Entertainment juggernaut Disney is on the verge of opening a new attraction at Disneyland, the California theme park where founder Walt Disney once kept an apartment.
And the attraction will resurrect the founder himself—in a way.
A new show, Walt Disney—A Magical Life, is set to open in July and will feature an animatronic version of Walt Disney that has been seven years in the making, the Los Angeles Times reported. The company aims to “bring Walt to life in a way that you could only experience at the park,” Tom Fitzgerald, a longtime engineer who has worked on popular Disney attractions, told the Times. “We felt the technology had gotten there,” he said.
However, the move to reanimate the founder has drawn opposition from none other than Disney’s own family.
Joanna Miller, a granddaughter of Walt’s, posted a statement on social media excoriating the plan to bring Walt to life.
“He did not want this,” she added.
Chris Miller, Walt’s grandson and a museum director, said in the statement that the company was “very eager to be as accurate as possible in creating this. We came away confident that this is the right group to take on this important project.” Museum board vice president Tamara Miller, Walt’s great-granddaughter, said he “would have been enthusiastic about the project and fascinated by the advancements of the Audio-Animatronics technology that was first developed during his days at WED (now Imagineering).”
Disney’s animated robots have more typically been used for fictional characters, like the robots in the Pirates of the Caribbean or Haunted Mansion rides, or national figures such as Abraham Lincoln, who stars in the long-running show Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln.
The project engineers even painstakingly worked to re-create the “blink profile” of the founder, making sure it lined up with film recordings of him.
“One of the things I discovered in watching the footage, he doesn’t blink when he speaks,” Fitzgerald told the outlet.
