Original subtitles

(THEME MUSIC PLAYING)

(ROARS)

(ROARING CONTINUES)

DORIS WOODWARD: As experienced as our company is,

it's still always new, and it's still not a hard and fast way of doing business.

We have to be dynamic, and flexible, and adjust

because who knows what happens, right?

Each year, the economy, and the environments,

and the people's interests and desires change,

so, we have to do it at the same time.

(THEME MUSIC CONTINUES)

(MUSIC ENDS)

-MALE VOICE: Light him up. -(VEHICLE REVVING)

-(INDISTINCT CHATTER) -MALE VOICE: Perfect.

NARRATOR: Behind the magic of every Disney theme park

lay mud, sweat, and fears.

After ten long years of negotiations with the Chinese government,

Walt Disney Imagineering received permission to build

their newest Magic Kingdom, the Shanghai Disney Resort.

(VEHICLE WHIRRING)

DORIS: Here is the enchanted storybook castle.

So, imagine seeing it and figuring out how it all fits within that pad.

I'm sure, all of our designers are out here going,

"How the heck is it gonna fit?" (CHUCKLES) Because it's such a large castle.

NARRATOR: Initially 3.7 billion dollars,

this marked the largest ever foreign investment made by Disney,

yet, they remained the minority owner.

The company navigated miles of red tape and yielded its usual control.

The Imagineers faced pleasing an unknown consumer.

From 60 years of past lessons learned,

the endeavor hinged on striking the right balance

between Chinese heritage and Disney tradition.

DORIS: One of our challenges on this project

is, like anytime we go into a new market,

is really trying to teach our culture, our history,

the Disney tradition, our heritage. It's such a rich heritage.

It all started with one man, one man with two daughters

that cared so much about their happiness, sitting in a park wondering,

"How can I make this more fun for more people?

"Not just me or my girls, but for everybody."

And for him, to have that courage and that vision to do that,

I think it's inspiring.

My roots is from Shanghai, my family's from Shanghai,

my parents and my grandparents.

It was very cosmopolitan.

There were many, many cultures that lived here.

My mom is full Chinese, and my father is European.

I have in my blood the mix between the East and the West.

In a way, it's sort of coming back home,

but it's a home that I don't know as well anymore,

but I'm rediscovering it now in a different light.

MURRAY KING: This market faces the same issues

that Walt saw almost six decades ago.

Issues around safety, issues around show, issues around quality.

Shanghai is retooling as a city to be a city focused on the service industry.

And what Walt brought to America is what I think we're doing for China today.

BOB IGER: We were announcing the deal

and I wanted to convey to the world

we're going to be extremely mindful of entering China...

with a great deal of respect for the people of China and its culture.

-(CROWD APPLAUDING) -IGER: We were wordsmithing

the press release and I said,

"Well, how about 'Authentically Disney, distinctly Chinese'?"

And it stuck.

IGER: This is a landmark occasion...

and it is a major step in our journey to create a destination

that will be authentically Disney and distinctly Chinese.

(CROWD APPLAUDING)

DORIS: I could see that there would be challenges from the standpoint

of understanding the Chinese culture

and not taking the stereotypical point-of-view.

As we started working with our Chinese partners

and the information funneled down to the team levels.

It was the bigger, the better, the wider, the higher, the more unique,

the unusual, never been done before,

but yet it's a magic kingdom like none other,

and that none other is the part that we all kind of go around,

scratch our heads and go, "What does that mean?"

NARRATOR: The Imagineers broke many of the sacred design principles

established six decades ago.

They removed the Americana, like the paddle wheeler,

the steam train, and Main Street, U.S.A.,

inspired by Walt Disney's hometown of Marceline, Missouri.

The Imagineers did keep the overall layout of four lands

but altered the central hub.

DORIS: We actually turned it into a land and called it the Gardens of Imagination.

Made it into a garden environment.

DORIS: This market is what we call the 421, four grandparents,

two parents, and one child.

We need to appeal to all of them.

So, this garden was great

because it provided a very simple enjoyment

while perhaps the older generation stay behind

and hung out with the babies, and enjoyed the carousel.

The Chinese workers, they all want to do it,

but if they've never had the exposure

and the training that took, for instance, for me,

from the time I started with Disney in '79 to now,

I'm still learning. How can we expect them to learn overnight?

So it requires that patience, that learning curve,

and here we're hitting the dirt running.

(CEMENT SPLASHING)

FABRICE KENNEL:

(SCRAPES)

FABRICE:

DORIS: Hmm-mm.

DORIS: Mm-hmm.

FABRICE:

DORIS: Hmm. Mm-hmm.

And this texture...

(SPEAKING CHINESE)

FABRICE:

People in China build big, it's a big country.

Scale is evident in the skyline.

The tallest buildings in the world are here.

The distinctly Chinese aspect of the iconic center of this resort

is the scale of the castle.

NARRATOR: The largest of any Disney castle.

The Imagineers designed four stories worth of interior walk-through spaces

including a grand rotunda that resembled a cathedral.

ALI RUBENSTEIN: It's a fairly harsh environment,

there's pollution, there's a lot of rain,

and there's a lot of dirt in the air.

Hopefully that's gonna get cleaned up over the

(CHUCKLES) in the near future, but for now, we know that we're gonna be

getting a lot of color-fading, we're gonna get...

The castle's gonna get a little bit dirty, so the color is gonna dull down.

