Making The Disney Wish: Disney’s Newest Cruise Ship

Papenburg is a very little town

in the northwestern part of Germany.

It's only just above 30,000 inhabitants.

It is very rural here.

We have fields, and you have dikes,

and you have some windmills,

but there's really not much else.

So, it's a bit strange, isn't it?

A small town building huge cruise ships.

The first time that you see a cruise ship,

it's akin to looking up at the pyramids

for the first time.

Because the scale of it is unbelievable.

You know, they're 1.2 million square feet at least.

They're over 200 feet tall.

They're more than three football fields long.

But a Disney cruise ship,

there's no other cruise ship like it.

The Disney Wish is the first of its kind,

so it's a first-in-class ship, never been done before.

We have four existing ships that are extraordinary,

and we're given this task of how do you make it better?

It has less emissions, it's cleaner burning.

The level of technological sophistication

is awe-inspiring.

Captain America!

We've never done anything like this

on any of our existing Disney cruise ships.

Hang tight!

Contingency plan is on her way.

It is unbelievable,

like, how big of a production this is.

Hit your buttons now!

It's probably .01 percent

of the overall cruise experience.

It's just one night of dinner.

That guy is still eating!

There are projections and lights.

There's performer flying. There is pyrotechnics.

We have a lot of work ahead of us,

and of course the pressure is enormous.

There is 100 million things

that we have to do.

We have engineering,

we have architecture, we have interiors.

A ship is like the ultimate design challenge.

It has to be anti-flammable.

It has to stand up in marine environments.

We have audio.

Ride design.

There's still a lot we need to do.

Where's my waterproof notebook?

We have show set, props.

No guest is ever gonna get

this close to her, but we wanna make sure

that she's exactly correct.

There is so much magic

that we need to create.

The timeline is so demanding,

but we have the most amazing team.

Alright. Where to next?

It'll be a race to the finish,

and we all have our running shoes

and we're ready to go.

We are in the main building hall

at the Meyer shipyard in Papenburg.

We've come here middle of the night

to really see one of the last blocks

of the foreship of our Disney Wish

be lifted and mounted onto the foreship.

Outside, we already have another piece of our ship

being completed as well.

A cruise ship is built in parts,

so-called blocks.

They are lifted and put together,

in a way like a LEGO principle,

and that's really what's happening at the moment.

This block has a number 73.

We are calling it the bridge block,

or wheelhouse, is where

the captain will navigate the ship.

It is really heavy.

Up to 800 tons,

so metric tons of weight.

If you think, like, a small car's about a ton,

so that's 800 cars just there hanging off of the crane.

My name is Philip Gennotte.

I'm a naval architect

and I work for Walt Disney Imagineering Germany.

I make sure that we know where we are,

what we're doing, and where we're going.

I'm also a keen model builder.

So, I'm trying to keep up

with the way the shipyard is actually doing the blocks

in the right sequence.

So, I am following the block plan here.

A cruise ship is one of the most unique,

most sophisticated, complex product out there.

I have not found anything to date that integrates

as much technology and different technologies

as a cruise ship does.

A power plant, a theme park,

a hotel resort, a sewage plant.

We have the Walt Disney Theater in there

and on top the entrance to the spa.

The ship also creates its own fresh water.

It all starts with a white piece of paper.

Concepts, ideas.

It takes a good year and a half

before the first part of construction

will even start.

We will then actually cut

the first piece of steel.

And then off we go! The main engines go in.

The LNG, the liquefied natural gas tanks go in as well.

All of the heavy components down below.

And those steel sections get put together into blocks.

The ship will be more than 60,000 tons.

These are metric tons,

so close to 130 million pounds

if I'm not mistaken.

So, the model is exactly the same size

as what our ship is at the moment.

It is not complete yet, but neither is my model.

Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

So, at the moment,

the bridge block is nearly

in its final position.

They're adjusting for the last few millimeters.

They're actually talking millimeters.

So they're laser scanning all the time,

making sure it really is perfect.

And then it will be welded up

to be part of our Disney Wish.

And then the most important one for the foreship.

It's like your child growing up.

When the ship grows like that,

you can't wait for it to grow as quickly as possible.

This... is a ship.

It's crazy, right?

My career is all about cruise ships.

And even though I've been doing this for many years,

every time is very emotional.

It's our design,

it's our dreams, our creativity,

all coming to life, pretty awesome.

Welcome to my garage.

This is my brain.

This is where I have to make the magic happen.

It's a pandemic. It's 2021.

I think I've been working in this garage

like everyone else for 15 months.

When you're designing a ship

where people are touching things

and looking at things,

you can't just do it through the computer.

You need to be surrounded by it.

I'm Laura Cabo, and I lead

the creative development of the cruise ship.

The task of designing and building cruise ships,

aside from the pandemic, is a mind-blowing task.

I'm an architect by training,

and I didn't know anything about cruise ships.

But I do know about design, and I know about storytelling,

so having that opportunity to be in charge

of an amazing team

that injects that into our cruise ships,

that's incredible.

As Imagineers on Disney Cruise Line,

we just have endless number of spaces.

And all of those spaces are telling stories.

That was one of my mantras.

Everything on the ship is inspired by something.

You wanna actually work into the carpet, right?

Is everything related to the story?

Oh gosh, it's just endless.

We go all over the company for inspiration.

And so we work very closely with ILM,

which tells all of our Star Wars stories,

with Marvel Studios, and with Walt Disney Animation.

I think each ship carries about 5,000 pieces of artwork.

So it's a floating gallery, too.

There's no other place in the world you'll see

that amount of Disney artwork.

We have about 65 million works

of art in our collection.

Everything from Snow White to Encanto,

and so we opened up our archives

and selected a lot of wonderful pieces

for various parts of the ship.

65 million assets.

That's a lot of millions. Right?

And so that's a huge resource for us.

You look at something like so simple,

this sketch of Bambi that's even, it's unfinished.

It's the essence of Bambi.

Or we were looking at a Mary Blair,

and Mary Blair is, like, one of my

absolute favorite Disney artists,

and you could just see the brushstroke,