It makes sense that Leslie Iwerks would become the greatest documentarian of the Walt Disney Company. Her grandfather, Ub Iwerks, worked closely with Walt, co-creating characters like Mickey Mouse and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit; and her father, Don, was responsible for a number of innovations at Walt Disney Imagineering, where he pioneered the technology that would drive the Circle-Vision theater attractions and motion simulators like Star Tours and Body Wars. (Don passed away last month at the age of 96.)
Earlier this year, “Disneyland Handcrafted” was released on Disney+, which chronicled the frantic, year-long design and construction of Disneyland using never-before-seen footage (which had to be painstakingly restored) and archival interviews. Now she’s back with “Disney Worldbuilders,” which just premiered on Disney+. Her latest takes a look at the intersection of creativity and the Disney Parks, as she chronicles a handful of executives and creative elites (folks like Pete Docter, Jon Favreau, Jennifer Lee, Jared Bush, Kevin Feige and James Cameron) as they watch the worlds they have created onscreen get translated to physical space within Disney’s portfolio of theme parks and cruise ships.
If some of Iwerks’ earlier projects, like her groundbreaking series “The Imagineering Story,” looked at the history of the parks, then “Disney Worldbuilders” makes a passionate case for the future of Disney’s themed entertainment. And that future looks bright.
“Worldbuilders,” Iwerks noted, came out of research that she was conducting for what would become “Disneyland Handcrafted.” She remembers stumbling upon a photo of Walt riding one of the rides at Disneyland with some little kids. It made her wish that she could go back in time and ask him: What did it feel like to ride these rides based on your stories, live in the worlds that you created on film that are now in physical space?
“It got me thinking about, What does that feel like for the modern-day storytellers? That was kind of the genesis of, OK, well, who are they? It’s Pete. It’s Kevin. It’s Jon. That’s where it all started,” Iwerks told TheWrap. “Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to walk around with all these folks into their own lands and see what it feels like? And it turns out they’re all big Disney fans at heart. That was what was fun about it, was to sit down and talk with everybody and really get that that inspirational story.”
The documentary premiered at D23, the Disney-only fan convention held in Anaheim across the street from Disneyland, last weekend. And Iwerks admitted that the turnaround time was quick. They started filming in Shanghai in December, for a section that saw Bush and then-CEO Bob Iger walking around the “Zootopia”-themed area of the land. She then visited other parks, including Disneyland Paris’ second gate Disney Adventure World, home to a new “Frozen” land, and Abu Dhabi, where a planned Middle Eastern Disney park is in the works.
“Trying to get on everyone’s schedules to go to the parks or go to where they could film, so that we could really be in their worlds was a jigsaw puzzle. But we did it somehow,” Iwerks shared. It was always important to her that the film premiere at D23, because, as she said, “I created this film for fans and I really felt like it was meant to be a story of creative inspiration, and I personally just wanted to inspire the next aspiring creator out there – if they felt they had characters in their head or ideas in their head, just keep going, and maybe one day they can too can be a world builder, so to speak.”
Iwerks said she was moved by all the stories in “Worldbuilders” – from Lee talking about how Cinderella was her favorite growing up and “Fantasyland is where she escaped into,” to Bush talking about his mom making him a homemade Peter Pan costume, to Docter explaining that when he would travel to the west coast as a child his favorite part wasn’t visiting his family but rather going to Disneyland. She was also particularly fond of Feige talking about “inside outside rides” – attractions like Space Mountain or Pirates of the Caribbean that simulate the outdoors while inside a show building.
“They all loved coming to Disneyland and they still do,” Iwerks said. “It’s just fun to hear everybody’s own nuance, specialty of what they love.”
One of the more surprising aspects of the doc is just how much Iger is featured – he’s seen walking around the parks and in the room when the Abu Dhabi park is being pitched. (Interestingly, Imagineer Tom Fitzgerald describes the park as being split into biomes unique to the Middle East’s geography, instead of traditional “lands” like in most of the parks.) Iger stepped down earlier this year, replaced by Josh D’Amaro, and in some ways “Worldbuilders” feels like a final victory lap and a testament to Iger as a portfolio manager (he was, after all, the CEO who led the acquisition of Pixar, Lucasfilm and Marvel).
