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The animation sightseer: Burbank, California
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The older gate at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank.
Burbank:
Animation Examiner’s first installment told the story of how, in 1940, Walt Disney pulled up stakes and moved his studio from Silverlake, California to Burbank, in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles. Though the original site is now home to a grocery store, the Burbank studio is alive and well after nearly seventy years. The company continues to thrive, but the lot itself is not quite what it was in its original 1940 incarnation.
Walt Disney died in 1967, and the studio floundered for many years thereafter. “What would Walt do?” was the oft-repeated mantra for Disney’s immediate successors. The company struggled to maintain a distinct identity for roughly fifteen years and, finally, in the early 1980s, seemed destined for hostile takeover. To stave off these attacks, new management was put in place led by former Paramount executive Michael Eisner. As part of his reformation of the company, Eisner restructured the studio lot. The animation team -- who at that time were in something of a rut -- were banished to nearby Glendale, and the studio became the province of live action filmmakers and corporate types. New buildings were built, and although many of them are charming, they are also more ostentatious than much of the original architecture. In fact, the Disney Studio of today is a peculiar amalgam of old and new -- with a virtual dividing line running right down the middle.
Above is what might be termed the “Eisner Entrance”, the gate through which one finds many of the newer buildings.
Above the fence can be seen the top of the “Team Disney” building, the company headquarters which were designed by architect Michael Graves and completed in 1990. Note how pillars in the form of the seven dwarfs support the roof of the structure.
This the fence which surrounds the entire Burbank property. The decorative elements are... Well, you know what they are.
This is the studio’s original gate, a much more blue collar affair than its elaborate brother around the corner. This is the gate through which Walt himself arrived for work everyday for twenty six years.
Above is the original animation building located on the lot itself. For a little over forty years, Disney’s short cartoons and animated features were created within this structure. (The signage above the door remains even today in honor of the building’s initial purpose.)
Adjacent to the lot proper (on nearby Riverside Dr.) is the headquarters of the television network ABC. Disney owns ABC.
Starting in 1989 with The Little Mermaid and continuing into the mid-1990s, Disney animation underwent a dramatic renaissance. As a reward, the division was moved out of Glendale into the imaginatively-themed building pictured above. This facility, completed in 1995, is also on Riverside Dr., behind the ABC building.
This is the Disney water tower along with one of the lot’s sound stages. The view is from Riverside Dr. Most Hollywood studios have such a tower, with each being adorned with that company’s logo.
Glendale:
Disney’s biggest competitor for animation box office is Jeffry Katzenberg’s Dreamworks. Dreamworks is a surprisingly short distance away from Disney in nearby Glendale.
Postscript:
The triangular strip of land which now plays host to the “sorcerer’s hat” animation building as well as ABC was Walt Disney’s original choice as a location for Disneyland. Soon, however, Disney’s ambitions for his theme park outgrew the available space at the Riverside Dr. location. Disneyland’s current Anaheim home was eventually settled upon.
[All photos are by the author.]
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