So, we have to kind of account for all that as we're addressing

color and finishes.

NARRATOR: For the eight castle finials,

the designers relied on a traditional 24-karat gold leaf technique

which doesn't tarnish.

One spire featured a decorative crown representing the Disney princesses.

The tallest tower showcased a lucky Chinese cultural symbol.

LEIA MI: (SPEAKING CHINESE)

(LEIA CHUCKLING)

-(CONTINUES SPEAKING) -(WORKERS CHATTERING)

(MAN LAUGHING IN DISTANCE)

NARRATOR: Based on their research, The Imagineers dropped Frontierland

in favor of the pirate-themed Treasure Cove.

There would also be no It's a Small World,

-(CROWD APPLAUDS) -...no Jungle Cruise, no Haunted Mansion.

-If any classics were to remain... -(INDISTINCT CHATTER)

they had to evolve.

BOB WEIS: I took a group of Chinese visitors to Disneyland

and we went through Pirates of The Caribbean, the original,

which we've all grown up with.

If you look at it through the eyes of someone

who has no nostalgia for that, who doesn't know anything about it...

they said, "Wow, this is slow and boring." (CHUCKLES)

And they said, "I felt like I was looking through little windows

"and the action was out there somewhere, but I wasn't in it."

They wanna be in the ship battle, not watching the ship battle.

LUC MAYRAND: Our attraction has some nods

-to the original Pirates of The Caribbean -(SCREAMING)

-'cause that was the original inspiration, -(GUNSHOTS)

but it's an extension, it's a whole new story.

It's not a retelling of the movies.

(UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING)

We wanted to tell the equivalent of a ten-minute long movie

that is really three-dimensionally happening around you.

You happen to be there and you're part of it,

it acknowledges you sometimes, it knows you are there,

and you're part of the story, and there's no interruption.

NANCY SERUTO: When you say, "I'm gonna seamlessly merge

"the physical world and the media world,"

all kinds of things come into play.

The media becomes an extension of the physical world.

That perspective and that scale all have to work together,

the lighting has to work together, the color.

You don't want it to look like a movie screen

at the end of the ships.

You're the center of the action,

so, if a cannonball is being fired at the ride vehicle,

you want it to come right at the ride vehicle,

and that has to intersect before the ride vehicle, say, turns right.

NARRATOR: The Imagineers achieved a controllable point-of-view

by untethering the boats from the chain mechanism

of earlier versions.

Instead, programmable magnets under the surface propelled the vehicles.

That gives us the ability to turn the boats around.

They can go sideways, they can go backwards, we can moderate the speed,

but we also simulate the feeling of sinking.

(SCREAMS)

IGER: You're basically immersed in a room that is an IMAX room.

-INTERVIEWER: Uh-huh. -By the time you sink,

you look up and there are fish swimming above you.

There's a lot of technology involved...

-INTERVIEWER: Hm-mmm. -...but there's huge media in the space.

-(INDISTINCT CHATTERING) -(MACHINES WHIRRING)

It's an Imagineering cultural thing when you're on-site to build a new family.

In my lifetime, it's the first time where the tools we have

matched the ambition of what we create.

We never did anything like Pirates before,

because we didn't have the right toolkit to actually do it.

WEIS: Even we pride ourselves in innovation.

When you're under pressure it's easy to think conservative.

We should lift Space Mountain

because we know it, we know how to build it,

we know how much it costs, it's popular,

and so surprisingly, one of the great hurdles you have

-in a project like this is ourselves. -(INDISTINCT CHATTER)

Should we do Tron or should we do a Space Mountain?

...in an all-new way.

SCOT: Welcome to Tomorrowland, this is where the future is happening.

Currently, we're standing in front of the Tron Lightcycle Power Run.

So, what you're seeing here is just what we call the gravity box.

This is the inside portion of the attraction.

-(MACHINE BEEPING) -There's a large section of the track

that darts out into the land.

It's gonna be launched at 60 miles an hour every 26 seconds,

and that's gonna be protected by this big superstructure.

(MACHINES WHIRRING)

NARRATOR: Even though movies from the Marvel Cinematic Universe

broke records in China,

The Imagineers opted to reboot Tomorrowland with Tron,

a property they felt better reflected the futuristic elegance

found in the metropolitan hub of Shanghai.

(WHIRRING)

SCOT: You can't have a vision of the future without really cool vehicles

and that's what we've been trying to deliver.

The ride vehicle is always a key storytelling device for us,

and that's why I'm so proud of the Tron vehicle,

is 'cause we are reintroducing how a roller coaster is looked at.

We have on-board lighting, on-board audio,

it's really a character, and you become a character

as part of this attraction.

(ENGINE REVVING)

SCOT: This is Disney's fastest coaster we've ever built.

There's some dynamic architecture in Shanghai

but nothing quite like this.

Trains of Light Cycles surging through it, right?

So, this is dynamic architecture in form and in function.

We talked a lot about the shape language of this being...

like the tail of a dragon,

and the strength of those kinds of Chinese imagery.

(PEOPLE SCREAMING)

SCOT: Everything is big,

all of our set pieces are big, our signage is big.

Tron was always something that really set a new bar for the aesthetics,

and how this sci-fi world could and should look,

and we're redefining that,

but we've created a whole new style for the grid that you're racing through.

