Opened: May 1, 1989, the same day as Disney-MGM Studios itself. Closed: late August 2015, a few weeks after the Magic of Disney Animation tour it was attached to had its final day on July 12, 2015. Location: the Animation Building, Animation Courtyard, Disney-MGM Studios/Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Type: retail shop and working cel-painting studio. Status: closed; the building has since been rebuilt as part of the Walt Disney Studios Courtyard.
Animation Gallery never got much attention on its own, and that’s understandable. It was a gift shop, tucked at the exit of a walking tour, in a park better known for the Great Movie Ride and the Tower of Terror. But for over two decades it did something almost no other retail counter at Walt Disney World could claim: it let you watch an actual Disney artist paint the thing you were about to buy.
A shop attached to a real studio
The Animation Building opened with Disney-MGM Studios on May 1, 1989, home to the Magic of Disney Animation tour and, for its first fourteen years, an actual production wing of Walt Disney Feature Animation. Guests walked past soundproof glass watching animators, layout artists, and background painters at work, then walked out through Animation Gallery, the shop built to sell the thing they’d just watched being made.
That production side closed for good on January 12, 2004, and the tour that followed traded a working studio for a more interactive, guest-facing format. Animation Gallery outlasted both versions. It kept selling animation art through the studio era, through the interactive-tour era, right up until the building’s animation identity ended altogether in 2015.
What was actually for sale
The inventory leaned into the building’s identity rather than generic park merchandise. How-to-draw books, flip books, character maquettes, and animation cels made up the core of it, with whatever Disney was promoting that year (Mulan-era art in the late 90s, Lilo & Stitch not long after) rotating through. Some of the cels were vintage production pieces pulled from actual film frames. Others were newly hand-painted, made to order, by artists trained in the same ink-and-paint techniques the studio had used for decades.
That second category is what made the shop worth a stop even if you weren’t buying anything. Disney kept a small crew of ink-and-paint artists on staff well after most animation had gone digital, largely to keep hand-painted cels available to collectors, and Animation Gallery was where guests could watch that happen. David Rippberger, one of that dwindling roster, painted cels at the shop for roughly sixteen years, visible near the exit as guests filed past on their way out of the tour.
Little-known fact: by the 2010s, Disney had only a handful of ink-and-paint artists left company-wide, a trade that had largely gone extinct once production animation moved to digital compositing. Animation Gallery was one of the few places in the country where a guest could watch that nearly obsolete skill practiced in person, for free, without buying a thing.
Why it closed
Animation Gallery’s fate was tied entirely to the building around it. The Magic of Disney Animation tour, the thing the shop existed to complement, closed in 2015 as Disney reworked Animation Courtyard around its incoming Star Wars content. Launch Bay Cargo opened that December in roughly the same footprint, selling lightsabers and prop replicas where cels and maquettes used to be. It was a clean symbolic handoff: one franchise’s retail space became another’s almost overnight.
What stands there now
Star Wars Launch Bay didn’t last either. It closed for good on September 24, 2025, along with the rest of Animation Courtyard, as Disney rebuilt the area into the Walt Disney Studios Courtyard, a Burbank-lot-inspired space that opened May 26, 2026. A reimagined Magic of Disney Animation is set to open in the same footprint on September 14, 2026, with an Olaf-hosted drawing class (“Olaf Draws!”) and a Mary Blair-inspired toddler playground (“Drawn to Wonderland”) rather than a working studio or a hand-painting artist at the exit. The building’s animation roots are coming back around; the shop that watched an artist paint your souvenir in real time isn’t part of the plan.
For the fuller story of how that stretch of park got built in the first place, see Disney-MGM Studios: How Walt Disney World’s Third Gate Became Hollywood Studios.