Walt Disney’s granddaughter has condemned the entertainment giant he founded for re-creating the late entrepreneur as a soulless “robotic grampa” for the 70th anniversary celebration of California’s Disneyland theme park in July.
Disney, who died in 1966, will appear as an animatronic figure in a new attraction called Walt Disney – A Magical Life in the park’s Main Street Opera House that commemorates the resort’s 17 July 1955 opening.
When the project to show “what it would be like to stop by Walt’s office” was announced last year, company officials said it would be “a fitting tribute” to one of the pioneers of modern entertainment.
But in an interview with the Los Angeles Times published on Tuesday, Joanna Miller said her grandfather would have hated his regeneration into a talking mechanical replica – and accused the company of ruining the legacy of her beloved “Grampa”.
“I think I started crying,” Miller said of the moment she first saw the figure. “It didn’t look like him to me.”
She said she laid out her fears in a letter to Disney’s chief executive, Bob Iger, when the venture was first proposed and later met him and members of the team creating the attraction. “He was very kind. He let me do my spiel,” Miller recalled, but she said her plea to drop the animatronic fell on deaf ears.
She also spoke out in a Facebook post in November, in which she said Disney was “dehumanizing” her grandfather, who loved to meet crowds at the park in person and would spend hours chatting with them.
“The idea of a robotic Grampa to give the public a feeling of who the living man was just makes no sense,” she wrote. “It would be an imposter, people are not replaceable.
“You could never get the casualness of his talking, interacting with the camera, [or] his excitement to show and tell people about what is new at the park. You cannot add life to one empty of a soul or essence of the man.”
On a personal level, she said she remembered magical childhood days with her siblings when their grandfather would take them to his studios and let them play with whatever he had been working on. “He’s ours,” she said. “We’re his family.”
As for the public’s experience of watching the animatronic and hearing Disney’s computerized voice, Miller told Iger: “I strongly feel the last two minutes with the robot will do much more harm than good to Grampa’s legacy. They will remember the robot – and not the man.”
Miller told the Times she was not speaking on behalf of her five siblings or other descendants of her grandfather. “I do speak for my grandfather and my mother,” she said, adding that it “pains” her to be speaking out about the company he created.
“When you get older, you just start to get pissed off. And you get tired of being quiet. So I spoke up on Facebook. Like that was going to do anything,” she said.
“The fact that it got back to the company is pretty funny.”
A spokesperson for the Walt Disney Company on Tuesday directed the Guardian back to a press release about the attraction issued in August 2024.
Josh D’Amaro, chair of Disney Experiences, told attenders of D23, the company’s annual fan event, that the company would strive to create an authentic version of Walt Disney using animatronic technology more advanced than 60 years ago, when he introduced a figure of Abraham Lincoln at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.
“Creating our first Walt figure is an idea that’s been whispered in the hallowed halls of imagineering for years, decades, even,” D’Amaro said.
“We just had to wait for innovation to catch up with our dreams. And we’re finally ready.”
