Imagineers name the Easter eggs hidden inside The Magic of Disney Animation

By entgrove · September 10, 2026

Walt Disney Imagineering's WED Walks series has toured The Magic of Disney Animation at Disney's Hollywood Studios room by room, with Imagineers naming the details they hid for guests to find. The list runs from paint brushes carrying real ink and paint colors like Simba 103, to the Black Cauldron on a lost and found shelf, to a sketchbook that names My Peoples, a film once in development in this very building.

Walt Disney Imagineering has taken its WED Walks series inside The Magic of Disney Animation, and the episode is built around the details guests are meant to hunt for. Imagineers hand the camera to each other room by room and name the Easter eggs one at a time, from paint brushes carrying real ink and paint colors to a sketchbook listing a film that was once in development in this building. The attraction opens at Disney's Hollywood Studios on September 14.

The premise, stated at the door

The tour opens with the idea the whole attraction runs on, said plainly before anyone steps inside. "This whole attraction is based on Once Upon a Studio," the first guide says. "It's a short where Mickey and all of his friends have gathered together when the animators are away to throw a big party. So, we get to come inside and see all the cool things the characters have in store for us."

Four Imagineers appear across the episode. Three are introduced by first name, Victoria, Matthew and Danny, as each hands the tour to the next. Nobody states a job title on camera, so what follows is attributed by first name only.

The reception room copies the Burbank studio

The first space is reception, and the guide says it was based on Walt Disney Animation Studios in Burbank, California. The reference most guests will walk straight past is the tile wall: walking into the real Burbank studio means walking past a large tile wall, and the version here spreads a color wheel of images around the room.

Hanging in the middle is a chandelier made of paint. It is wired to the room next door, so when the lighting in the fixture changes, the colors of the mural in the Off the Page area change with it.

The paint brushes on that fixture are the first Easter egg named outright. Imagineering asked Disney's ink and paint department to pick favorite colors they had worked with over the years, then put those colors on the brushes themselves. One is labeled Simba 103, and as the guide says, "you can kind of guess what that color is going to be."

A lost and found shelf of misplaced props

Because the story has the characters throwing an open house, the team decided the building needed a lost and found. It sits on a shelf in reception, holding items left behind by characters from different films. Three are named on camera: the Black Cauldron, lost by the Horned King; the Shepherd's Journal from Atlantis: The Lost Empire; and Figaro, taking a catnap on top of the lost and found box.

Victoria on the Once Upon a Studio Theater

The theater lobby is Victoria's stop, and she starts with the characters worked into it. Timon and Pumbaa are there, so are Lilo and Stitch, and her own favorite is a jump rope gag involving Pegasus. Baymax turns up in the lobby in person, and she greets him mid-sentence.

The floor is the detail she singles out. "Since our characters are at the heart of this whole attraction and its design, we brought a lot of the iconic characters into the carpet in the form of a sketch, which is truly where every animator's process begins," she says.

She also confirms what plays inside. The theater screens Once Upon a Studio, and Imagineering worked directly with Walt Disney Animation Studios on new hand-drawn and computer animation of the characters jumping out of their portraits to make it over for the group photo, footage she describes as exclusive to this theater.

Mary Blair's art, and the butterflies that come off the wall

The playground is entered through what the video calls the visual development department, hung with pieces by Mary Blair. "One of which is blooming out of its frame, allowing us to step inside the world that she created for Alice in Wonderland," the guide there says. Past that frame is Drawn to Wonderland, and the first area inside is set aside for the youngest guests.

The stated goal for the room was the feeling of standing inside a collage, with art layered everywhere and popping off the walls. The butterflies are how that gets done. They start as digitally hand painted wall graphics, flat enough that "you can run your hand over it, feels like the rest of the graphics," then begin to lift off the surface a little, and by the time they are flying around the room they are fully dimensional.

The floor took a workaround. "Our play floor is beautiful, and we used every color we could, but we were still missing pinks and purples, which are really important to that Mary Blair art for Alice in Wonderland," the guide says. Lights reflecting off a white and light color mix put those two colors back into the floor.

