of Disney’s theme parks and the people who created them. “Disneyland Handcrafted” is a deeper dive into the origin of that story, using hundreds of hours of film footage commissioned by Walt of Disneyland’s construction. It’s seeing Disneyland come to life and hearing from the people building it, rather than talking heads analyzing it years after the fact.
Workers installing the Disneyland marquee. All photos courtesy DisneyI spoke with Leslie this afternoon about the new film – and storytellers who worked with and continued to be inspired by Walt. Here is an edited transcript.Robert: Typically, I start interviews by asking people how they got introduced to the theme park industry. But with your family, I think that’s probably pretty obvious. So I will ask instead – what keeps you coming back to stories about Disney and the theme parks? Leslie: I think because I keep finding stories that haven’t been told before, or stories that need to be told in a different way that could be fresh. It’s funny about this project, because it just kind of happened organically. We were doing “The Imagineering Story,” and we had 200 hours of footage, transferred by the film archives, and then under 100 hours of those was footage [of] the building of Disneyland. It was so much footage. A lot of it they used for the TV show and other things, but so much of it had never really been seen before. These cameramen that were doing the True Life Adventures and other films for Disney, he brought [them] in to film this – to film the making of. So when we saw it, it was just like, wow, this is so fresh and different to do this in a way that isn’t like a typical documentary. It’s more verite footage all the way through – just using audio sound bites to explain it and not cut away to talking heads or still photos. But I really wanted to preserve the cameraman’s point of view – the cameraman’s vision. Walt hired these guys to film this. Then what is it through their lens that was unique? I really wanted to lean into that and focus just on the footage. That was fun for me as a documentary filmmaker – telling a story through the eyes of other documentary filmmakers, if that makes sense.Robert: I find it amazing that there are these hundreds of hours of film in the Walt Disney archives that no one seems to have seen for decades, and you took that and somehow transformed it into something that looks like you time-traveled a film crew with a RED camera back to 1955 to record this. How did you find all of this stuff in the archives and make it into what we’re going to see later this month on Disney+ and YouTube? Leslie: A lot of this footage has was seen in different films or TV shows over time. [It] might have been shown in the Disneyland TV show or Dateline Disneyland or the Wonderful World of Disney, as he talked about the making of the park. But what we found out of that material was stuff that was left on the cutting room floor. What we did was tell the story in a way that is fresh and different than it has been told before. No one’s ever taken the footage and cut it together, straight through, as if you’re watching it unfold before your eyes. You might have seen some of this footage in little excerpts here or there, like in “The Imagineering Story,” Episode One. I used some of this footage there, but you’re only seeing a shot as part of an overall story of somebody talking about it. But this is letting you live in it, and sit in it, and breathe in it, without talking heads or anything like that. I didn’t want the audience to know everything about the making of Disneyland. It was about living in it and feeling it. It was the emotional story of getting this thing built. So through these sound bites, you’re hearing from a variety of people in a variety of different positions at the company.By the way, when we read these interviews, what rose to the surface is what’s in the film. There was a lot of stress. It was a lot of pressure, and a lot of people thought Walt was crazy, and they were candid about it. Even Walt knew that everyone thought he was crazy. Even his brother at one point, as we know, thought he was crazy. So it leans into what rose to the surface about the pressures around this.What I found fascinating in going through this footage is they shot a lot of tight shots of hands, tight shots of machinery, and a lot of people painting – just the craftsmanship that went into it. [That] is what these filmmakers leaned into and filmed, so I that’s why I thought “Disneyland Handcrafted” felt like a good title.Robert: I was going to ask about that word, handcrafted. Personally, as a writer online today, with so much AI stuff out there, that word just jumped out and spoke to me. I loved it, so I wanted to know why you selected “handcrafted,” and what does it mean for this particular story? Leslie: Handcrafted is almost a bygone word because, as you say with AI and everything that we have at our fingertips to help us write [and] to help us paint, where do we still get a paintbrush and paint, and use our pencil to write, and use our hammer to hammer? This film is a time capsule of craftsmanship and [what] has become the blueprint for what Disneyland is and what it became across the world. For me, it’s very fun to see the physical building of it, and then hear the voices of the people speaking about it, and then also hear about Walt inspiring these people to do their best work. He could have gone the cheap route and pulled off-the-shelf equipment and off-the-shelf this and that and signage and whatever. But he didn’t. He had people build things from scratch and literally tool them.That’s what you see in this. And you’re amazed at it because you’re thinking, he could have just bought that from a third party, but he didn’t. That was what made the Disney difference.Robert: Obviously, Walt is going to be the focus of any story about the creation of Disneyland. What other people made essential decisions or contributions to the development of the park that you found a newfound respect for while you were making this film?Leslie: Honestly, everyone that’s in this film that you see, like Ruth Shellhorn. Harper Goff talking about Jungle Cruise and crafting that. Everybody was doing this for the very first time. Joe Fowler [and] the amazing the work that he did on the Mark Twain and overseeing pretty much the whole park. He is an unsung hero in this piece. I find it emotional to see that they did something truly from nothing and then against all odds they opened on that opening day.
Bob Gurr and Leslie Iwerks, on the Matterhorn “basketball court.”What’s fascinating is that there was a lot of conflict in this, and we had a lot of sound bites in an early cut that showed the conflict. I remember giving a screener to Bob Iger, and his note back was it was that it was great, but feel free to add more conflict.Robert: Conflict is story.Leslie: Bob, having done Shanghai Disneyland, certainly knows first-hand what it’s like to build a theme park. I thought that was the best note any CEO could ever give a filmmaker is to add more conflict. That’s unheard of for their own story.Robert: It seems like this is an opportunity for a fan who might have noticed those names on the windows on Main Street to actually get to know some of these people and understand why their names are on those windows on Main Street. Do you find that satisfying as a filmmaker? Leslie: I do. In fact, you know my dad and grandfather have a window on Walt Disney World’s Main Street. Their involvement was the Circarama camera that my grandfather designed and developed. Then my dad was a camera technician on the Tour of the West film. That was all done in eight months’ time. I mean – major pressure. My dad – he’s 96 – he was just telling me the other night about that whole experience of making that film and having to go across the country and [finish] it for opening day in Tomorrowland. And Tomorrowland was the last land to get finished because they didn’t really know what it was going to be until the very last minute.
The Iwerks’ Main Street windowAnyway, there’s just all these stories of pressure and stress that I don’t think most people have experienced before that they may experience through watching this.Robert: One last question. Obviously you are a storyteller who is telling stories about other storytellers. What have you learned from them that you want to make sure that the next generation of storytellers learns and then passes along? Leslie: It’s a good question. I’m a believer in capturing things as they unfold. Walt was a visionary to do that and to capture the making of the park. We are all history in the making – in our own lives, in our own stories, in things that we build, projects that we develop, [and] businesses that we create. I’ve been a storyteller of these stories, whether it be the origin of Pixar Animation Studio to Industrial Light and Magic to Hearst, to even Warner Brothers [with] “100 Years of Warner Brothers.” If people weren’t recording their own stories, we wouldn’t have history. There are stories meant to be told. We should continue to tell them and record them.Robert: Keep a diary, folks.Leslie: [Laughs]”Disneyland Handcrafted” streams January 22 on Disney+ and on Disney’s YouTube channel. For more Disney and theme park news, please sign up for Theme Park Insider’s weekly newsletter.
Replies (0)