(PEOPLE SCREAMING)

SCOT: I have two daughters here, and a son that we're adopting here,

it's my goal for them to walk this, and this,

what we're building is just the spark, right?

What their imagination fills in after that,

that's the true genius of the original Disneyland,

when we would walk through Tomorrowland as kids, and we saw that rocket,

we weren't seeing a fiberglass and steel rocket,

we were seeing space travel, and that's what we're trying to hint at,

the possibilities are endless,

and if we can inspire the next generation,

I can't wait to go to the next Tomorrowland.

As Imagineers, we have to be prepared to iris back and forth

between the big picture and every little detail.

That means you're involved with dishes,

and furniture, and fabrics, and tiles,

and a myriad of detail that you have to be able to master.

(SPEAKING CHINESE)

NARRATOR: Within the Gardens of Imagination,

the Imagineers blended Disney characters

with the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac calendar.

The inclusion of the horoscope honored its role in Chinese daily life.

Each mosaic mural would serve as a playful photo op.

For me, it's like a kid in a candy shop,

I love looking at all of these tiles, look how gorgeous this is.

This shows how they handle a lot of their other jobs.

You can see, it's very pixelated.

It's truly a cut technique,

it's taking a tile factory made or manufactured,

and then it's cut into shapes so that it would fit

within the overall shape that you need it to be.

If it's an eye, then you have to create

all of the different fractions and little pieces

that would create the pupil, and all of the different colors within it,

and the eyelashes, and all of that.

It really becomes an expression of art

in another form, another technique, another material.

This is you proverbial jigsaw puzzle.

These folks don't really follow it down to the tee...

-(TILES CLATTERING) -...because you really can't.

'Cause the way they cut their tile, sometimes when it's cut,

it actually cuts the wrong way, and they'll just work with it.

As you can see, she's laying it down one by one.

It's a very laborious job.

This would give me high anxiety, I think (CHUCKLES)

to try and find that piece.

(INDISTINCT CHATTER)

(SPEAKING CHINESE)

DORIS: Sometimes you get lost in the details,

and you can't quite think about,

"Well, wait a minute, what am I doing right now?"

So, you have to constantly remind them of the big picture,

"Oh, this is one of the twelve,"

and it just made it that much more special for them

because they put their heart into this,

and so it... You need to do that, and you always have to remind yourself,

"What is it for in the long run?"

TOM MORRIS: You can think of it as an heirloom.

It's something that is precious, and it's gonna be

handed down from family to family, except from millions of families

to millions of families.

In that regard, it is like opening up a giant present.

There's like a big wrapped ribbon with a fantastic bow

that is... They're tantalizing our new audiences.

When we finally open the park, it's like pulling that ribbon

and, you know, the ribbon comes apart, and the paper comes apart,

and the park is there for the guest for the first time.

HOWARD BROWN: We went up to Beijing last month and asked the contractors

to support the project even more, and they said, "Well, you know,

"in China we don't really know how to run a marathon.

"But we really know how to sprint."

They know how to do the last 90 days,

and when we talk about the rush to finish,

everybody's out there in the sprint right now.

ALI: My team is going so strong.

They have been painting like fiends.

(DRUMS BEATING DRAMATICALLY)

This castle, a week ago, was covered in scaffolding.

(DRUMS CONTINUING)

Level two, I think this is our big hit zone

because we wanna knock down the red,

probably gonna have to hit more like 80 percent of them to some extent.

Take out all the gray stones. If we focus on lightening level two

and cooling down level four,

we're gonna have to dialed in the majority of this castle.

IGER: We all shared the stress, the eyes of the world were on this.

We've been there sixteen times in six months.

I was completely strung out, I had nothing left in the tank.

The pressure on us...

we had the board, we had senior executives,

we had investors, we had the press.

We had to tour, wine and dine everybody, we had the government.

(CHUCKLES) We had the Imagineering team and the construction team.

And we had this thing that we had to open.

It was quite something.

(CROWD CHEERS, APPLAUDS)

DORIS: There's always a certain sense of urgency

and it is urgency because we're down to the wire,

and there's still so much left to do.

You go home at the end of the day and go how are we going to do this?

But the next day comes, you take a deep breath

and the show must go on and you start again.

I am pretty philosophical about stress... (SIGHS)

because we're not paramedics.

We're not rocket scientists, we're not flying airplanes.

We're building happiness.

NARRATOR: Before a rare public meeting with China's President,

Bob Iger learned that Xi Jinping's father, a revolutionary leader,

had visited Disneyland in 1980.

Bob pressed his staff to find a photograph and presented it to Xi

as an optimistic symbol of their future partnership.

IGER: I could tell he got very emotional about it,

and he didn't cry but tears welled up in his eyes.

And he said to me at the time...

"My interest in Disney is not rhetoric, it's from the bottom of my heart."

I had never heard a Chinese official echo anything like that...

injecting your emotion into a discussion. It was a big deal.

NARRATOR: After nearly 20 years in the making

and a total cost of 5.5 billion dollars,

Disney's 12th theme park opened its gates to the world.

(INDISTINCT CHATTER)

The Imagineers had planted Disney roots deep into mainland China.

A model city stood as a symbol

-of patience and collaboration. -(CROWD CHEERING)

LUC: When creating a project for China,

we found that faced with a challenge

to accomplish something, especially something creative,

people rally around it. People want to do it. They're excited.

