Disney Animation Building
| Disney Animation Building | |
|---|---|
| Park | Disney California Adventure |
| Land / area | Hollywood Land |
| Type | Walk-through attraction complex / shows |
| Opened | February 8, 2001 |
| Designer | Walt Disney Imagineering
|
| Status | Operating |
The Disney Animation Building (also signed simply as Disney Animation) is an attraction complex at Disney California Adventure in Anaheim, California. Located in Hollywood Land, it brings together several experiences devoted to the art of Disney animation under one roof: the Animation Academy drawing class, the interactive Sorcerer's Workshop, and the live conversation show Turtle Talk with Crush. It is one of the park's original opening-day attractions.
History
The building opened with the park on February 8, 2001, in the land then called Hollywood Pictures Backlot, which recreated the studio streets of Hollywood's golden age. Where the rest of the backlot celebrated live-action filmmaking, Disney Animation was devoted to the studio's other great tradition, and it arranged a collection of exhibits and theatres around a central courtyard gallery.
The original line-up differed from today's. A screening room showed Back to Never Land, a short film about animation starring Robin Williams and Walter Cronkite, later replaced by material from One Man's Dream. A presentation on character development paired a live animator with Mushu from Mulan. The Sorcerer's Workshop and the drawing lessons that became the Animation Academy were present from the start.
The building's biggest change came on July 15, 2005, when Turtle Talk with Crush opened in the former screening-room space. The show had debuted at Epcot in November 2004 to great popularity, and its arrival in California made the Animation Building home to one of the park's most talked-about experiences. When Hollywood Pictures Backlot was renamed Hollywood Land in the park's 2012 relaunch, centred on the new Buena Vista Street, the building survived the transition intact, and it has since also hosted character greetings, including a long-running meeting place for Anna and Elsa from Frozen.
The lobby
Every visit begins in the Animation Courtyard, the building's soaring central lobby. Its walls are lined with huge screens playing a continuous montage of sketches, storyboards, finished animation and songs from Disney and Pixar films. Doorways around its perimeter lead to each experience, and many guests treat the lobby as an attraction in itself — a cool, dark place to sit and watch decades of animation unspool overhead.
Animation Academy
In the Animation Academy, a Disney artist leads a class of guests through drawing a Disney character, step by step, on a large projected easel while each guest follows along on a provided sketch pad and pencil. Sessions run roughly every half hour through the day, and the character taught rotates from class to class, from classics such as Mickey Mouse to recent Pixar figures; a board outside the building lists the day's schedule. No experience is needed, and guests keep their drawings as souvenirs.
Sorcerer's Workshop
The Sorcerer's Workshop is a hands-on walk-through exploring how animated characters are given movement, personality and voice. The Magic Mirror Realm introduces the basics of animation with interactive devices including zoetropes and hand-drawn experiments. Beast's Library, modelled on the library from Beauty and the Beast, invites guests to answer questions from an enchanted book to discover which Disney hero or villain they most resemble. In Ursula's Grotto, guests step into scenes from Disney films and record their own dialogue and singing over the original characters.
Turtle Talk with Crush
Turtle Talk with Crush seats guests before what appears to be a window into the ocean, where Crush, the sea turtle from Pixar's Finding Nemo (2003), swims up and holds a real conversation with the audience. Using real-time computer animation driven by a hidden performer, Crush answers children's questions, jokes with individual guests and reacts to the room — so no two shows are alike. Characters from Finding Dory were added to the show in 2016.