No detail of the animator's desk is overlooked from the way Julie's father left things: his lucky pencil, pencil sharpener, and even a colossal version of an animator's lamp become design elements. Drawn to Life plays out on a vast stage itself made to look like an animator's desk with footlights shaped like pegs that held the sheets of animation paper in place. Sheets of paper surround the stage resembling the stacked sheets of drafts that an animator inevitably sifts through during their creation process.

Inanimate objects appear animated – Audiences will be awestruck as the mammoth lamp follows Julie's movements, becoming her source of comfort and, in a way, her guiding light. Sheets of animation paper seemingly hang in the air arcing high above the stage in a dramatic proscenium. Far from static props, the sheets become living screens onto which characters and moments from the earliest Disney Animation productions are projected. Even their corners are given to playful flopping as if they are paper set in motion.

Massive rotating curtains are cast for the backdrop to give texture to scenes and move Julie along her story. The curtains are layered and made interchangeable to mimic the multiplane camera of the early animation days, where artists would move around transparent glass plates of hand-painted artwork to create the illusion of depth or other effects through the lens of the camera above.