The Mad Tea Party table carries several interactives, standing in for the steam coming off teacups and the bubbles from that scene. Pieces spin, make noise and trigger the lights. One clarification comes with it: the teacups and teapots in the room are not modeled on the Alice in Wonderland film and not on the teacups ride, but on the art Mary Blair made for the film.

Matthew at Off the Page, where the building's own history is hidden

"Here we are at Off the Page. And this is where we have transformed character greetings into immersive moments that are inspired by the animation stages, story, layout, animation, lighting, effects," Matthew says. Two of those stages sit side by side: hand-drawn animation, and the computer animation that grew out of it.

The hand-drawn side is dressed with the tools of the trade, colored pencils and character sketches, and it holds an Easter egg Matthew names directly: a reference to James Algar, who he identifies as the director of The Sorcerer's Apprentice. He makes a point about the pencil on the way to the CG side, that a stylus is the same idea with different technology.

The second Easter egg he names is a nod to the building itself. This was once a working animation studio, and a sketchbook placed in the computer animation greeting carries the titles drawn here: Mulan, Lilo and Stitch, Brother Bear, "and even My Peoples, which was actually in development at one point in this very building," he says. My Peoples was never finished, which makes it the one title on the sketchbook a guest cannot go home and watch.

Danny in Olaf Draws, from the sleighs to the book on stage

Danny takes the last room. Olaf, in his telling, left his painting in Arendelle, wandered into the theater and took the best seat in the house on stage, and the problem is that he cannot draw either. "So, we have to call upon Disney animators, story artists, directors to kind of help us learn how to draw the characters that they've created for the films that we all know and love," Danny says.

The seating is split. Adults get animation desks at the back, which Danny calls "Chem Weber style animation desks." Younger children get sleighs brought in from Arendelle by Olaf himself, closer to the stage, and each sleigh carries a different color palette themed to a different Frozen character.

The detail Danny likes most is under Olaf. The book the snowman is sitting on is The Illusion of Life, the animation book written by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, and it is the same book Olaf sits on in Once Upon a Studio during the scene at the drawing desk. Around the stage are maquettes from different animated films and a stack of VHS tapes from the 1990s. The set dressing across the attraction leans on toys, tapes and maquettes for the same reason: Danny says the team wanted the space to read as a real animator's loft.

The Easter eggs the Imagineers name on camera

• Paint brushes on the reception chandelier carrying real ink and paint colors, one of them Simba 103
• The color wheel tile wall in reception, taken from the tile wall at the Burbank studio
• Lighting in the reception fixture that changes the mural colors in the Off the Page area
• The Black Cauldron on the reception lost and found shelf, lost by the Horned King
• The Shepherd's Journal from Atlantis: The Lost Empire, on the same shelf
• Figaro asleep on top of the lost and found box
• Character sketches worked into the theater lobby carpet
• Timon and Pumbaa, Lilo and Stitch, and a jump rope gag with Pegasus in the theater lobby
• A Mary Blair piece in the visual development room, blooming out of its frame into the playground
• Butterflies that begin as flat wall graphics and end up flying dimensionally around the play area
• Interactives on the Mad Tea Party table standing in for steam and bubbles
• Teacups and teapots drawn from Mary Blair's art rather than the film or the teacups ride
• A reference to The Sorcerer's Apprentice director James Algar in the hand-drawn animation greeting
• A sketchbook in the computer animation greeting naming Mulan, Lilo and Stitch, Brother Bear and My Peoples
• Sleighs from Arendelle in Olaf Draws, each in a different Frozen character's color palette
• The Illusion of Life under Olaf on stage, the book he sits on in the short
• Maquettes and 1990s VHS tapes dressed through the Olaf Draws loft

Why this matters

WED Walks is Imagineering's own series, and the episodes it has run on Mickey and Minnie's Runaway Railway and Rock 'n' Roller Coaster Starring The Muppets follow the same pattern: the people who built the thing point at what they hid in it. For The Magic of Disney Animation that turns the walkthrough into a checklist, and most of the items on it are small enough to miss on a first pass. The attraction opens September 14, 2026 at Disney's Hollywood Studios.