“Honestly, without Bob, these stories would not be here. These filmmakers may not be within the Disney fold. He acquired these companies, and as a result, these filmmakers came with them. He knows a good storyteller when he sees one, and he bought into these brands, hook, line and sinker. We need these brands to continue the growth of the of the company, and to me, that was that was actually a good chunk of the story,” Iwerks said. “Without Bob, this would not be here. It goes back to that whole thing of Disneyland will never be complete as long as there’s imagination left in the world. These are the people continuing that lineage that Walt set in place, and it took it takes great leadership.”
To Iwerks, it was Iger’s forethought that brought the creatives into the fold and enlivened the theme parks, around the world, for new generations. Even if some “Star Wars” or Marvel films aren’t as successful as they’d hoped, the stories are still strong enough to make visiting a land based on the properties a huge priority.
“That was hitting the ball out of the park in a way from a leadership standpoint, in my opinion. And so I just felt like it was important for the audience to remember his contributions to Disney and during an almost a 20-year tenure, but the fact that he’s also very humble. He’s not a storyteller,” Iwerks said.
She compares this to a story that Walt used to share, which is immortalized in a new attraction at Disneyland, where he compares himself to a bee that buzzes around the studio and gets the creativity going in different departments. “Walt was a storyteller but he was there to enable these storytellers,” Iwerks said.
Iger, too, in her estimation, is a worldbuilder – he built Shanghai Disneyland, the first Disney Park in mainland China, which ended a decades-long ban on Disney entertainment. “It took him 20 years but he stayed the course and is now planting the seed in Abu Dhabi,” Iwerks said.
There was, she admitted, debate over how much Iger to put in the final cut – and there probably is still debate, now that it’s on Disney+. “Is he in there too much? Is he not in there enough? But I feel like his story is equally as important,” Iwerks said.
“Worldbuilders” runs a little under an hour and Iwerks admits there was a longer, feature-length cut of the movie but that she didn’t want it “feeling like a hybrid of ‘The Imagineering Story.’”
“The moment you start getting into the how they make it versus the point-of-view of the storyteller and what excited them, that’s when we’d be like, ‘OK, pull back.’ Or if it felt like maybe we heard that story before,” Iwerks said.
She wanted the documentary to be for non-Disney films as well as Disney diehards, and for “Worldbuilders” to be seen as “a story about leadership and about creativity and believing in yourself and those inspiration themes for non-Disney people.”
Iwerks also saw the documentary as a business story: “I want to attract the people who read Fortune magazine or the Wall Street Journal. I want those folks to also find some inspiration in this and be like, Wow, that’s how you create something out of nothing – an idea is a character in your mind.”
There’s an anecdote in the movie where Docter talks about how characters that he drew on a napkin are now a part of the Disney Parks worldwide. “That’s an amazing creative arc,” Iwerks said. And it’s one she is intimately familiar with. “It’s what Walt Disney and my grandfather did when they came up with Mickey Mouse.”
As if any other documentary filmmaker could tell this story.
We also asked Iwerks if working on “Disney Worldbuilders” inspired her to do more installments of “The Imagineering Story,” her absolutely brilliant documentary series that debuted with the rest of Disney+ back in 2019. Frank and plainly told, it charts the mysterious division of the Walt Disney Company originally formed as Walt’s personal think tank, eventually evolving into the division responsible for the company’s theme parks, cruise ships and retail locations. Would she be open to furthering that story? After all, we are in the midst of an unprecedented period for Walt Disney Imagineering, with massive projects all over the world.
“We’ll see,” Iwerks said.
The next night, during D23’s big parks presentation, a second season of “The Imagineering Story” was announced. It will be on Disney+ in 2028.
But hey, secrecy is a big part of being a worldbuilder. Especially at Disney.
“Disney Worldbuilders” is out now on Disney+.
