Disney Worldbuilders

We all know that Walt told many stories to the world.

What I think about every time I walk down Main Street

is the fact that he knew that there was a value in nostalgia,

but he was also a real futurist.

He created the fine balance between

the world of yesterday, the world of today, and the world of tomorrow.

In many respects, that's what Disneyland is.

Now we want you to share with us our latest and greatest dream.

That's it, right here.

Disneyland.

We hope it will be unlike anything else on this earth.

A place of hopes and dreams, facts and fancy, all in one.

It's incredible to be here,

thinking back to what Walt was talking about

and being immersed in the world that he was describing

and what he was dreaming about building.

As a young boy, you can just imagine how much he inspired me.

You know, I was stumped one day when a little boy asked,

"Mr. Disney, just what do you do?"

Well, I said, "Sometimes, I think of myself as a little bee.

I go from one area of the studio to another and gather pollen

and sort of stimulate everybody.

I guess that's the job I do."

Nothing excites me more than to hear a storyteller tell a great story.

When I looked at Pixar and Marvel and Lucasfilm, and then at 20th Century Fox,

I saw a collection of wonderful stories,

and if we could bring all that into the Walt Disney Company,

it would greatly expand the canvas

and enable the company to grow and to be successful for years to come.

One of the things you discover when you work with a great storyteller is

the fact that they own their own stories in many respects.

They come from within them, from their hearts.

They're an extension of who they are as people,

and they're very intimately connected to the stories that they're telling.

And I think it's really important when you work with a storyteller

to understand that.

More than anything else, every theme park attraction that exists,

exists because a great storyteller told a great story.

It's that simple.

The origin of all this is play.

When you go back and remember what it was like to be a kid,

and you have two little plastic figures,

and suddenly your brain goes...

...into this reality that you are crafting.

To me, Disneyland was that on a grand scale,

that as soon as you walk into the space, you are invited to play.

I grew up in a small town in suburban Minnesota, and once a year-ish,

we would drive our VW camper bus out to visit family in Southern California.

And the highlight for me,

sadly, wasn't seeing, like, my grandparents or aunts and uncles.

It was going to Disneyland.

To me, it was like, "Okay, yeah, let's get this picture taken

so we can get out and experience this place."

And I would plan for months.

They had a Super 8 camera.

I was trying to like, you know, on that two-and-a-half-minute reel,

maximize the footage so I could capture it, because it was so magic.

To this date I think Pirates is, like, the best ride.

I just remember feeling as though I had gone into a dream.

Dead men tell no tales!

It's just such great storytelling.

You go in, you fall asleep, you've experienced this whole thing,

and then you come up, and you wake up out of it, and you're like,

"Did I just... What just happened?" You know? It's magic.

I think the thing that got me into animation was the illusion of movement.

And I figured that out pretty quickly on a flip book,

that I could draw a dot, and then it would grow into a line

and it would curl around and become a table and...

And just, "Whoa, it's moving!" That was amazing to me.

And the more I got into it, the more I realized, you know,

the movement is actually secondarily important to the story itself.

So, by the time I left school, I think I was just really amazed by storytelling.

I figured I was gonna be an animator even though my drawing was... I struggled with.

And then instead, for reasons I can't fully explain,

I came to this completely unknown computer studio

that nobody had heard of, called Pixar.

It wasn't even a studio. It was, like, a computer company.

They made hardware and software and then, on the side, commercials.

And that's why I came in.

And then one thing led to another, and I was the supervising animator on Toy Story.

I didn't know I could do that.

To infinity and beyond!

And getting in on the ground floor of that

was life-changing for me.

We saw ourselves as, like, the rebels.

There was this kind of push-pull of, like, "I want to push the boundaries.

Animation can do anything."

And, uh, I came up with this idea about monsters.

There's nothing more toxic or deadly than a human child.

A single touch could kill you.

- Boo! -

I don't really remember anybody saying, "You're gonna direct it."

It just sort of mutated into that.

I barely made it through by the skin of my teeth.

I almost got fired, I'm sure, multiple times,

because the story just was not coming together.