When you come to know other human beings

through the lens of working together every single day,

it's very enriching.

NGAKWAN CHAN:

To all who come to this happy place...

Welcome.

Disneyland is your land.

Shanghai Disneyland is your land.

Here age relives fond memories of the past.

And here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future.

Here you leave today and discover imaginative worlds

of fantasy, romance, and adventure

that ignite the magical dreams within all of us.

WALT DISNEY: Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams,

and hard facts that have created America.

IGER: Shanghai Disneyland is authentically Disney

and distinctly Chinese.

It was created for everyone.

With the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration

...for generations to come.

-Thank you. -(IN CHINESE) Xiexie.

That was the highest high that I've had in this job.

INTERVIEWER:

(CHUCKLES) To Disneyland.

Of course, now that I've done this, I go to Disneyland.

(CROWD CHEERING, APPLAUDING)

NARRATOR: During the first year of operation,

over 11 million people

passed through the front gate of Shanghai Disneyland,

exceeding all expectation.

Like the original Disneyland, the gamble paid off.

The synthesis of Chinese and Disney elements

created an experience greater than the sum of its parts.

NANCY: When you go to a different culture, and you live in a different country,

and you work differently, it changes you.

It changes you forever. You don't just go back.

This idea of Yin and Yang

that I kept thinking about when I was there.

I keep saying yin and yang, this is yin and yang,

and then I looked it up because I really wanted

to understand what the heart of that was.

And the heart of it isn't just about two different things coming together,

it's about the fundamental change in both that happens

as a result of them coming together.

I think that was our experience there.

I think that philosophy very much captures it.

The idea is, if they tear that thing...

WEIS: As I think back on Shanghai, what we've learned is

that it's harder for people to come back than it is to go.

You go, you're excited,

new life, new place, project, all that stuff.

But then you've been away for five or six years,

and look around at this great people.

What are they gonna come home to? What's their next big thing?

And how do we make sure that they come home to a company

that understands their contribution and how we leverage

this international experience we've had in Asia.

It's always tough, it's always got to evolve.

The challenges are gonna change.

And our job is to constantly refresh that engine.

NARRATOR: After spending six years in China,

Bob Weis came home to a promotion.

From a young coordinator in Tokyo. to the creative lead in Shanghai

nearly a four decade-long journey.

Bob was appointed the new President of Walt Disney Imagineering.

He inherited a huge menu of work already in progress.

Empathetic to the pressures on creative minds,

Bob focused his energy on keeping the teams motivated...

even the veterans.

INTERVIEWER:

Interestingly, yes, I do get assigned to projects I am not excited about...

but my job is to figure out

what it is about that project that is exciting.

For example, I did not have a clear way of understanding

how Avatar was even possible to do.

People love the movie, but is it feasible? Can we do it?

It's all organic, so there's no repeating forms.

That means everything has to independently engineered,

so there's no economy of scale.

Everything is gigantic.

It's a tremendous investment of time.

You have a world where things float in the air,

which looks great in a CGI film,

but I do not know how that could ever be done in the physical world.

The key characters are 12 feet tall and really skinny.

They're not gonna fit inside of a human costume.

What about this is a smart idea?

But then I get it.

Avatar is about the intrinsic value of nature,

Avatar is about a personal call to action.

So, it fits really neatly into the mythology of Animal Kingdom

even though it's a science fiction adventure.

JON LANDAU: The Imagineers were very apprehensive at first

about working in a partnership.

It took time to get that trust, to get that relationship,

but the door was always open to us.

Joe and Jim hit if off because I think they both realized

the importance of creating content that has a theme.

The experience of the ride itself, the wows of it,

is what you leave at the theme park.

The theme of the ride,

the theme of the land is what you leave a park with.

JAMES CAMERON: Joe is just a ball of fire which was, you know, match made in heaven.

Joe Rohde really understood Avatar.

He really understood what we were trying to do.

He distilled the very best messaging from the movie,

and he put it into the fabric of the land.

LISA GIROLAMI: We can envision something,

but you don't really know if it's gonna go over well.

That was the biggest unknown for me.

The movie had come out quite a while before.

Were people really gonna wanna hang out on Pandora?

Were they really gonna wanna, you know, wonder around

and kind of experience that whole land?

I was a little nervous about, "Would this be enough?"

JOE: We took about a year in engineering

to develop the structures of these mountains

which I wanna make clear

does not include these giant aluminum poles.

What we did was to take the structural steel

and redesign the structural steel,

so that it appears to be nothing but limp, draped vines.

It's these little skinny vines that are holding up the mountain.

But your mind's eye won't let you believe that.

It's like a classic magician's trick.

ZSOLT HORMAY: Throughout the design, we really wanted to make sure

that the guest will not connect

this structure is supporting those mountains

and the other structure is doing the same thing.

So, what we did, we actually pushed them apart from each other,

so when you look at it,

visually you just don't connect that it's an arch.

JOE: It looks like confusion, but every piece is designed, placed, engineered,

that's what's amazing about it. Every piece.

LANDAU: Those trees play great, it's far enough away from me.

I'm not sure... You know, here, I worry...

-MAN: Too close. -Too close.

ZSOLT: You think it's... They're too big or...

They play as plants to me and not as far away.

The challenge is to force the perspective vertically

and into the distance too, so it's a tricky one.

ZSOLT: Normally, we have hero shots point of views.

