Disney executive Josh D’Amaro was among the speakers at the Inbound conference in Boston this week, sharing the principles that guide the company as it seeks to create unique in-person experiences and tell memorable stories.
D’Amaro is the Chairman of Disney Experiences, which includes the company’s 12 theme parks, the Disney Cruise Line and consumer products business, and a new collaboration with Fortnite maker Epic Games to create an online metaverse featuring Disney characters. D’Amaro also oversees the Walt Disney Imagineering division, an R&D team originally formed by Walt Disney to design and build the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, Calif.
Lightly-edited highlights from D’Amaro’s talk are below, focused on the six principles he covered.
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At Disney, we believe in the power of great stories…
You can all right now go online and you can type in “what makes a great story,” and you’ll come up with with hundreds, probably thousands, of different answers. I’m here to tell you what I believe sets Disney apart from everything else. These are things like being courageous innovators, bringing relatable characters to life, paying attention to those very little details, and so much more. And while I’m obviously focused on Disney, I hope that something in our approach can help one of you out there today in the way that you’re telling your stories…
1. Emotional connection
…When I was about 10 years old, my parents took us across the country. We went to California for our first trip to Disneyland. Now, my father’s favorite ride at the time was Peter Pan’s Flight.
On this attraction, you get on a pirate ship. It’s attached to a rail above your head. And when you leave the station, you swing back and forth as you fly through the story… I remember my pop saying before we arrived at Disneyland, “Josh, it really feels like you’re flying when you’re on this attraction. You’re not going to believe it.” You know what? He was right. As our ship sailed through the air, and he glanced over to me as if to say, “See, Josh, I told you so.”
…Peter Pan’s Flight was an opening day attraction. It was there in 1955. So you think that nearly 70 years later, maybe it’s faded a bit? No, actually, just the opposite. It is still one of the most popular attractions in the whole entire park. How could this be? Well, it’s because our guests have emotional connections to these experiences. When I sit in that pirate ship today, I’m immediately 10 years old again, and I feel like I’m sitting there with my parents, flying over London.
2. Innovation
Do you know what innovation is driven by?
It’s curiosity, and you can trace this thread through Disney’s entire history. In 1928, Walt released the first animated short with synchronized sound, and that meant his audience could better connect with his new characters… A decade later, Walt invented a new way to make films using a multi-plane camera, so that when you move through a scene, it felt more real than animation ever had before. And to deliver his dream of Disneyland, Walt gathered a team of artists and architects and engineers and producers, master planners, and writers and even more. He brought them together under one roof. He shared his vision for what Disneyland was going to be, and he coined a new term for them. He called them Imagineers…
There’s really no secret about our approach. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors, doing new things, because we’re curious, and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. We’re always exploring and experimenting.
Walt Disney
Walt said Disneyland would never be complete as long as there was imagination left in the world. We’ve been fulfilling that promise ever since.
One of the last attractions that Walt had a chance to work on was Pirates of Caribbean. …That debuted in 1967, and it was a massive leap forward in our experiential storytelling. …If you fast-forward nearly 50 years later, when we started working on a new park in Shanghai, it had been a while since we had created a Pirates attraction. At that time, the film franchise had become wildly successful. In fact, people in China, they knew the movies better than the ride that it was based on the first place. So, we decided to reimagine a classic for this new audience. We wrote a story that featured Jack Sparrow and Davy Jones, and we designed an all-new ride on a scale that we had never achieved anywhere before.
The attraction became an immediate fan favorite when the park opened in the summer of 2016. And the Imagineers who lived and breathed this attraction for six years — they will tell you that there were some days that they weren’t sure how the heck this was all going to work. But we were committed to doing something truly special for this new park. We wanted to make sure the park felt like a Disney experience that everybody knows and loves, but that it had specific touches for our Chinese guests…
3. Relatability
[Relatability] is the third critical aspect of Disney storytelling that I want to talk about.
Our audience — they need to see themselves in our stories, or they need to see who they aspire to be… In our parks, you all probably know what we call our employees. We call them cast members, and it reminds us that we’re putting on a show for our guests every minute of the day… We invest in amazing experiences, and then it’s our cast members who bring these experiences to life. They are they’re literally the face of our brand, and they make that relatable connection with our guests. I want to show you one of my favorite examples here.
So simple, right? So Stitch falling down like that — as you could probably imagine, that was in no script that Stitch had. He turned what could have been an upsetting moment for that young girl and her family into memory that they will never forget. The character became real by relating to the child on her level, and in a split second, he created a story for this family that they will be telling now for the rest of their their lives. …And now, thanks to social media, it’s been seen by millions and millions of people around the globe, and it went viral, because people could relate to that story.
