For celebrated artist Josh Agle, growing up with annual visits to Disneyland® Park helped shape his literal world view. “I’m a really visual person,” he explains, “so I think in images more than words, and Disneyland is a very visual place. It’s designed in a way that everywhere you look, there’s visual eye candy, and it’s put together in a way that is escapist and immersive. I think Disneyland in Anaheim, [California] does it better than any of the other Disney parks because they have limited space. They couldn’t expand and triple the size of the park, so they had to fit it all in.
“Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me)”—the musical anthem of those many rascals and scoundrels we have adored for almost sixty years—is undoubtedly one of the most iconic Disney Parks songs. But how did this famous tune and its accompanying lyrics come to be? Hop in, landlubbers, and hold on tight—let’s take a little boat trip to find out…
Author Michael Campbell’s earliest childhood memory is of a Disney train. Visiting Disneyland® Park at the age of six, young Campbell was already a budding railroad enthusiast and had convinced his parents to let him dress up as an engineer for this fateful first visit to the Park. “I have a special gene, that’s actually fairly common,” he quips, “that creates an irrational love of trains.”
Disney Legend Mary Blair was one of Walt Disney’s finest stylists—a visualizer of characters and worlds—but her work was not self-contained: it added up to something larger: a story. “Walt responded to the storytelling aspect of her pictures,” historian John Canemaker wrote, “especially the underlying emotion palpable in much of her art, even when veering toward abstraction…. Many paintings are self-portraits of her inner feelings.”
Opening more than a half-century ago in 1975, the iconic attraction was first envisioned by Walt Disney more than a decade earlier.
The longtime designer and historian is peeling back the layers of how Walt Disney recruited a distinctive team of artists and set designers to build his 1955 theme park.
In November 1918, a young Walt Disney stepped onto a ship named the Vauban, which was set to take him and his Red Cross Ambulance Corps unit from the United States all the way to France. For a 16-year-old boy who had never traveled farther east than Illinois or farther west than Colorado, this was a sizable adventure; Walt’s journey to France marked his first-ever encounter with the ocean.
70 years after Walt Disney opened his dream park, we take a look at some attractions that have stood the test of time and others that still live in our memories.
Blair’s own niece and the eminent historian were recently at The Walt Disney Family Museum in conjunction with Mary Blair: Mid-Century Magic.
55 years after its release, The Aristocats remains the first of its kind as a Disney animated feature made without Walt Disney’s comprehensive involvement. But Walt did make some important contributions to the film before his sudden passing in 1966.