Vacation Fun! + Mickey Shorts Theater
An Original Animated Short with Mickey and Minnie
Disney’s Hollywood Studios, Walt Disney World Resort
© Disney
If this video doesn’t automatically play, click here to watch it on YouTube. Video is © CJ Summers. Content is ©Disney.
How do you take an animated world and make it feel real?
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Vacation Fun is a guest experience at Disney’s Hollywood Studios that brings Mickey and Minnie’s animated world into a physical environment. The experience combines an original animated short with a fully themed theater and surrounding environment, extending the story beyond the screen through visual details, graphics, and opportunities for guest interaction.
The project offered an opportunity to think about storytelling not simply as something guests watch, but as something they enter, explore, and experience.
DESIGN CHALLENGE
Vacation Fun needed to be more than a theater where guests watched an animated short. The experience needed to establish Mickey and Minnie’s world before the film began, carry that story through the show, and continue the experience after guests left their seats.
The challenge was creating a cohesive transition between screen and space—translating the visual language, characters, humor, and sense of play found in animation into a physical guest environment.
That meant considering every touchpoint:
ARRIVAL → DISCOVERY → SHOW → REVEAL → INTERACTION
Environmental graphics, artwork, architectural details, visual cues, and interactive moments all became opportunities to extend the story.
The space wasn’t simply a container for the film.
The environment had to become part of the story.
MY ROLE
Designing from the Plan
The creative story had to work not just on the page, but within the physical space.
Because the Mickey Shorts Theater was a refurbishment of an existing theater, we weren’t designing from a blank slate. We were working within an existing theater, queue line, and exit, which meant the creative approach had to respond to the space that was already there.
I used CAD drawings, floor plans, and site plans as tools for making creative and guest-experience decisions. I reviewed spatial layouts and architectural plans to understand how guests would move through the theater and queue, where creative moments could live, and how storytelling elements could work within the existing architecture and infrastructure.
This meant considering the entire guest journey—sightlines, circulation, placement, scale, environmental context, and the relationship between story and space—while balancing the creative vision with the practical realities of an existing environment.
Working alongside design and technical teams, I helped carry the creative intent of Vacation Fun from story concept into a cohesive physical guest experience, making thoughtful use of the space we already had.
Creating the Story & Guest Experience
I designed the story and guest experience for Vacation Fun, translating the film’s playful, nostalgic energy into a cohesive experience that extended beyond the theater screen.
I also wrote the script for the Vacation Fun animated short, helping shape the story itself while considering how that story would ultimately connect to the physical guest experience. I then collaborated with Disney Television Animation to refine the short and put the finishing touches on the final story and script.
From there, I looked at the experience from the guest’s perspective—from entering the queue to waiting for the show, experiencing the theater, and exiting afterward—and considered how each touchpoint could contribute to the story.
The goal was to make the experience feel like an extension of the film rather than simply a place to watch it.
I developed the creative strategy for how the environment could extend the Vacation Fun narrative, considering storytelling moments, visual elements, and guest-facing details alongside the existing architecture, queue, theater, and exit.
The result was a guest journey where the storytelling continued before and after the film, connecting the written story, animated content, and physical environment into one cohesive experience.
RESULT
Vacation Fun transformed an animated Mickey and Minnie adventure into a multidimensional guest experience, allowing the story to extend beyond the screen and into the physical environment.
Guests move from discovering the world, to experiencing the film, to stepping directly into Mickey and Minnie’s world themselves.
The result is a seamless relationship between story, environment, and guest experience—where creative intent continues across disciplines and every detail contributes to the larger narrative.
For me, Vacation Fun represents a fundamental part of how I approach creative work: A great story doesn’t just tell people where they are. It gives them a reason to look, explore, interact, and remember the experience.
Post-Show (Attraction Exit) Photo Ops
Before the After
Here’s where the story begins: An existing theater. A dated identity. An opportunity to rethink the entire guest experience.
The transformation went far beyond a fresh coat of paint. Working with the creative and design teams, we reimagined the space from the guest’s perspective—rethinking the visual identity, seating, lighting, marquee, queue, and guest-facing moments to create an environment that felt unmistakably Mickey.
The result? A theater transformed into a cohesive, story-driven experience where the physical environment and entertainment work together to bring Disney Animation to life.
Everything above is the “after”—a very different chapter for the same space.