On this project, everything is a hero shot,

you know, that so, we have to pay attention to everything,

360 degrees, all the way around.

JOE: One of the most important things

that the Avatar Project is doing for animal kingdom

is bringing animal kingdom into the night.

The world of Avatar glows.

It comes to life. It's full of bioluminescence.

So, we have bioluminescence spread throughout the land.

All of those plants are actually electric lighting fixtures.

They all light up at night.

They are all connected to a centralized show control system,

so not only can we make them light up,

we can send waves of illumination through all of the plants in the land.

And then these mountains are projected onto

with mapped projections that covers the mountains in bioluminescence.

So, you see these sort of waves of luminescence

crossing through the mountains themselves at night.

It should be really neat.

NARRATOR: The Imagineers invented dozens of bioluminescent plant species

and mixed them with the natural flora.

Throughout the darkened Na'vi River journey,

the designers hoped to induce an emotion rarely felt in a theme park...

serenity.

JOE: This all the R&D area.

Behind all of these curtains are different projects going on.

This is the cutting edge of the technology of Imagineering.

And in our case, this incredible figure.

I can't even say that it represents a next step.

It's really like a completely new animation technology.

Traditionally with animatronics,

we sculpt an expression into the character

because they just don't have that much range of motion in their faces.

We wanted a character that could express emotion.

At some level, it's a matter of creating enough movements inside the face

that you can actually reproduce what people or creatures can actually do.

AKHIL: One of the technologies that's allowed us to do that

is to move completely towards electric motors and electric actuators.

Now, we can get motors that are the size of my little finger

that 30 years ago would have been the size of my hand, right?

And it allows us to place them inside the face.

So, a face like this has 42 different electric motors inside of it.

And each one of these motors is controllable very accurately

to within a fracture of a degree of rotation.

If the skin thickness is wrong, if the sculpt is wrong,

if the placement of the motors is wrong,

or if where you move them is wrong, it very quickly goes to,

"This is creepy, it's deforming in the wrong way,

"and it doesn't look realistic."

JAMES: We were able to plug in, almost as a module,

our way of capturing motion and performance

that we had used to make the movie

became the front end for the programming of The Shaman.

So, it actually represents real, human, instinctive movement

that's now being manifested through an incredibly complex machine.

LINCOLN: We all declare for liberty...

but in using the same word...

JAMES: I remember when Lincoln blew my mind, and that would have been,

what, in the mid '60s?

When you think about how crude that figure is now

in terms of number of actuators, number of axes of motion,

subtleties of movement.

But to see something right in front of you

that's undeniably real and appears to be alive

and can't possibly be real

because she's ten feet tall and she's got three fingers

and she's got the widely spaced eyes and giant eyes of the Na'vi,

-and yet she's real. -(NA'VI SONG PLAYING)

I look forward to seeing you on Pandora.

(SPEAKS NA'VI LANGUAGE)

Was that okay?

NARRATOR: For the premier attraction,

the Imagineers attempted to recreate Soarin', over Pandora.

The feeling of flight seemed elusive enough

but this ride system had to move and breathe like a living creature.

Performance capture is a way to translate human actions,

human performance into a digital character.

AMY JUPITER: We were able to sort of put banshees on a stick

and have our designers go and act out, perform,

puppeteer the flight of the banshees. And that provided our first ride profile.

This expression of joy, and ballet, and dance.

The technology enabled us to, in a very intuitive way,

-capture that spirit. -(INDISTINCT CHATTER)

JOE: We were riding that ride at a pretty rudimentary scale

when all of us kind of have this joyful, weepy sensation

at the beginning of the third act.

We're flying through, like, computer graphics.

Like, what is this feeling?

How do we make that better? How do we feed this?

What do we take out? What do we put in?

And so, you could go in and do this strange, dream-like

level of correlation that pushes it to another level of experience.

But you found that. You didn't know it was there.

You found that.

JAMES: I felt early on that it was too rough, that the ride was too rough,

that it was trying to compete with hardcore iron rides

and hardcore simulator rides for an adrenaline rush.

And so, I asked them to back off on that. I think we met in the middle.

I felt that the visual experience of it, with the big dome screen

and the high-resolution projection and the super bright projection of the 3D,

would be so compelling

that you wouldn't wanna just get pounded through it.

You'd wanna take it in and enjoy it.

(AVATAR THEME MUSIC PLAYING)

(CHEERING)

NARRATOR: All of the analysis, calculation, and technology receded,

the emotion remained.

Avatar Flight of Passage took guests to a world of pure exhilaration.

(SPEAKING NA'VI)

NARRATOR: On the same weekend, Pandora: The World of Avatar opened,

another science fiction universe debuted on the opposite coast

-to equal anticipation. -(CROWD CHEERING)

NARRATOR: Disney California Adventure had no room for expansion.

When operators first asked the Imagineers to re-theme

The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror with a Marvel footprint

some fans voiced outright disapproval. Others called it

a millennial pop culture marketing ploy.

But the Imagineers confronted the directive,

"Use valuable characters, make it current, keep the same box."

JOE: It's amazing how much flat scenic painting works,

when we get above this line.

-You can paint almost anything... -Right.

...and get people to believe it.

It's a hundred and fifty feet away from our viewer.

You know, when you look up at the building now,

-there's this big Art Deco zigzag thing? -Yeah.

-That's painting.

That's flat. You'd never know it was flat.

