Disney has announced its honorees for this year’s Disney Legends Awards Ceremony, which this year will take place on Sunday, Aug. 11 at the Honda Center in Anaheim, California, as part of D23. The show “honors artists and visionaries throughout the company’s history who have pushed the envelope of creativity, challenged conventional wisdom, and broken the restraints of the status quo in search of new possibilities and excellence.”
This year’s class of Disney Legends honorees include costume designer Colleen Atwood, Angela Bassett, trailblazing Disney employee Martha Blanding, James L. Brooks, James Cameron, Jamie Lee Curtis, Miley Cyrus, comic book creator Steve Ditko, Harrison Ford, Walt Disney Animation Studios animator Mark Henn, Frank Oz, Kelly Ripa, Walt Disney Imagineer Joe Rohde and John Williams. The ceremony will be hosted by Ryan Seacrest.
“To be named a Disney Legend is the highest honor our company can bestow on anyone, reserved for those whose talent and achievement have earned them an enduring place in our history,” Disney CEO Bob Iger said in a statement. “The 14 individuals to be honored as Disney Legends this year have each made extraordinary creative contributions across the worlds of Disney and we look forward to celebrating them at D23: The Ultimate Disney Fan Event.”
The Disney Legends Awards program started in 1987, when they awarded Fred MacMurray, who had starred in a number of classic Disney live-action films (like “The Absent-Minded Professor”), the inaugural distinction. In 1989, the Nine Old Men, the group of nine animators most closely associated with Walt Disney himself, got the honor, along with Ub Iwerks, Walt’s right hand man. In the years since, honorees have included Imagineers like Ken Anderson, performers Julie Andrews, Kurt Russell and Annette Funicello, animators Joe Grant and Mel Shaw; musicians Phil Collins and Tim Rice, television personalities like Peter Jennings and Regis Philbin and the likes of Steve Jobs, Frank Wells, George Lucas and Jim Henson.
After the ceremony, their handprints are immortalized in Legends Plaza, an area on the Disney Lot in Burbank (formerly the reflection pool for the masterful Team Disney Burbank building designed by postmodern architect Michael Graves). There, you can visit your favorite Disney Legends any time you’d like (as long as you’re invited onto the lot).
This year’s crop is impressive — Henn is one of the most influential and important Disney animators of the modern era and a man who Jeffrey Katzenberg described as the “Julia Roberts of Disney Animation” due to his knack for animating princesses and Rohde is a man whose oversized influence and ambition has made him one of the greatest Imagineers of all time. If you’ve ever been to Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Florida, you’ve basically been inside Rohde’s brain.
This year’s ceremony will be held at the end of D23 weekend instead of at the beginning.
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