Walt Disney Imagineering posted a new video this week giving a look at the animator’s desk on display inside The Magic of Disney Animation, and it is loaded with real Disney animation history. With the September 14 opening now just over a week away, this is the closest look yet at the small details Imagineering built into the space, and it is worth slowing down for.
The video, hosted by a cast member named Ben, walks around a single dressed-out animator’s desk and the shelving behind it. It’s loaded with a rotating light table, a jar of grease pencils, a Pascal figure from Tangled perched on a lamp arm, a mirror shaped like a porthole with Donald Duck and his nephews on it, a genie lamp, a record player, a Big Ben model, and a pair of posable wooden mannequins. A mural of Lilo and Stitch resting in a hammock hangs on the wall just above it.
Two of the props tie directly into the building’s own backstory. One is a small model of a striped, resort-style building with mint green trim. The other is a mug sitting on the desk, filled with pencils, that reads “Walt Disney Feature Animation, Robert A.M. Stern Architects, Disney Development Company.”
Robert A.M. Stern is the architect who designed the real Roy E. Disney Animation Building in Burbank, the one topped with the giant Sorcerer Mickey hat that inspired the hat now sitting on top of this exact attraction at Hollywood Studios. Stern also designed Disney’s Yacht and Beach Club Resorts and Disney’s BoardWalk, all built in that same striped, nostalgic style. We covered Stern’s passing last November, and finding a genuine commemorative piece from his firm sitting on this desk is a nice, quiet way to honor the man whose work is literally holding up the hat over this building.
A 1998 Newsletter From the Real Florida Animation Studio – Pinned to a corkboard behind the desk is a copy of “Rabbit Rabbit,” the internal newsletter of Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida, the actual working studio that operated out of this same building from 1989 until it closed in 2004. This particular issue, dated July 20, 1998, celebrates Mulan crossing the $100 million mark at the box office, with a party planned that evening in the studio atrium.
That detail lines up with real history. Mulan was one of only three films the Florida studio animated from start to finish, alongside Lilo & Stitch and Brother Bear, which explains the Lilo and Stitch mural hanging right above the desk. Guests at the original 1989 version of this attraction even walked through a real glass-walled corridor overlooking those working animators, so seeing that studio’s own internal newsletter sitting out on the desk is a deep pull from Hollywood Studios history.
The Glasses, the Caricature Book, and the Rest of the Desk Clutter – A pair of green plastic glasses sits on the desk next to a placard describing them, though the placard’s full text is hard to make out on video. Nearby, a book titled “Studio Caricatures 1989-2006” appears to be a real internal book of staff caricatures drawn at Walt Disney Animation Studios over that stretch of years.
The shelf behind the desk is stacked with genuine animation art books, including “Drawn to Life,” a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs art book, “Hippo in a Tutu,” “The Nine Old Men,” “The Art of Frozen,” “The Art of Meet the Robinsons,” and “The Art of Encanto,” along with a second small resin building model tucked in front of them.
None of this had to be here. Disney could have filled this desk with generic prop dressing and called it finished. Instead there is a mug that name-drops the actual architect of the real animation building, a newsletter from a studio that closed more than two decades ago, and a mural tied to the exact films that studio made. That kind of detail only shows up when the people building a space actually care about the history behind it, and it matches what we already noticed with the Lost Boy from Back to Neverland callback in the atrium entrance. Imagineering keeps rewarding people who slow down and look closely, and this desk is the best example yet.