We have a machine. It only does one thing.

It goes up and down. That's all it does.

It won't do anything else. We can't change it.

We can't rebuild it. All we can do reprogram it.

AMY: It was a little terrifying and daunting because it was so beloved.

And we just wanted to understand, what is the essence of that attraction.

The essence of going up and down, the essence of it.

How much motion can we get out this? How much emotion can we get out of it?

So, we wanted to make it a giggle machine, the Guardians are funny.

So, like, what is the motion in that attraction that is funny?

Well, God, tummy ticklers are funny. All up and down is funny.

Surprise is funny.

(UPBEAT ROCK MUSIC PLAYING)

Tower of Terror is modeled to produce a sensation of fear.

It's a scary ride. This is not scary.

This is an irreverent ride.

So, we need to change the emotional feeling of the ride

to favor a kind of floating sensation.

You know, when you take the baby and you throw them up in the air

and you catch them, you throw them up in the air and you catch them,

and they giggle, right?

'Cause it's a fun feeling to be tossed up in the air and caught again.

So, the little baby is giggling 'cause of that feeling. That feeling.

The filmmakers shot the live actors with a vertical array of seven cameras

which allowed the ride engineers to seamlessly match the perspective

with the physical motion of the vehicle.

The script writers harness the irreverent nature of the characters

to further fine-tune that feeling of fun.

-ALL: One, two... Yeah! -JOE: These are hard things to measure.

The micro adjustments is where the emotion is and why people feel the emotion.

The stuff has no emotion in it until you load it,

and you load it by making these very careful decisions.

(GRUNTS)

(LAUGHS) You're welcome.

(LAUGHS)

When you're directing for a ride, people are in a much different state

than they are when they come in and see a movie.

When they come in and see a movie, they're mellow, they're listening,

they're excited to be there but they're listening.

In a ride, people are so amped up and so crazy,

you really need to move fast, you need to pound it home.

Everything's a little bit bigger.

Everything's a little bit more grand than it is in the movies.

-And the actors reflect that. -(CROWD CHEERING, APPLAUDING)

Ladies and gentlemen, the Tivan Collection is official open.

(CROWD CHEERING, APPLAUDING)

-ROCKET: Rocket unplugs you... -(WIRE STATICS)

-...and start things rocking. -(WIRE STATICS)

NARRATOR: Guardians of the Galaxy: Mission Breakout! won over many critics.

It also served as a prelude to the grand Imagineering plans

yet to come.

Plans that included three separate but interconnected superhero lands

spread across the globe.

But until then, the promise of a galaxy far away

grabbed the public's attention.

("STAR WARS: MAIN TITLE" PLAYING)

SCOTT TROWBRIDGE: When we announced that

Lucasfilm is gonna become part of the Disney family,

all of Imagineering was abuzz with,

"Oh, my gosh, now we can go big."

But also, it went from, "Oh, my gosh, look at all things we can do,"

to, "Oh, my gosh, we better get this right," pretty quickly.

MALE VOICE: The ambition level was going to be high.

You can see that this was going to be built both in Orlando and in Anaheim.

But, at that point, it was quite malleable.

It was a ball of clay to be shaped.

NARRATOR: From one rabid fan base to the next,

the Imagineers wrestled with what to build and from which movie.

They debated whether the guest should be treated as a witness or participant.

Against conventional wisdom, the Imagineers opted to conceive

somewhere entirely new.

This way, each guest could follow their own immersive heroes' journey.

KATHLEEN KENNEDY: I don't think there's any more

innovative team than the Imagineers.

Just that name alone is something that immediately conjures up excitement.

When you start thinking about what's possible

in terms of immersive entertainment,

it's often the way you think about making a movie when you're translating a book.

You look at the book and you think,

"I'm not gonna do a literal translation of that.

"I'm gonna try to find out what feeling

"are they actually taking away from the experience?"

DOUG CHIANG: It's an interesting transition to design for theme parks.

It's a whole another level of thoroughness.

Sometimes, you know, I would insist

on having something look a certain way because it was very authentic Star Wars,

but it broke all the rules in terms of what they had to do.

And so, we had to find a happy medium.

And by working together as one team, we were able to bridge those gaps.

NARRATOR: The Imagineers spent months digging

through old paintings of Ralph McQuarrie,

the concept artist on the original Star Wars film.

They assembled a patchwork quilt of sketches

that helped define the shapes, colors, and landscape of Planet Batuu.

It's really important to find that one ingredient

that actually defines what that planet is.

For instance, Endor is a forest planet, and Hoth is a snow planet,

you know, Tatooine is a desert planet, Batuu is a petrified spired planet.

We're creating a new world that represents

our largest single-themed land expansion ever.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUDS, CHEERS)

The image comes up Bob gives the announcement,

and the place erupts. I mean, it goes crazy.

We were backstage and we were, like, high fiving each other... (CHUCKLES)

hugging each other, mostly out of relief.

SCOTT: One of our core guiding principles from day one...

was to build a place that felt authentic.

Everything from the buildings we build to the wardrobe that the cast members wear

to the merchandise in the stores to the food in the shops.

If you wouldn't see something in a film, you shouldn’t see it in this land.

(MACHINE WHIRRING)

CHRIS: We wanted this land to feel mysterious,

and we wanted it to feel a little bit dangerous.

And we wanted it to have a sense of history.

I remember standing in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul.

