The birth of Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida
Image: Disney
Even more than their experience, Disney had a trump card that Universal simply couldn’t match with its Florida property: Walt Disney Animation.
The thought process went like this: If we put an outpost of our most historically successful division in Florida, we can outsource work there – right where people could see it happen. It’d give us the ability to say real movies are being made there without having to attract any actual film productions, which is a very competitive process and one which, ultimately, would prove impossible.
And so, Disney decided to build a space to house the newly created Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida – and wouldn’t you know it, it just happened to come at the perfect time in the company’s history.
Image: Disney
The Magic of Disney Animation attraction was really two entities that met in the middle: One was the theme park attraction, and the other was the working studio space housing Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida. We’ll get to the former in a second, but we first have to take a look at the backstory of the latter.
After Walt and Roy Disney died, Walt Disney Animation was left somewhat rudderless. That division, much like the rest of the company, took so much of its direction from its iconoclastic and visionary founder that, without him, it was difficult to move forward. The period immediately following Walt’s passing - a time spanning nearly 25 years - featured a dearth of classic Disney animated films. That era produced a few cult hits – films like Pete’s Dragon or The Fox and the Hound – but none of the smash successes Disney was known for, like Cinderella or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
In 1988, however, that changed – seemingly on a dime. In just one year, Disney released two films that put its animation studio back on the public’s radar: the clever and cute Oliver & Company and the profoundly strange Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Even before those films were released, the atmosphere around Walt Disney Animation was so positive that they took two crazy steps.
The first was to open their satellite studio in Orlando at the soon-to-be-opened Disney-MGM Studios. The second was to put into production a film called The Little Mermaid. One of those two projects caused a new generation of kids to fall in love with Disney, while the other gave them the opportunity to connect with it on an even deeper level.
Comments
I hope that Disney lives up to the expectations it is giving us, I personally thing that most of the new "Experiences/rides" ie. The little Mermaid and the, yes I am going to say this.. Seven Dwarfs Mine Train ride leave me a bit disappointed. They don't have the same feel as the older rides, they seam to be all "new" but are in my opinion very poorly done. Yes they have new innovations, swinging ride cars and such, but if you have been on these rides they lack that certain "disneyesque" quality, that " Plus" Disney is so proud of. Those who have ridden these know what I mean, but to explain it to others let me just say that they have left little to the imagination and have done little to hide the fact that they are rides in an amusement park, sure there is all the Facade work, making it Look amazing, but it has always been the experience inside that made a ride truly Disneyesque. They need to bring back the immersive quality that was once was. According to this article they just might...we'll see.
My thought on this is that those rides you mentioned -- The Little Mermaid and Seven Dwarves Mine Train -- really weren't put in a position to succeed. These attractions are D-Ticket attractions at best, but were over-hyped by the company as a sort of bizarre PR campaign to show that, yes, they were investing in Walt Disney World. With Universal expanding faster than a supernova, they needed to try and counter the narrative somehow.
I think for what they are, they're fine attractions. They simply aren't the game-changing experiences we all wanted them to be. What Disney's promising moving forward, from Star Wars to Pandora, are attractions in this mold -- attractions that we'll be awed by. It remains to be seen if they'll be as successful as Disney is claiming they'll be, but I think the recent disappointments, as you call them, are more due to unrealistic and unfair expectations that Disney itself fed into.