It wasn’t quite Disney World, but a recent press junket to Disney’s Pixer studio and KNB EFX, the company which supplied all the furry prosthetics for The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, proved even more of an eye-opener.

The mission had a double objective, firstly to visit the luxurious Pixar residence near San Francisco and talk to WALL-E’s creators about their latest animated blockbuster and secondly, to find out from the company which made the furry prosthetics for Disney’s Narnia saga, how Prince Caspian was brought to life in such vivid detail. And with both films arriving on Blu-ray in time for the Christmas market, it was perfect timing for an exclusive look at how the discs were shaping up.

The first stop was San Francisco and a short drive to the Bay Bridge area and the leafy suburb where our hotel and the Pixar property are located.

Setting out from the hotel on the short drive through glorious morning sunshine to Pixar’s HQ raises the question, why did Pixar pitch up here when the rest of Disney’s operations are based 300 miles south in Los Angeles?

In fact, Emeryville is a short commute from previous owner, Lucasfilm, and the newly-independent Pixar obviously wanted to keep its uniquely talented workforce.

It’s also a beautiful spot with clean air sweeping in over grassy parkland.

In the middle is a historic brick warehouse that’s been meticulously reconstructed to serve as Pixar’s impressive central building.

The handsome brickwork, copied from a 1950’s building, was specified by the company’s chairman at the time, Steve Jobs.

An oversized model of Luxo Jr, the lamp that’s come to symbolise the Pixar brand, looms over the journalists as we enter the studio, only to be greeted on the inside by two life size figures from Monsters Inc.

The Californian sun streams into the huge space lighting up the prodigious amount of art from Pixar’s latest animation, WALL-E, that adorns most of the wall space.

Our tour takes in the affectionately named Pixar University and a brief history of the studio followed by an explanation of what actually happens here.

Specifically, how a project like WALL-E turns from a seemingly unworkable idea in the head of its creator and Pixar honcho, Andrew Stanton, into a multi million-dollar feature film.

As you might expect, it’s a long process involving thousands of hours of sketching, planning, programming and re-sketching until it comes good.

To give you an idea of how much thought went into it, Stanton actually came up with the idea fifteen years ago.

One action-packed day is barely enough to fit in all of the exclusive one-to-one and round table interviews with Pixar’s key artists and players, but we have another exciting date with Disney the next day to find out how the special effects house, KNB, brought Prince Caspian to life.

A short flight takes us to our next hotel in Hollywood and a rendezvous with Disney’s head of disc production at Burbank bearing news of Prince Caspian’s Blu-ray release.

One new feature in particular, called Circle-Vision Interactive, looks set to make this one of the most advanced Blu-ray releases so far.

In the demo, it was possible to choose a scene offering this function and then navigate around it in a 360-degree circle in order to highlight almost anything in the shot that you wanted more information on.

Select an item with the remote control and a short documentary or written explanation will pop up.

Following the preview we take a short ride out to the sun-drenched Van Nuys facility, where Greg Nicotero and his team created the fantastical costumes for the Chronicles of Narnia.

Nicotero greets us at the workshop which is chock full of fake animals, masks, limbs and alarmingly, piles of very real-looking corpses. “We’re working on a new film for Tarantino,” explains Roy with a big laugh.

Standing proudly in the centre of the lobby is a life size model of Aslan, the Lion from The Lion The Witch and Wardrobe. Each individual hair of his impressive mane has been sewn on by Nicotero’s staff.

On the tour we also learn that the process can takes weeks after taking the mould of each actor’s head to create all the prosthetics that make up, for example a centaur, which happens to be Nicotero’s favourite beast from Prince Caspian, and there are many centaurs in the film.

From the thousands of body suits, motorised masks and fawn noses, it becomes clear that the Disney contract was a big one for Nicotero and evidently his commitment to the Narnia project has paid off because there on a shelf at the back of his office is the Oscar that he picked up for his efforts.

Of all of the dedicated people we met at Disney, the Pixar studio and KNB, a passion for their work seems to be the common force that drives them toward perfection on each production.

Prince Caspian and Wall-E are both out on Blu-Ray and DVD now.