One Day at Disney

Starved for a bit of original content on Disney Plus at the weekend, I put on the feature length version of "One Day at Disney". Whilst admittedly, it's a bit of a puff piece (they're hardly likely to make hard hitting documentaries about themselves) for me, Disney is maybe the one corporation in the world that can get away with parlaying our lifelong affection for their output into something like this.

Surrounded by telling us a through story about Bob Iger (recently stood down as CEO of Disney Corporation), "One Day At Disney" tells us about the day to day lives of several staff members across the various business streams of Disney. These include news anchor Robin Roberts, Mark Gonzales, who runs the classic Steam train at Disneyland and Zama Maguduela who is playing Rafiki in the Madrid run of "The Lion King" musical but perhaps the most memorable is Eric Goldberg - a Disney animator that worked on everything from "Aladdin" onwards.

As I say, hard hitting it is not, and I'm sure that the subjects were chosen for their presentability and back stories as much as their enthusiasm for their work. We aren't spending any time with the park cleaning staff or midlevel accountants, or anyone who isn't doing a job they love. That doesn't change the warmth of the documentary though, and the fact on a couple of occasions there are some emotional curveballs along the way. Mostly though, I just felt jealous of people who, and even if they're just pretending for the camera, give the impression that they are in the exact career they were meant to do and never "work" a day in their lives.

Well, it's a faux-documentary about how absolutely fantastic it is to work at any of the Disney-affiliated businesses. From the actual parks to the news division, everything is just absolutely wonderful, not a single critique to be heard.

So yea, it's basically a hour long advertisement for Disney, by Disney. And sure, for the True Believer, it's got some sights a regular park attendee won't see, like how the animals are cared for, or the props department.

I just didn't care about the pieces about Iger, the news anchor, etc. It'd have been nice to put more people like the artist, the locomotive driver, the veterinarian and the lady who worked on the robotic prop in the spotlight. Less wealthy CEOs, more cleaning department folks or those servicing park attendees.