4. Sweat the details
As we bring these experiences to life, you start to believe these magical places are real. Earning that belief — this is the trick. There can’t be any contradictions, and if you spot something that doesn’t ring true, well then the spell breaks and you’ve lost ‘em. So we pay close attention to the smallest details…
You have got to sweat the details. That is the North Star for Imagineers. …Our Star Wars lands at Disneyland and Walt Disney World are great examples. Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge takes you to a new planet never seen before in the Star Wars universe. But it feels like Star Wars in big, gigantic ways, and in very small ways as well. When you walk through the land, you see the Millennium Falcon, you see X-Wing fighters, you see TIE Fighters. Stormtroopers will walk around interacting with guests. Everything that is in this land is authentic to Star Wars. Now, one of the best examples is a set of tracks on the ground…that looks like a droid rode through there before the concrete dried.
…Those just aren’t any tracks. Those tracks are made from the original R2-D2. So can you imagine the discussions that we had on this one? The Imagineers are extolling the virtues [of] deep storytelling. And the finance team’s over here are saying, “Are you nuts? You’re going to get the real R2-D2 to roll through this and make these tracks?”
The answer is, yes, the Imagineers, they won that one. Now, not everyone who visits Galaxy’s Edge is going to pick up on that detail, but the die-hard fans, they will…and those fans appreciate how the Imagineers care as much about the integrity of the story as they do.
5. Courage
When I was [President of the Disneyland Resort, the Imagineers] came to me one day with this wild idea for Avenger’s land, [which] they were building at Disney’s California Adventure. …They said, “All right, Josh, here’s what we want to do. We want to build a robot. It’s gonna kind of look like Spider-Man. And…we’re gonna launch this thing up into the air. We think it’ll fly like 60 feet in the air. We’re gonna do this inside the park, and it’s not gonna be tethered to anything. It’s just going to be flying up in the air…And it’s gonna land in a net somewhere. …So it will kind of look like Spider-Man’s actually swinging through the land…”
They said, “What do you think about that, Josh?” And of course, from a practical point of view, I’m thinking, well, this makes no sense, there’s no way this is even possible, and that’s going to cost way too much money to make any sense.
And the Imagineers, they had no idea if they could actually make it work. But…they sold me on the story. It’ll look like Spider-Man is swinging through the land, they said. And that was key. If we’re telling an Avengers story, then of course we need Spider-Man there. And you know, it turned out pretty great…
It took courage to pitch that that idea. But we knew that it was the right thing to do, because it was right for the story, and we knew that would amaze our guests. Taking these big chances on things that we’ve never done before, I think, is what sets us apart from anyone else…
6. Boundless thinking
It is an honor to work at Disney — to be trusted stewards of our legacy. At the same time, I challenge my team not to let our history be the gravity that holds us in place. We should never rest on past successes. We should always look for the next big idea, the next big challenge.
We want to be boundless in our thinking as a tribute to our past. As consumer preferences continue to shift, we have to adapt or we are going to be left behind.
Josh D’Amaro
…We want to be boundless in our thinking as a tribute to our past. As consumer preferences continue to shift, we have to adapt or we are going to be left behind. Disney’s always leading into new spaces that will allow us to keep meeting our fans where our fans are.
And that’s led us to an exciting new project — a collaboration with Epic Games to create an entirely new online Disney universe. Just as Walt took us from the silver screen to the small screen to the theme park, this is our next major evolution. Epic Games is the creator of Fortnite, which is one of the most popular video games of all time…
We’re taking everything that we’ve learned about storytelling over the course of 100 years now, everything that I’ve been talking about today, and then we’re pouring it into this universe. We’re inviting our fans to a place where their favorite Disney characters and stories and worlds, they all converge into one place — a place where they can watch, where they can play, they can even create their own Disney stories in ways that they’ve never dreamed of before. We’re turning everything our fans love about Disney into a digital playground, and they can be there 365 days a year.
Now, of course, this is going to challenge us. We’ll have to approach our storytelling brand new ways, which means that we’ll be applying all these principles to ensure this dynamic new universe exceeds our fans wildest expectations…
Stories Can Change the World
….We’re embarking on a bold new path forward with some of the most ambitious investments that our business has ever made. We’re creating new experiences. We’re telling new stories like “Incanto,” Indiana Jones, “Coco,” and “Monsters, Inc.,” and “Cars.” …Remember, when we’re doing all this, we’re not following a formula as we bring those experiences to life. This isn’t a rinse-and-repeat.
At Disney, great storytelling is part of our DNA, and we expect our entire team to be the best storytellers that they can be. It’s the writer with a bold new idea, or the Imagineer with a spark of inspiration. It’s the tens of thousands of cast members enriching and extending our stories every single day. We are on a relentless pursuit of perfection, powered by the belief that these stories, they can actually change the world.
You can replay D’Amaro’s complete talk below.
