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Tribune News Service

Today, California’s Disneyland – the first ever – is so fully formed that it is taken for granted. People debate ticket prices and crowd calendars, strategising the optimal time to visit.
The new documentary Disneyland Handcrafted hits pause on all of that.
Culled from about 200 hours of mostly unseen footage, director Leslie Iwerks’ film takes viewers back to the near beginning, tracing the largely impossible creation of the park from a year before its opening.
“Can you imagine LA without Disneyland?” Iwerks says during an interview.
To begin to answer that question cuts to the importance of Disneyland Handcrafted, which is now streaming on Disney+.
For while Disneyland is corporately owned and managed, the park has become a cultural institution, a reflection of the stories and myths that have shaped America.

Disneyland shifts with the times, but Iwerks’ film shows us Walt Disney’s template, one that by the time the park opened on July 17, 1955, was so set in place that it would soon become a place of pilgrimage, a former Anaheim orange grove in which generations of people would visit as a rite of passage.
Iwerks comes from a family of Disney royalty. Her grandfather, Ub, was a legendary animator instrumental in the development of Mickey Mouse. Her father, Don, was a cinematic and special effects wizard who worked on numerous Disney attractions, including the Michael Jackson-starring film Captain EO.
As a documentarian, Iwerks has explored Disney before as the director of The Imagineering Story and has a long career of films that touch on not just Hollywood but also politics and environmental issues. In her latest work, she reveals just how fragile the creation of Disneyland was.
There are many small moments throughout the documentary that might stick with viewers. A worker, for instance, carefully sculpting the concrete on Sleeping Beauty Castle just months before opening, while a narrator speaks of the park’s rising cost. A construction vehicle toppling, with its driver escaping a life-changing accident by jumping out in the nick of time as Disney himself talks up how there have been very few accidents. And the mistakes, such as frantically learning – and failing – at how to build a river.

That Disneyland is as popular today as it was in 1955 – the film reveals that more than 900 million people have visited the park – is no accident. We live in stressful, divisive times, and Disneyland was not only born of such a moment but built for them, arriving in 1955 in a post-World War II America that was adjusting to more internalised, less overtly visible fears. The spectre of nuclear annihilation was now forever a reality, and the Cold War heightened the sense of uncertainty.
Disneyland is a fake world inspired by a real one that never existed, but do not mistake its enduring popularity as simply nostalgia.
Disneyland seeks to reorient, to show a better, more optimistic world that only exists if we continue to dream – to imagine a walkable street, for instance, in which a fairy-tale castle sits at its end. The park is not so much an escape from our world as it is a place where we go to make sense of it, a work of live theatre where we, the guests, are on a stage and can play at idealised versions of ourselves.
“Why do we care? Why does it matter?” Iwerks asks. “I think what matters, for Disneyland, is that Walt set out to create the happiest place on Earth. Right there, putting that stake in the ground. That’s so impressive. That’s so risky.
“And yet he did it by sheer belief that he wanted families to come together and experience a place they could come back to time and again, a place that would continue to grow and always be evolving through cultures, through time, through generations.”

What makes the film so poignant is that Iwerks essentially gets out of the way. The footage was initially commissioned by Disney and shot for use in Walt Disney’s Disneyland, the company’s then weekly series on US TV network ABC, which was funding the park.
Some of the clips have appeared in episodes of Walt Disney’s Disneyland, but very few. For that show, Disney was selling the public on the park. With the public having long been sold, Iwerks can show us the park in shambles – such as a dirt path entering a wood-strewn Frontierland while Harper Goff, then Disneyland’s art director, speaks of a frustrated Disney lamenting that half the park’s money was gone and it remained nothing but a pile of muck.
“What rose to the surface was how much pressure there was during this one year,” Iwerks says. “It was impossible. It was building what ultimately was a mini city in less than a year, pulling together all those construction workers, all those people who handcrafted this whole park in record time using their own skills, artistry and storytelling.”
She adds: “You can’t remodel your kitchen right now in a year.”
Since the film is done in a light cinéma vérité style, Iwerks does not editorialise as to how it all did get done. But we see workers, for instance, straddling beams in Tomorrowland with no support, making it clear this was an era with fewer regulations.
Iwerks herself points to the ABC funding, acknowledging that the arrangement simply necessitated the park being completed in a year. But when it opened, it was far from finished. Disneyland’s struggles on opening day have long been mythologised, be it stories of weak asphalt or plumbing disasters.
Iwerks is more interested in showing viewers the race against time, especially for a park that deviated from the light theming and simple rides of amusement parks of the era.
Throughout the film’s hour-and-a-half running time, Iwerks makes the argument that Disneyland simply was not practical. Two months before opening we see a concrete-less Main Street, while we are told of a debate as to whether Disneyland should delay its planned July date. The decision was made not to, as the park was running out of money and there was a fear any push would ultimately kill it.
In some ways, it is a surprise we are seeing any of this. Iwerks notes the film was completed years ago, but sat on the shelf. She credits Disney executive Jason Recher with pushing it through.
“I showed him a link, and he said, ‘This has to be seen.’ It takes someone with a vision to see that this could get out there and be appreciated by audiences,” Iwerks says. “I was thinking this would never see the light of day.”
The result is a film that is likely to be cherished by Disney fans but also admired by anyone interested in the making of an American classic.
One of the most striking moments in the film is that of the cars of the Disneyland Railroad being ferried on trucks past Anaheim’s downtown City Hall. It is a reminder that Disneyland, no matter its influences, its stewards or its changes, is a Southern California original.


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Disneyland Handcrafted shows the crazy year building world’s first Disneyland

Workers construct the front gates of California’s Disneyland in a still from Disneyland Handcrafted, a new documentary on Disney+. Photo: TNS

Workers construct the Sleeping Beauty Castle at California’s Disneyland in a still from Disneyland Handcrafted. Photo: TNS

Walt Disney surveys the Anaheim land that would become the first Disneyland in a still from Disneyland Handcrafted. Photo: TNS

Workers construct the Mad Tea Party attraction in a still from Disneyland Handcrafted. Photo: TNS

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Instagrammable tents are lit up at a glamping site in Shek Chung Au, in Hong Kong’s New Territories. Glamping’s popularity around the world has skyrocketed in recent years and continues to do so as more people seek out convenient “back to nature” experiences. Photo: Sam Evans

Rugged green hills provide a picturesque backdrop for the writer’s first glamping experience, in Shek Chung Au. Photo: Sam Evans

The writer’s tent for the evening opens onto a deck under a canvas canopy. Photo: Sam Evans

Glampers cook food over their barbecue at the site in Shek Chung Au. Photo: Sam Evans

A handheld fan proves an effective way of stoking the fire. Photo: Sam Evans

Children play in the morning at the glampsite in Shek Chung Au. Photo: Sam Evans

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Lifestyle

Travel & Leisure

Entertainment

The new documentary Disneyland Handcrafted on Disney+ reveals just how fragile the creation of California’s Disneyland was


The new documentary Disneyland Handcrafted on Disney+ reveals just how fragile the creation of California’s Disneyland was.


Disneyland Handcrafted shows the crazy year building world’s first Disneyland

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The new documentary Disneyland Handcrafted on Disney+ reveals just how fragile the creation of California’s Disneyland was

The new documentary Disneyland Handcrafted on Disney+ reveals just how fragile the creation of California’s Disneyland was