But, I survived.

You can't just make a movie based on what you think people will want.

It has to be sparked by something that you feel deeply as a person.

And so, you know, one thing just leads to another.

I think it was in 1999 when we first came up with the door vault as a concept.

And it was literally like 30 seconds until we were like,

"That would make a great theme park attraction."

- - But for one reason or another,

whether it was the technology wasn't there or the budget wasn't quite right,

it just kept getting postponed.

So, it's very exciting now that they're finally building it.

Pixar Pier.

California Adventure opened up a great opportunity for all these Pixar films.

Probably the greatest compliment you could give any of us was,

"We're gonna make an attraction out of your movie and put it in Disneyland."

I remember the first time seeing a Woody walk around.

I think I cried.

As we're designing the characters and the stories,

we are thinking, "Let's get the audience in lockstep,

so that they believe and feel the same things the character does."

And then you see kids come up,

and to them it's as though they're in the movie,

or that the character stepped out of the movie,

and they already know this guy,

because they've had a whole emotional experience with them.

I think it's what we all want as filmmakers, as artists,

is to somehow, like, reach into ourselves, create something that then will...

Like a music box, you can crank it up and play it back for someone else,

and it plays that same feeling that you had.

I'm the voice of Kevin, the bird from Up .

Uh, we needed some sound, so I just went...

And that's what's in the movie.

- - Ah!

I remember it was 1989, and I got an internship at Disney Animation.

I was so excited.

And they said, "You're gonna animate on this thing for EPCOT."

And so I did some of the exploratory first scenes of Buzzy ,

which was a preshow for Cranium Command.

- What's your name, recruit? - Buzzy, sir.

Do you think you're ready to pilot a brain, Fuzzy?

That's Buzzy, sir. Oh, yes.

Of course, the whole thing takes place in the brain,

in the body of this kid.

Years later, when I came up with the idea for Inside Out,

I realized there probably was some inspiration there.

I didn't put it together at the time.

I'm Sadness.

Oh, hello. I-- I'm Joy.

That's Fear.

This is Disgust.

That's Anger.

I think the first character that sort of emerged was Anger.

He was just like a square, you know.

It is weird to visit a country

where I can't speak the language, I've never met a single person,

and yet, millions of people are going to connect to this character

that, halfway around the world, I drew on a napkin eight years ago.

Making movies and being part of the theme park attractions

are a way to sort of say, "You're not alone.

You're not the only one that feels this way." And it connects people.

It brings people together in ways that are kind of beyond my dreams.

Can you get it to stop? Can you get it to stop?

- - Let's see.

We got... What...

- Hey, we did it. -

All right. Let's turn it the other way.

It's slippery.

It's a feeling that we're all connected,

that we're all sharing this story together.

And I think that's what Disney does so well,

is to take these stories that are kind of weird and specific

and make them universal.

I've been fortunate enough to be

the steward of worlds that have come before and evolve them.

That's a very specific type of world-building,

because you're not starting it from scratch.

You're adhering to what came before, but trying to forward it and progress it.

Sometimes with new technology, sometimes updating it for these times

but still preserving what made it a world to begin with

and what was created before you.

Disneyland is my favorite of all the parks.

I love that Walt was there.

It's funny because people think of Disney or Disneyland as nostalgic,

but it's difficult to keep in mind how cutting edge

all of that technology was when it was originally presented to the public.

I think the mix of the old and the new

makes something relevant to all of us collectively.

My relationship with Star Wars started back in '77

when I saw the first film, and I was, like, ten.

That was the right age to see that film.

It's like talking about Disneyland.

We take it for granted now because we've all grown up with it.

It's been almost fifty years.

It's hard to express in the context of that era how significant that film was.

I think, when you first see Star Wars ,

one reason it connects so powerfully is you really do feel like Luke.

It's so instantly relatable.

You feel like someone that's, you know, in this very small place,

and that there's a much bigger, brighter galaxy out there,

and you know your life is gonna drive you towards that.

As a kid, I think it's just so powerful

because you know that's a journey, really, that you're going to go on.