In the spring edition of Disney Files Magazine, Bill Diercksen, Senior Vice President, Disney Vacation Club and Aulani, reflected on the wisdom and insights shared by longtime Disney Imagineer-turned-Disney author Bob Weis (whose impressive 40 years as an Imagineer included six years as President of Walt Disney Imagineering) during a Disney Vacation Club First Wave sailing aboard the Disney Treasure ship. The stories Bob shared on stage with Disney Files Magazine Editor Ryan March merely scratched the surface of the more than 400 pages of insights he includes in his hit book Dream Chasing: My Four Decades of Success and Failure with Walt Disney Imagineering, available now from Disney Publishing wherever books are sold. To whet the appetite of Members yet to add the book to their personal library, Disney Files Magazine is pleased to share a couple of excerpts, including a note from Bob that appears at the beginning of the book and an insightful passage about the passionately collaborative, urgency-driven concept of a charrette.
Under the headline “We all dream,” Bob begins the book by quoting the Cinderella song “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” through which the 1950 film’s title character encourages her animal friends to never stop dreaming. Here’s what follows in Bob’s note:
Dreams come from a place of infinite possibilities, from a part of us that doesn’t recognize limits. As Walt once said, “Everybody in the world was once a child. So, in planning a new picture, we don’t think of grown-ups, and we don’t think of children, but just of that fine, clean, unspoiled spot down deep in everyone of us that maybe the world has made us forget and that maybe our pictures can help recall.”
That philosophy can be seen in just about everything we read about Walt Disney, and to emerge so creatively strong from the darkness of World War II, he must have had extraordinary internal optimism. It was also around that time he began to gather a ragtag team of artists and engineers to help him formulate dreams that more than seven years later would become Disneyland.
Walt’s team of dreamers all shared certain attributes. They could expand on his notions, give them form and shape – and provide a semblance of reality. They had no fear of opening new doors or trying new things. They were curious, and willing to explore ideas by heading down new paths. Ultimately, Walt described his dreamers as possessing a blending of creative imagination with technical know-how. They called it “Imagineering,” and most of all they could dream together. They could collaborate with Walt, and they could collaborate with each other.
I was lucky enough to be part of the second generation of Imagineers. We started after Walt was gone, but we learned from many of those who’d worked side by side with him. When I started, there were two Disney theme parks in the world. By the time I retired from Disney in 2023, there were 12.
Dreams are exciting, frustrating, and sometimes elusive, as hard to hold on to as pixie dust, like glitter falling through your fingers. Sometimes they are meant to happen, and they do, sometimes they are meant to happen, and they don’t … and then there’s every combination in between. Built or unbuilt, every dream was a journey, and one many of us took together. This is how I remember them.
The stories that follow on the book’s subsequent pages place the reader in the rooms where Disney magic was made, with Bob recounting his time working on projects in Southern California and Central Florida, across the globe and at sea. Along the way, he likens some of his best behind-the-scenes experiences to a charrette. Here’s a look at a few highlights from a passage that’s made charrette a new favorite buzzword in the Disney Files newsroom.
Imagination lies somewhere between the possible and the impossible. Often a creative or artistic or technological invention is the result of one person’s brilliance. In a complex product like an animated movie, or a vast theme park, it’s different. Creativity, somehow for me, has always been a spark that arcs between at least a few if not several minds, minds who all think differently, who all see the world differently, and who all process criteria differently. It could be a spark that occurs in a formal meeting. It could be a spark that occurs in a serendipitous hallway passing. It could be something over a shared lunch or a couple of drinks and dozens of sketches on cocktail napkins. Most often for me, it occurred in the form of what we call a charrette …
The origins of the term charette go back to 19th century France during the time of the École des Beaux-Arts, the renowned art school in Paris. Back then, on the day that students’ projects were to be completed, a cart called a charrette would roll through the streets of Paris, stopping at all the students’ apartments to collect their projects. When the cart got to you, you were supposed to load your canvases onto the cart, and that was pretty much your deadline. Your only option, should you not be finished, would be to squeeze onto the cart yourself, with your paintings, and try to continue working, as the cart was driving down through the cobblestone streets of Paris.
Imagine this colorful image: a wooden cart with big wheels shaking along the cobblestones, packed with drawings and canvases and a number of late students trying frantically to finish their paintings. But more than a colorful image, it has come to mean something, certainly more than brainstorming. A charrette has a sense of urgency. If you don’t have a deadline, and in fact, you don’t have an impossible deadline, it’s best to create one; otherwise, a charrette is more like a normal research project.
And there’s something about everybody crowding together into a cart. It’s a journey, a difficult one. Gear up for it. If the room is too big, too luxurious, if you don’t have diverse people, if everyone is relaxed, half engaged and texting all the time, it’s not a charrette, either. A charrette is a combination of urgency and difficulty and passion …
Part of the magic that comes out of a well-run charrette is those synapses that spark between people of different backgrounds, different perspectives, to yield something beyond what the same group of people, working by themselves, would likely have yielded. A charrette, with five or six or eight people, is a kind of journey, and at the end of the journey, if you’re lucky, everyone realizes it wasn’t about whose idea was best. It was about the fusion of everyone’s ideas. It’s impossible to determine whose idea it is. The dream belongs to all of us, and the result is usually something that bonds the group together, and often, carries through the long process of bringing the idea to reality.”
