BREAKING: Disneyland Handcrafted Trailer Released, Includes Never-Before-Seen Park Construction Footage

Disney has announced the release of a new documentary film titled Disneyland Handcrafted, as part of today’s many exciting announcements from Destination D23.

Disneyland Handcrafted Documentary

A person in a hat uses a large camera to photograph a riverboat at Disneyland docked on the water.

The new documentary, Disneyland Handcrafted, is set to tell the story of the creation and construction of Disneyland Park. The film’s description reads, “Capturing the excitement of the creation of Disneyland as it was being built more than 70 years ago, you’ll get a chance to peek behind the orange groves and experience the making of the park like never before in Disneyland Handcrafted.”

A man paints gold and red details on a Peter Pan pirate ship vehicle in this never-before-seen footage at an amusement park.

This new documentary comes from filmmaker Leslie Iwerks, the granddaughter of Disney Legend Ub Iwerks, who was the designer and co-creator of Mickey Mouse. Leslie’s father Don Iwerks was also a Disney camera technician and inventor, as well as another Disney Legend. Leslie herself previously created the Disney+ series The Imagineering Story, which was later nominated for an Emmy.

Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color

A man paints details on a handcrafted trailer sculpture outdoors, reminiscent of Disneyland artistry.

Disneyland Handcrafted, similar to The Imagineering Story, will include some unique footage that has never been released. Iwerks and her team discovered raw, never-before-seen 16mm film reels from the making of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, which have been sitting in the Walt Disney Film Archives for years. Several of the scenes were restored using high-resolution scans:

Having been stored in the vaults for years, Leslie and her dedicated team were able to produce high-resolution scans of every reel without a timecode, helping to restore beautiful, once-forgotten shots of the early days of Disneyland onto a hard drive through a revolutionary process that had never been tackled before.

A large rocket is being lifted by cranes at a Disneyland construction site, with workers and trucks nearby.

Disney has described this footage as providing “an unpolished fly-on-the-wall perspective for viewers to see and hear what was actually happening during construction from the first-hand accounts of the real artists, craftsmen and Imagineers on site.”

Three men pose by film equipment and a large machine; one holds a reel canister from Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color.

Disneyland Handcrafted will be premiering on Disney+ and @Disney on YouTube this winter, though no exact date has been announced yet.

A group of workers push large machinery near a handcrafted trailer at a Disneyland Park construction site surrounded by trees.

Watch the new trailer for Disneyland Handcrafted below:

Other exciting announcements from Destination D23 have included the addition of Patrick Warburton to the cast of Zootopia 2, a first look at Conan O’Brien’s character in Toy Story 5, and the title of the next Disney animated theatrical film.

For more Disneyland Resort news and info, follow Disneyland News Today on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. For Disney Parks news worldwide, visit WDWNT.