By Zach Johnson

Walt Disney Animation Studios’ short Once Upon a Studio features a newly recorded version of the classic Mary Poppins lullaby “Feed the Birds” by the late Academy Award-winning composer, songwriter, and Disney Legend Richard Sherman—who, at age 94 in 2022, returned to Walt Disney’s office to play piano for the new short.

“It’s hard to talk about without making ourselves cry,” director Dan Abraham says of Richard returning to the same place where he and his brother, the late Disney Legend Robert Sherman, would regularly perform the song for Walt on Friday afternoons. According to director Trent Correy, “Those sentimental moments can be really tough onscreen, and usually they need to get worked a lot. Dan pitched me the idea, and then he went off to board it. We both knew ‘Feed the Birds’ would be an important part of this.”

Correy continues, “We watched it play for the first time and it brought tears to our eyes. A couple of days later, we bumped into our head of music, Matt Walker, and he asked us, ‘Why don’t you just get Richard Sherman to play it for your short?’ We said, ‘Is that possible?’ Matt said, ‘Oh, yeah!’ Matt followed that up by suggesting, ‘Why don’t we do it in Walt’s office where he originally played it for Walt?’ We said, ‘OK… but don’t lie to us, Matt! This is a very big deal for us.'”

Walker wasn’t the only one who had a hand in bringing Richard onboard. Howard Green, Legacy Communications Executive for Disney Animation, had mentioned earlier to producers Yvett Merino and Bradford Simonsen that he would be having a birthday lunch with Richard. “Howard asked, ‘Would you would you guys want to show him the short?'” Simonsen recalls. “That was when it was in storyboards. So, we all went over and showed him that. It was an amazing experience and he asked great questions. At the end of that, he asked, ‘When are you guys done? I want to see it.’ Trent said, ‘We’ll be done in a year. We’ll show it to you for your birthday next year!'”

Richard was touched by what he saw, and with Walker’s help, filmmakers set up a time to rerecord “Feed the Birds.” On a Friday afternoon in August 2022, the directors put on their sport coats and joined the producers in Walt’s office. “It looks exactly like how Walt left it, including with the piano the Sherman Brothers played for him back in the day,” Abraham explains. “And there was Richard Sherman! He sat down and played ‘A Spoonful of Sugar,’ and he was just going to town on this piano. Then, when he went into ‘Feed the Birds,’ it was just… I can’t even talk about it without getting chills. I will never, ever forget that day.”

Merino echoes that sentiment, saying, “It was a magical day. It truly was a ‘pinch-me’ moment, because he just came in and sat down at the piano and was so natural. He started playing ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.’ It was a very special day.” Credit goes to the Walt Disney Archives staff for “tuning the piano,” Simonsen adds.

For Richard, getting involved with Once Upon a Studio represented a chance to celebrate 100 years of Walt Disney Animation Studios and Walt’s dream in a touching, magical way. “I think Walt had a very deep-rooted feeling about this song; he could understand what we were saying. It doesn’t take much to give love, to give kindness, to give thought to people,” Richard explains. “Giving a little something of yourself… it doesn’t take much to do that.”

By Zach Johnson

The all-new original short Once Upon a Studio takes place at the end of the work day at Walt Disney Animation Studios in Burbank, California, just after the artists, technologists, and storytellers head home. Disney Legend Burny Mattinson—who worked at The Walt Disney Company for 70 years, longer than any other employee—is the last person to leave. When the coast is clear, Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse step out of a picture on the wall and ask their animated friends to take an official 100th anniversary portrait. Hand-drawn characters, such as Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and Merlin, intermingle with CG characters, such as Baymax and Rapunzel, as they comically scramble to assemble for the group photo.

If that sounds like an ambitious endeavor… that’s because it is.

Once Upon a Studio is the brainchild of directors Dan Abraham and Trent Correy, who developed the pitch in secret for eight months before presenting it to Disney Animation Chief Creative Officer Jennifer Lee in late 2021. From its inception, they knew the short would be technically complicated—but they always saw the reward in the risk. “Because we built the pitch for so long, the short hasn’t actually changed much,” Correy says. “We changed characters out and tightened up the pacing, but structurally, it’s basically the same as the pitch. We got Bradford Simonsen and Yvett Merino on board as producers very quickly, and Dan and I were lucky enough to be able to write, storyboard, and direct it. So, we jumped into editorial and started making it.”

