- Starting this July, Disneyland’s famed array of animatronics characters will include a robot of founder Walt Disney himself, the Los Angeles Times reports. The plans have split Disney’s family, with one granddaughter calling the move “dehumanizing” and charging, “He did not want this.”
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.
“It would be an imposter,” Miller said on Facebook. “They are Dehumanizing him.”
“He did not want this,” she added.
Still, at least some in the Disney family are on board with the plan. When the company first unveiled the intent for a Walt Disney animatronic figure at its fan convention last August, Walt’s grandnephew Roy P. Disney was present.
Asked for comment, a spokesperson for the Walt Disney Co. referred Fortune to previous announcements about the exhibit and to the Walt Disney Family Museum. A spokesperson for the museum told Fortune the company asked for input from Disney family board members and that the company and the museum have a long history of collaborating.
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.
Lincoln’s likeness was the first to experience an animatronic treatment: When a robotic Abe Lincoln debuted at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, National Geographic called its realism “alarming,” according to the Disneyland resort website. The show moved to Disneyland the following year.
Re-creating Disney’s founder has put a new spotlight on the technology, which is under extra pressure in a world where everyone is armed with a smartphone. The company went to great lengths to make the reanimated Walt lifelike, including making the robot’s hands from a bronze casting of Walt’s actual hands, and having it wear shoes in his size as well as a suit made from the material Walt’s suits were made from, IGN reported. The figure will sport a tie hand-embroidered with the logo of Palm Springs’ Smoke Tree Ranch, which Walt loved, the Los Angeles Times reported.
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.
