The Imagineering Story (Season 1)

The Imagineering Story (2019) is a Disney+ documentary series you can watch online on iFILM. Across six episodes it traces how a small workshop inside Walt Disney's studio grew into Imagineering, the division that dreamed up and built theme parks around the globe.

Director Leslie Iwerks landed rare backstage access — to the archives, the blueprints and the engineers themselves, the people Disney calls Imagineers. The camera follows the road from the first Disneyland in California to the parks in Paris, Tokyo and Shanghai, covering the loud triumphs and the expensive misfires alike. Angela Bassett narrates. There is plenty of nuts-and-bolts here: how a ride gets born, why some projects rescue the company while others nearly sink it.

Iwerks has a personal stake in the subject — her grandfather was one of Disney's earliest animators and her father worked as an Imagineer, and that lens shows. The series is candid about financial crises and changing eras instead of playing as a promo reel. A treat for anyone who loves stories about an idea on a napkin turning into a whole industry. Stream The Imagineering Story (2019) online on iFILM.