Their first step was to turn the storyboard panels into a rough cut to assess what they had. “I have a visual effects and live-action background, so I started mapping the milestones of when to line up and hire a crew to shoot the plates; we wanted to start attacking that at the same time we were getting the boards up,” Simonsen says. “And then Yvett and I were chatting every day about this massive cast and how we were going to bring them all back.”

“That alone was another logistical challenge, because we had over 40 of the original voices come back,” Merino explains. “We did everything from recording in-person to recording over Zoom when people were out of out of the state or out of the country. It was such a testament to their experiences with Disney Animation, because the pitch was literally, ‘We’re doing a short to celebrate 100 years. We have a line for you. Would you like to be involved?’ Everyone we reached out to said yes, and they did so without knowing anything.”

Inherently, a project such as Once Upon a Studio requires a skilled team of animators. The directors looked no further than venerated veteran animator and director Eric Goldberg as head of hand-drawn animation. His team included a handful of hand-drawn experts, including Mark Henn and Randy Haycock, in addition to CG animators who had hand-drawn experience; five apprentices specializing in traditional animation; and five returning animation greats who had helped to create some of the Studio’s most beloved characters. Much to Goldberg’s delight, the directors insisted that the hand-drawn animation be done with paper and pencil as much as possible, and that the characters be faithful to their roots. In the end, an estimated 80 percent of the characters featured in the short are hand-drawn.

“This is absolutely the film that had to be made to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Disney and Disney Animation,” Goldberg says. “I think it absolutely fits the bill. I was so excited to work on it and to work with so many of my friends and colleagues. We really tried to honor the past and bring it up to date in the modern day. It’s just been marvelous.”

Andrew Feliciano, a 10-year Disney veteran, was head of CG animation. In all, more than 100 CG characters appear in Once Upon a Studio, hailing from such feature films as Frozen and Wreck-It Ralph and shorts such as Feast and Us Again. Asha, the star of Disney Animation’s upcoming feature film Wish, also makes an early debut in the short film.

“We had the benefit of having people who are able to do both CG and hand-drawn animation,” Feliciano says. “In the scene with Moana and Flounder, for example, Mario Furmanczyk animated both characters. He started by animating Moana, so he had a very clear place to put Flounder. Our shot planning team printed out every single frame for him to put it on paper. Then, he put paper on top of it and he would ‘drop’ Flounder right there.” According to Goldberg, it was especially important to pay attention to eyelines in scenes such as this. “You have to make sure Moana’s eyeline is looking where she is depositing Flounder,” he says. “Another example: Trent animated a penguin with the plate of spaghetti walking past the Mad Hatter. You need him to see it to say, ‘Oh, waiter!’ You really have to make sure that all that timing and eye direction is correct to make it all appear believable.”

Animators from both teams were in constant communication, all in service of the story. And, due to technological advancements, CG character models from Chicken Little to Tangled had to be rebuilt so they would work in the current pipeline.

Making hand-drawn and CG characters look congruous in the same scene was also tricky. “Depending on the needs of a particular scene, we were very, very flexible in terms of what should come first and whatever is going to work best for each particular shot,” Goldberg explains. “When the hand-drawn characters and CG characters interact, there’s a lot of back and forth and coordinating to do—especially if they make contact with something.”

That can be intricate enough for a scene with a handful of characters—let alone 543 of them! Abraham sketched the original idea for the group shot at the end of Once Upon a Studio, which features characters from more than 85 feature films and shorts. Correy then created a “heat map” to determine each character’s placement, Goldberg says. “They both had a huge hand in working out what that shot was going to look like,” he adds. As if the sheer volume of characters wasn’t enough, there were other technical aspects to consider. “The camera’s pulling back, but it’s also rising, so the perspective is actually changing on the groundline as you’re watching the shot reveal,” Goldberg says. “You have to place all of the characters on what we call ‘cards’ so that they are in the right perspective points throughout the entire three-dimensional camera move.”