It's incredible to actually close your eyes,

stand in the middle of the bazaar,

and you hear the shopkeepers yelling at each other.

-(CALL TO PRAYER) -You hear the call to prayer.

You hear all these different people speaking different languages pass by.

And you can smell the Turkish coffee.

And you can smell the wet stone 'cause it's been raining that morning,

and the stone just has a smell to it.

The ground you're walking on, those cobbles have been walked on

for a thousand years.

If you close your eyes, you could be in a Star Wars film, right?

You could be on the planet Batuu, You could be on Black Spire Outpost.

It gave us so much more than just the visual look of this planet.

DOUG: This is gonna be an unguided journey.

The guest will be able to roam, go wherever they want.

They'll be able to smell, you know, the fragrances that we're gonna create.

They're gonna be to touch materials and fabrics.

They're gonna basically live this place as if it's real because it is real.

CHRIS: We always bring a sense of play

and a sense of discovery to everything we design.

I remember building play sets in my backyard

and having my figures have these epic battles

and, you know, TIE fighters coming in and X-wings battling.

And now as an Imagineer, I can imagine being that ten-year old kid

with his action figures in the backyard. It's just on a scale that's full size...

(CHUCKLES) ...you know, and epic.

MALE VOICE: Yeah, we can come back in and slush...

CHRIS: What we love as storytellers is not showing you everything at one time.

What we like to do is come in, give you a little taste of it.

Give you a moment where you're like, "Oh, my God. We just arrived.

"Look at this building. This is the Droid shop. This is incredible."

And then as you turn the corner, we open this amazing view up to you.

-(MACHINE BEEPING) -Almost like a cinematic reveal.

And we're excited because this isn't the only one.

Every time, you turn a corner, we paint one of these reveals for you.

We're always pulling you through the scene to a destination

you just haven't seen yet.

(DRILLING)

When you think about Star Wars, it's not a high-tech galaxy.

Most of the stuff, the screens and all that,

are never anything after the '70s and '80s.

So, there's a particular look of the propping to make it look Star Wars.

NARRATOR: A band of Imagineer scavengers rummaged through airplane graveyards,

flea markets and ministries of defense, gathering parts to recycle.

(CLATTERING)

(MACHINE REVVING)

NARRATOR: In a secret Orlando warehouse, the small team constructed thousands

of custom props to decorate the planet.

The Imagineers thought of one hunk of junk as the main character

and the land's central icon.

What a piece of junk.

(STAR WARS MUSIC PLAYING)

Every time we said, "Look, we're gonna do something Star Wars,"

people said, "Oh, I wanna fly on the Millennium Falcon."

NARRATOR: Where the Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run, the Imagineers partnered

with game engine software developers to create an interactive adventure

light years beyond a videogame played from a couch.

We knew we needed this to be near cinematic quality imagery

rendered at a high frame rate in real time.

That was not technology that exists.

We started marching down that path with the expectation

that by the time we were getting ready to open,

it would all work. We didn't know.

Months before opening, it doesn't work.

It almost works.

It has almost worked for a very long time.

As we start to fix these bugs, connect this piece of technology

with this piece of the technology, figure out why this impediment is there.

But that's what life is like,

when you're working on the cutting edge of technology.

You're treading in territory that no one's been in before,

yet we're counting on this

all working flawlessly and seamlessly on opening day.

That can keep you up at night.

I can tell you, we've solved those problems.

-INTERVIEWER: -Yes. Almost. (CHUCKLES)

Almost.

NARRATOR: The design team faced another dilemma.

Deliver a personal experience to an individual flight crew,

yet accommodate 1,800 guests per hour.

After a month of puzzle solving, they devised a massive

three-dimensional Swiss watch mechanism

that contained four turntables with seven cockpits each,

all hidden from the guests.

ROBIN REARDON: Often times, I find myself as the translator,

where you're trying to translate this crazy vision of what we're gonna do

to the operator who's never heard it before and the...

the park operator is going, "You wanna do... you wanna do what?"

It's like, "No, no, no. It's not gonna be that bad."

-(MACHINE BEEPING) -(ENGINE REVVING)

ROBIN: This was a huge win for all of us...

but Rise of the Resistance has always been the critical path.

STEVE DAVISON: I don't know if you've ever walked through the hallways

of a Star Destroyer before.

At least, a Star Destroyer that's under construction.

NARRATOR: Designed as a 15-minute-long immersive experience,

Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance

earned the distinction of the most complicated attraction

the Imagineers have ever created.

The main storyline revolved around guests being captured aboard an enemy ship

and attempting to escape.

This scene, we find ourselves actually coming face to face

with this amazing armored transport vehicles.

We know what laser bolts looked like. We know what spaceships look like.

And it's movie special effects.

-(LASER ZAPS) -And so for us to actually recreate

those CG-style effects but do it for real, in the real world,

requires us to bring a whole bunch of technologies together

and kind of create these amazing technology sandwiches.

In this scene, lasers are a big part of that.

And so what these folks are doing right now

is actually calibrating and programming those lasers

as part of the special effects that'll happen inside this scene.

Outside these windows, we see the battle is raging.

And these giant blasters are just... (IMITATES LASER BEAMS)

...and we have to kind of cat and mouse our way through them to get to safety.

NARRATOR: The Imagineers combined dimensional sets,

audio animatronics, and media on an epic scale,

which require precision timing.

