The Walt Disney Family Museum - Review

As a proclaimed dedicated Disney fan, I'm so disappointed to say that I had no idea this museum existed before visiting San Francisco! And am I ever glad that I found out about it. The amount of knowledge taken away from a single day there is indescribable, and I can't wait to share it with you all so that one day you'll want to visit, too!

Admission

To start, you'll need some tickets to enter the exhibit. You can buy them online or in person, there's really no difference. The general admission price is $25 for adults, and if you want to see the general admission museum as well as the special exhibit that's happening at the time, it's $35. It's 100% worth it to pay the extra $10 I believe, because you get way more than what $10 is worth. The exhibit changes every few months, and I was fortunate enough to visit the Mickey Mouse: From Walt to the World exhibit, which I'll get into on a later post.

What to expect

When you enter the main building, you'll see the ticket desk on your right, and just passed it is the lobby. The lobby already has tons of things to look at, including Walt's Oscars, awards he's been given over the years, university degrees, honors, and more. The center piece though is some original furnishings of the Disneyland apartment, as well as information and photos.

Once you enter the galleries, they follow chronological order of Walt's entire life, from before birth to after death.

The first room includes some of his original documents including letters from him, his birth certificate, his baptism certificate, the banking papers of when his father sold the farm, and pictures of his family tree. I couldn't believe how many of his belongings were preserved.

Deed of sale for the Disney farm

The displays have preserved copies of some of Walt's original work, including his high school newsletters with his comics in them. It's absolutely marvelous to see where he started out.

The rooms continue, each with different decor and different layout, but easy to follow. One room was all about him arriving in Hollywood for the first time, and details his journey with pitching the Alice Comedies to different studios.

The next room over is full of information about Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, why he created him and how he lost him, and the story about how Mickey Mouse came to be.

Continuing on you'll hit rooms dedicated to the evolution of animation (examples such as when color was added), and when Snow White, Pinocchio, and the rest of the original films were made.

In the room with all of the original sketches from the first few movies, there is a multiplane camera, which extends from that level to the bottom level in the gift store. Multiplane cameras were invented by Ub Iwerks, Walt's close friend and business partner, and it was created to move different animations past each other at different speeds. It is 1 of 3 original multiplane cameras used by Walt that is preserved.

The museum also includes the original Schultheis notebook, which is a large notebook full of animation effects and sketches from stories like Pinocchio and Fantasia.

The museum continues with displays about the Disney Strike, Disney's involvement in World War II, real audio clips from 1940, some of the war memorabilia from the time, and the films he made after the war, such as Cinderella, Peter Pan, and Alice in Wonderland. This room seems like the last one - at least to me it did. At this point you should be about 2 hours in, and it felt like a good wrap up.

You'll walk through a hallway with different videos playing of Walt, which is designed beautifully. It's next to a large window with an amazing view of the Golden Gate Bridge. There is a green bench at the end of the hallway, which is one of the original benches from Griffiths park, where Walt dreamt of Disneyland. You can sit and take a break and gaze out of the window. This is an excellent transition into the next gallery.

The next part of the museum is absolutely breathtaking, it can easily be many people's favorite part. If you're not very interested in Walt himself but like the park, this will make you fall in love with both.

This gallery includes Walt's Lilly Belle train, the original model for the Disneyland castle, all of the steps they took from creating the idea of Disneyland to opening day, and the center piece of the gallery - the model of the original, opening day Disneyland park. The details on it are spectacular. You should take some time and really study each part, look at the placement of certain things, and how different it is from the park we see today.

This gallery also includes interactive animatronics and video screens, displaying tons of information that even big Disney fans may not know about.

The last part of the museum includes info about Walt's last projects such as Mary Poppins and EPCOT. There's also one wall dedicated to the story that Dianne Disney Miller included about the nights leading up to Disney's death. The entire vibe of the room changes and it feels very heavy, and even personal. But it is such a great way to wrap up.

It ends with a white room with beautiful montages, videos, and photos of Walt throughout his life, with music and audio clips playing in the background. There's a bench in the middle to sit on to admire all of the things he's done in his life, and reflect on everything you had just learned throughout the museum. It is beautifully designed, much like the rest of the museum.

Museum Gift Store

On the left of the lobby is the gift store, but it's not your typical Disney store. It has post cards with photos seen in the museum on it, full books and novels about Walt's life, Disneyland, Mickey Mouse, and more. There's the usual mugs, pens, notebooks, and of course Disney pins as well. My favorite parts of the gift store are the E-tickets and the original children's books. E-tickets, named after the tickets you bought at Disneyland before park hoppers were a thing, are magazines about different rides at Disneyland. Each magazine is dedicated to telling the history behind each ride, why they decided to build it, the process, and pictures that are very old and vintage. E-tickets range from a price of $12-$15, and I went a little crazy there. They also sell the old Disney children's books of some stories, such as Peter Pan, Pinocchio, Alice in Wonderland, Snow White, for only $5!

My Experience

I arrived at the museum at 11:00am, and it took me until about 5:00pm to be finished looking at all of it, including the special exhibition. If you had doubts about whether this museum would be worth it, then I'm here to tell you that it's worth your money, and more! It's about a 15 minute drive outside of Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, it's enormous, includes so many original documents that I thought I'd never be able to see, and tells his story in such a beautiful, non-biased, clear way. It's important that the younger generations get to know Uncle Walt, too.