Unveiling the Untold Story of Disneyland’s Birth: A Review of “Disneyland Handcrafted”
If you think you know everything about Disneyland, a new documentary from filmmaker Leslie Iwerks will make you realize you really don’t know anything about the wild, improbable, and chaotic birth of Walt Disney’s first theme park. The new “Disneyland Handcrafted” documentary on the one-year blitz to create the Anaheim theme park will debut Jan. 22 on YouTube and the Disney+ streaming service.
The blue carpet premiere of “Disneyland Handcrafted” took place on Thursday, Jan. 8 at the Walt Disney Studios Lot in Burbank. Think again if you think you’ve seen and read everything about Disneyland and know every corner of the park inside and out. “Disneyland Handcrafted” will make you realize you simply don’t and you haven’t.
A Unique Filmmaking Approach
I was mesmerized by every second of “Disneyland Handcrafted.” That’s in part due to the cinema verite-style of filmmaking employed by Iwerks that eschews the typical talking heads cutaways that are popular in today’s documentaries in favor of bathing you in nonstop footage that makes you feel like a fly on the wall of a seemingly impossible undertaking.
You are completely immersed in the yearlong making of Disneyland thanks to excerpts from 100 hours of raw and rarely seen footage from the Walt Disney Archives shot by a team of cameramen tasked by Walt Disney to capture the construction of Disneyland.
A Glimpse into the Past
You also realize how few OSHA rules and regulations there were in the 1950s with film crews riding untethered atop moving trains, workers shimmying down I-beams and visitors standing on the deck of the Mark Twain Riverboat sans any guardrails.
Legend always told us that Disneyland was woefully unprepared for opening day. “Disneyland Handcrafted” shows us why. The whole thing was just barely held together by bailing wire, duct tape, and Band-Aids.
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A Story of Perseverance
Then the film bounces back to a year before the park opens and there’s nothing there but dirt where an Anaheim orange grove once stood. As each month passes you start to quickly realize how little progress is being made. Three months before the park opens there’s still almost nothing there.
Walt remarks on there being nothing but holes and piles of dirt and laments: “There isn’t one thing that any human being would spend 15 cents to come and see.”
It’s at that moment that you realize this thing we know today as Disneyland came amazingly close to never happening. That everything everyone said about Walt’s Folly was true. That Disneyland was destined to be the biggest bust in Hollywood history. That Walt was certifiably crazy.
