There’s a lot of cultural baggage around the word “propaganda,” but I’m hard-pressed to come up with a more fitting description for what’s going on in the new docuseries One Day at Disney. If it exists for any reason besides assuring everyone who watches it that The Walt Disney Company is great and awesome, and everyone who works there is living their best professional life, it’s not easy to figure out what that reason might be.
One Day at Disney is less a profile of individual Disney employees in a wide range of roles across the organization than it is a bright and shiny piece of boosterism. In the 60-minute premiere installment, 10 individuals take the spotlight at various times, ranging from high-profile subjects like Good Morning America co-host Robin Roberts and Aladdin animator Eric Goldberg, to behind-the-scenes talent like Walt Disney Imagineering engineer Ashley Girdich and Walt Disney World veterinarian Natalie Mylniczenko. Narration by Sterling K. Brown provides a little connective tissue, as do interstitial interviews with Disney CEO Bob Iger attesting to the company’s firm commitment to story and imagination and magic and so on and so forth.
Very occasionally, the profiles offer a bit of information about the subjects’ lives that might be considered interesting or informative. Disneyland Railroad engineer Mark Gonzales talks about being a new hire required to work the night shift polishing the brass on the railroad’s engines, while Disney Publishing illustrator Grace Lee addresses the coordination required to insure that “extension stories” released in books maintain the storytelling tone—and even the appropriate color palate—from the properties that inspired them. With a company as massive as Disney, there’s bound to be material that shows you corners you weren’t aware existed.
But for the overwhelming majority of One Day at Disney, what you’re getting is smiling faces telling stories about how important Disney was to their childhood, and what a dream come true it is to be working for Disney. There’s no reason to assume these people are being disingenuous; if you’re an animator, for example, or someone who grew up loving comic books, it stands to reason that getting a chance to work for Walt Disney Animation or Marvel would be career pinnacles. Unfortunately, corporate cheerleading starts to get tedious after a while. Since there’s little educational meat on the bones of this show and only rare glimpses at what these people actually do, it’s hard to relate to many of the subjects.
It’s a telling moment in one early segment when we see Iger talking to the creative team at Pixar about his background working for ABC Sports on Olympic Games broadcasts, which pioneered the idea of “Up Close and Personal” segments appealing to viewers who might not be big sports fans. Iger gets that people want to watch things that make them feel good, so it’s understandable, for example, that One Day at Disney would spend time during its brief profile of Robin Roberts on her battle with life-threatening medical conditions, or Pixar maquette sculptor Jerome Ranft’s sadness over the passing of his brother, Pixar’s Joe Ranft. How much more interesting would it have been, though, to dig a little deeper at Ranft’s passing comment that the need for his work at Pixar might be changing as 3D modeling techniques evolve? That, of course, could have suggested a dream job with a few uncomfortable wrinkles around the edges. But that sort of reality doesn’t fit the goal of what’s going on here.
If you’re subscribing to Disney+, chances are you’ve already got a positive feeling about the brand. There’s no need to have a program spend an hour elbowing you in the ribs and going, “No, seriously, how awesome are we?”
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Let’s Hear From You
What do you think of One Day At Disney? Do you think it was necessary for the Walt Disney Company to create this show for Disney+? Were you expecting more from D23’s “Secret Project”? Let us know in the comments below!