Over the course of four years, the designers pre-programmed

and pre-visualized every element across 18 different scenes.

STEVE: You don't know how it's gonna feel until you start seeing it for real

in the site. And you just saw it, like, for the...

-...first time. -First time.

Yeah. For the first time. So?

-And... -It's a good place to start.

-It's a good place to start. -So...

MALE VOICE: Containment breach. Closing blast doors.

-There's no escape. -(MACHINE WHIRRING, BEEPING)

You will tell me the location of the secret base,

and then I will destroy you and the Resistance.

JOHN: So, right now you can see sight lines are a little...

He was a little too far to his right when he looks over here.

And as well, I'm gonna destroy you and the Resistance

-and I'm waiting for it. -Right, right.

So we have to add the rest of Kylo's line in there, "Once and for..."

-(IMITATES EXPLOSION) ...like that. -Yeah.

SCOTT: Some of the things we were thinking for Rise of the Resistance were

"How do we explore a Star Destroyer?"

A trackless ride vehicle like Ratatouille or Mystic Manor

where you don't see the obvious track

and you can... and... and your vehicle's making choices,

and you don't know which direction you're gonna go,

felt like right answer,

but we also knew that we needed a bit more thrill

and a bit more visceral thrill.

So we came up with the idea of "What if we take

"that trackless ride vehicle and what if we mount it to

"a motion-based experience like Star Tours?"

It's not just about zipping through this Star Destroyer

but it's a moment of kind of like being very, very active

in a simulated motion environment.

But then we said, "Okay, let's take that trackless ride vehicle,

"let's put it on that motion-base,

"and then let's take that whole motion-base

"and attach it to free fall drop tour."

That is a crazy idea but that was the best way to bring Star Wars to life.

ROBIN: The secret sauce of Imagineering is instead of building complex

power plants or roads or movies or special effects,

you're doing all of those things at once.

And that puts a different perspective on each one of those jobs.

And when you put them together, it is the combination of those voices

and those points of view that allow us to build this.

IGER: Ladies and gentlemen, George Lucas.

I'll first say, you did a great job.

IGER: Thank you very much. Coming from you, that means a lot.

-Well, it could have gone very bad. -(ALL LAUGHING)

I'd also like to thank all the Imagineers

that made this thing possible 'cause it's really something

that couldn't even dream about 20 years ago.

Ladies and gentlemen, Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge is now open.

-ALL: Three, two, one. -(CHEERING, APPLAUDING)

NARRATOR: With the opening Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge,

the Imagineers created a new kind of experience.

Boundaries blurred between what's an attraction and what's not.

On the verge of the next frontier, they aspired to design every aspect

of an environment,

one where the guest steps into a living theater and plays make believe.

MALE VOICE: Checking status.

Uh, all the servers are fine. Voltages are good.

Temperature is fine.

-Prelaunch position. -Here we go.

I suspect a lot of places around the world have robotics labs.

And we think of this as our characters' lab.

JON SNODDY: You know, when you look at the latest characters

from Star Wars, from Marvel...

those characters are not planted to the floor.

Those characters are not connected to the ground.

Those characters move. (CHUCKLES) They're exciting.

They do big crazy things. And I feel like it's the same kind of thing

that kicked it all off with Walt back, you know, all those years ago.

That thing of saying, "I wanna build something extraordinary.

"I want people to walk in and go,

"'Oh, my goodness, I... where did that come from?'"

MALE VOICE: Ten, nine, eight,

seven, six, five, four,

three, two, one. Go!

-That's a beautiful one. -(MAN LAUGHING)

Awesome.

-I'm glad you hit a bird. -(LAUGHS)

-I never get tired of that, my friend. -(LAUGHING CONTINUE)

That's great.

SNODDY: The same people that dream this up are still dreaming. (CHUCKLES)

And that just goes on and on and on.

The next decade, it's gonna be pretty amazing.

I think it's gonna be truly revolutionary

in what we're able to deliver to the parks.

NARRATOR: With every breakthrough discovery, past and present,

comes a relaxed tendency toward maintaining something proven to work.

As the saying goes, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

But there lies today's threat.

The next generation of Imagineers must continue that innovative spirit.

Exhibit the sheer desire to obsolete themselves and advance.

Blue sky is not the limit.

I often kind of fantasize when I'm driving home about,

"What's Imagineering gonna be a hundred years from now?

"What are the parks gonna be like? Where are the parks gonna be?

"What's Disneyland gonna be, and what's still gonna be there?"

It's kind of fun to think about that.

MARTY SKLAR: It's a philosophy.

It's an ethic that Walt brought to doing these parks.

His attitude about the public, it was never putting down people.

It was always about meeting the needs of people as he saw them.

DORIS: I've been with this company 26, almost 27 years now.

And I view this company as my family.

To carry that sort of aspiration

about what it is that we do and engage that into other people

and inspire them, I think that's the greatest gift.

JOE: People want to participate. They want to belong.

Human beings are emotional first.

You have to find their emotions.

That's what runs this thing, emotions.

You have to let yourself feel emotion in order to do this work.

NARRATOR: For nearly 70 years, the Imagineers cultivated an idea

from the mind of the one man into a global phenomenon

of 12 theme parks and counting.

The balancing act continues between cultural influence

and the constant stream of new characters and stories.

An Imagineers' work will never be completed

as long as their imagination keeps asking the question...

"What if?"