In the end, all that coordination and dedication paid off—and fans will get to see it for themselves when Once Upon a Studio debuts Sunday, October 15, at 8 p.m. ET/PT as part of ABC’s The Wonderful World of Disney: Disney’s 100th Anniversary Celebration!. “I had a fabulous time working alongside the CG animators whom I’ve been working with for years,” Feliciano says, “and I loved getting to spend time and work very closely with the hand-drawn animators like Eric, Randy, and Mark, as well as the apprentices. It was a really fun experience. The animation reviews and dailies were so much fun, because you never quite knew what you were going to see; it was always going to be a mix of different things. Like, you have Stromboli shaking the vending machines so perfectly and it’s just hysterical and joyful. This short was such a great way to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the Studio.”

How do you meaningfully celebrate a century’s worth of beloved features and shorts? That question was top of mind in the fall of 2021, when Dan Abraham and Trent Correy would meet in a local Taco Bell parking lot to brainstorm ways to honor Walt Disney Animation Studios’ 100th anniversary. This was the definition of a passion project, as no one had assigned them such an ambitious project (or even knew they were working on it, for that matter). Over a span of eight months, the two would continue to meet in secret, anytime and anywhere they could, as they developed the all-new original short Once Upon a Studio.

“In 2019, Dan and I worked on an Olaf short called Once Upon a Snowman. We directed it together, and that was actually our first time meeting each other,” Correy recalls. “Dan comes from story and I come from animation, so it seemed like a really good fit. We had a genuinely great time making that short, and we came out on the other side thinking, ‘How do we work together again?’ As we went on different paths—I went off to work on the Zootopia+ series, and Dan went off to work on the Baymax! series—we started talking about how to recreate that experience. We started sharing ideas about what inspired us and what we’d like to do together. And then we realized very early on that the 100-year anniversary was upon us and that that our studio was making Wish—which, as a feature, celebrates the future of Disney—but there was nothing yet planned to look at the legacy characters and what inspired us to become animators. So, that’s kind of where this started.”

After months of ideating in their spare time, the collaborators pitched their concept to Jennifer Lee, Chief Creative Officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios. “She had no idea what it was,” Abraham says. “Because the pandemic was still going on, I tapped through all of our storyboards on Zoom and presented this idea to her. After I was done, she stood up and left the camera. Trent and I looked at each other like, ‘Oh, no… What is happening?’ When she came back, her glasses were on top of her head, and she wiped away a little tear. She said, ‘I don’t know how, but we have to figure out how to make this.’ Trent and I were just beside ourselves! We couldn’t believe it. It felt like such a long shot to work on something for that long—and on something that no one was asking for. It felt so amazing.”

Of course, now that they’d been greenlit, they had to fast-track the production process.

“There are hundreds of characters in this short, which includes hand-drawn elements, CG elements, and live-action plates,” Correy explains. “We knew we were swinging big, and we knew that the 100th year was getting closer—and we all know how long animation can take. If we wanted to do this thing, it would need to happen quickly. Thank goodness Jennifer Lee said yes to our pitch in that moment. We got started very quickly after that.”

Next, Clark Spencer, President of Walt Disney Animation Studios, announced plans for Once Upon a Studio internally during a year-end town hall meeting. Feeling inspired, both Yvett Merino and Bradford Simonsen pitched themselves—and each other—to produce the short. “Separately, Brad and I emailed Clark and said, ‘Hey, I need to work on this,'” Merino says. “I didn’t know then that Brad had basically written Clark the same email I did. By the end of January, we were working on the short and just starting to put everything together.”

Virtually everyone in the studio shared Abraham, Correy, Simonsen, and Merino’s passion for Once Upon a Studio, which brings together 543 characters from more than 85 feature-length and short films. Because the hand-drawn, CG, and live-action elements all need to interact, the producers assembled an expert team to support the short’s technical needs. According to Correy, “I didn’t anticipate that we would have so many people coming up to us, emailing us, texting us, or Slacking us to say, ‘I just need to be a part of this thing.'” Abraham adds, “We found out very quickly just how much these characters mean to the people in the building; characters like Ariel, Mulan, and Pinocchio feel like part of their families. Everyone came out of the woodwork, and it was joyous to see all that enthusiasm.”

Fans will get to see Once Upon a Studio when it makes its broadcast debut Sunday, October 15, as part of ABC’s Wonderful World of Disney: Disney’s 100th Anniversary Celebration!. With all-new hand-drawn and CG animation, Once Upon a Studio will celebrate 10 decades of storytelling, artistry, and technological achievements—all with a dash of Disney magic.