Walt Disney Treasures: Behind the Scenes at the Walt Disney Studios

A Trip Through the Walt Disney Studios was a documentary made in response to requests from members of RKO Radio Pictures for a behind the scenes look at Walt Disney Studios. The film was never intended for public showing; it was only shown to executives at RKO. However, footage from this documentary was recycled into a shorter featurette, How Walt Disney Cartoons Are Made, which was released to public audiences. It was shot in the first week of July 1937. The film opens with the Walt Disney Studios sign with Mickey Mouse on it. The camera then pans over to the studio building and parking lot. Before the tour, Walt Disney is at his desk with a snappy outfit with a tie and a boutonniere, with a baby photo of him on the left, and models of the dwarfs on the right and right next to him is lifelong secretary, Dolores Vought. When you see the legendary animator Fred Moore draw Mickey Mouse, he is using a grease pencil instead of a normal lead pencil, because drawings with thin pencil lines wouldn't photograph well. Some of the other Disney Studio stalwarts seen in the film include, but are not limited to, Norm Ferguson, Webb Smith, Jack Kinney, Hamilton Luske, James MacDonald, Les Clark, Frank Churchill, Leigh Harline and Oliver Wallace.

How Walt Disney Cartoons Are Made was a documentary made in response to requests from members of RKO Radio Pictures for a behind the scenes look at Walt Disney Studios. The short featured recycled footage from an earlier documentary, A Trip Through the Walt Disney Studios, which was only shown to executives at RKO.

The Reluctant Dragon is a 1941 American combined live-action and animated film produced by Walt Disney, directed by Alfred Werker, and released by RKO Radio Pictures on June 20, 1941. Essentially a tour of the then-new Walt Disney Studios facility in Burbank, California, the film stars radio comedian Robert Benchley and many Disney staffers such as Ward Kimball, Fred Moore, Norman Ferguson, Clarence Nash, and Walt Disney, all as themselves. The first third of the film is in black-and-white, the remaining two-thirds are in Technicolor. Most of the film is live-action, with four short animated segments inserted into the running time: a black-and-white segment featuring Casey Junior from Dumbo; and three Technicolor cartoons: Baby Weems, Goofy's How to Ride a Horse, and the extended-length short The Reluctant Dragon, based upon Kenneth Grahame's book of the same name. The total length of all animated parts is 40 minutes.

Walt Disney opens the show with a lecture on how the art of animation has taken its rightful place as "the last of the fine arts." He then consults his staff's book project The Art of Animation and shows to the viewer that bringing still pictures to life actually dates back to prehistoric times, proving his point by showing several cave paintings depicting creative ways how a caveman would tell about actions with an inanimate picture. He then goes into ancient Egypt and depicts of how an old mural looked very similar to animation depicted on film strips. We then flash-forward to artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci and Walt tells of how his famous picture detailing the proportions of the human figure has animation-like qualities to it. Walt then showcases several toys that played on "persistence of vision" and were forerunners of making pictures move, after which he tells of how animation was exhibited to a wide audience for the first time with the French "Théâtre Optique" in the 1890s, even before movie cameras and projectors were invented.

Walt Disney takes a look at the technical improvements in animation, such as in more fluid animation of bodies and clothing, advanced special effects such as bubbles bursting and water splashing, and the development of the multiplane camera for a greater feeling of depth.