6 Behind-The-Scenes Shots From Disney Movies That Are Magic

Other times, scenes were hilariously stripped down, with an enchanted woodland forest comprised of some discarded bits of lumber with signs reading "owl" and "tree," like a children's playground built by Lars von Trier.

How did they nail those flying scenes in Peter Pan? Easy: fairy dust, remembering your happiest thought, and awkwardly straddling a couple of empty liquor crates.

To approximate the magic of Wonderland, meanwhile, the child actress playing poor Alice had to be shoved into and hung from elaborate contraptions:

And the magic of Cinderella is ruined just a touch when you find out that the closest we get to a fairy godmother in real life is a teamster in an old plaid shirt working a crank.

Since hanging around with fish is pretty much Ariel's jam, Stoner acted out scenes with puppets. Instead of the adorable Flounder, for instance, Stoner had to chat with a character straight out of a puppet show about meth-addicted velociraptors.

Weirder still, for some reason, this step in the process took place after the voice acting was recorded. In the making-of footage, you can see Stoner lip-syncing to the dialogue, not unlike an episode of Baywatch that inexplicably takes place on the Star Trek Holodeck.

When Pixar started including human children in their movies, they went to painstaking lengths to make them sound authentic. Ever wondered how they got such a good performance for the character of Boo in Monsters Inc.? Well, for starters, they didn't hire an actor. They roped one of the storyboard artists into bringing his daughter into the studio and following her around with microphones. Then they recorded her voice as they played with puppets, tickled her feet, or gave her candy then took it away.

In Up, there was the character of Russell, the loquacious Wilderness Explorer whose job is to distract you from the fact that you spent the first ten minutes of this movie openly weeping in a movie theater full of children. Once again, the filmmakers wanted a non-actor, hopefully to get that authentic feel in the performance and not to dodge a bunch of union rules. To get the overly energetic tone of the character, they had the kid do things like dart out of the studio and run as fast as he could "around the Foosball table three times," then back in front of the mic to say the line.

And for the scene in which he's precariously dangling for a rope? They had him dangling from the director's arm to get a naturalistic reading:

And full-grown, James-Earl-Jones-like beasts:

The only safety precaution was apparently some yellow "caution" tape placed on the ground ... which exec Jeffrey Katzenberg seemingly didn't give a fig about.

Katzenberg may have gotten a little too relaxed with the lions, and started to use the animals in public appearances to promote the movie. This backfired big time when, at an event in Las Vegas, one lion went full Scar and nearly mauled Katzenberg in front of a live audience:

... and of course, heavyset men angrily tap-dancing:

This meant that animators were pulling double duty, working on the movie during the day, taking classes at night, and then falling asleep at their desks. The fact that some classes featured nude models may have helped attendance.

But the Snow White production wasn't all setting up art schools and naked women. Disney had some misguided notion that it would somehow ruin the "mystery" if he credited the voice actress playing Snow White, so he basically torpedoed her entire career.

With no credit in the movie, Snow White's voice actress, Adriana Caselotti, along with the actor playing Prince Charming, had to sneak into their own premiere after being turned away at the door. Even worse, when she was invited to sing on The Jack Benny Show, Disney objected because "he thought it would ruin the Snow White illusion." And because no one knew who she was, anyone wanting to hire Caselotti had to go through Disney, which he "would have stopped right there." It kinda makes you wonder if Disney thought the Witch was the hero of the movie.

Of course, it turns out that making Mary Poppins wasn't quite as enchanting as watching it. Karen Dotrice, who played the young Jane Banks, recalled that "Uncle Walt" assured her she'd have a "magical time" -- only to be "startled" that her first day on the production consisted of getting a plaster cast made of her butt for the scene wherein she slides down the banister. That is the opposite of magical, Uncle Walt.

Similarly, for all those scenes of the kids playing with happy cartoon animals, they were in actuality dancing with "sweaty prop guys" holding cardboard cutouts and trying really hard not to drop F-bombs in front of the little kids.

Dotrice was also "shocked" to see Julie Andrews, in full Mary Poppins costume, smoking on set, which must have been a little like running into Winnie the Pooh at a dog track. The whimsical scene where the characters laugh so hard that they fly up to the ceiling, meanwhile, involved a lot of wire work and a healthy dose of imagination. Since the little boy playing Michael was afraid of heights, the crew had to bribe him, paying him a dime for every time he had to go up on the wires.

To fulfill the illusion that they were flying, multiple versions of the set were built: one right side up, one on its side, one completely upside-down, and a "truncated" version where the ceiling was but a few feet above the ground. All of this to recreate the simple of experience of getting hammered in your grandpa's living room.

The multiple sets, combined with the wire work and giant teeter totters, all contributed to the illusion that they were truly floating. As for the robin that flies through the window and tweets along with Mary ...

It was the first animatronic puppet used in a movie. But because this was before these things could be radio-controlled, it necessitated running a ton of wires underneath Julie Andrews' clothes. Which she was kind of irked about.

It may have been uncomfortable, but it was way ahead of its time, paving the way for future cinematic creations such as the Gremlins, the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, and Vin Diesel.

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