When director Leslie Iwerks decided to make Disneyland Handcrafted using archival footage to depict the eponymous theme park being built in 1954 and ’55, she had one lingering doubt: Are people interested in a movie about construction?
Based on the awestruck comments on YouTube, where the film can be viewed in full, the answer is yes. “I think new generations are like, ‘Oh, it’s always been there,’ ” says Iwerks. “But they’re actually seeing the origin of it before they were ever born and seeing Disneyland in a whole new way.”
To make the 79-minute film, also available on Disney+, Iwerks and her small team combed through roughly 200 hours of 16mm footage they’d obtained from Disney’s archives. Most of the imagery was in good condition, but whittling it all down became a massive undertaking: It wasn’t in chronological order, and all of it was silent.
Fortunately, Iwerks knows a thing or two about Disney history. Her grandfather, Ub Iwerks, helped to design Mickey Mouse, and her father, Don Iwerks, spent 35 years as a camera technician at the company. She’d initially delved into Disney’s theme-park legacy when she directed 2019’s The Imagineering Story. The first episode of that miniseries details the advent of Disneyland, but without an emphasis on how deadline-driven its inception was.
