2025 is a big year for Disneyland Resort. It’s the 70th anniversary of Disneyland Park, and while there isn’t a major E-ticket attraction opening this year, Disneyland's 70th anniversary is offering some incredible entertainment, as well as what might be one of the most groundbreaking creations in the history of Walt Disney Imagineering: an audio-animatronic of the man himself, Walt Disney.
Walt Disney: A Magical Life, a new attraction at Disneyland, is set to open at the park's Opera House on May 16, 2025, the first day of Disneyland Resort’s 70th anniversary. The show will, at least for now, replace Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, a show starring an audio-animatronic of the 16th President overseen by Walt himself. Not everybody is in love with this new idea, but I think it’s the right choice for a reason that I'm sure Walt himself would understand.
Disneyland Is Getting A Walt Disney Animatronic, And Not Everybody Is Happy About It
The announcement of Walt Disney: A Magical Life was made at D23 in August 2024. I was sitting two seats away from Roy P. Disney, the great-grandnephew of Walt, who was on hand when the show was revealed. The show will feature an audio-animatronic of Walt Disney speaking to an audience. For fans of Walt, this potentially sounds like an incredible experience.
However, not every member of the Disney family is quite so happy to celebrate the development. Diana Miller, Walt’s own granddaughter, said the decision to create an animatronic of Walt showed a “lack of respect” for the man who made Disneyland.
She’s not the only one who feels that way. A lot of fans think that making Walt Disney an attraction inside his own theme park is a step too far. Some feel that it is disrespectful, and more than a little bit creepy, to create a robotic version of a real man who means so much to so many. Maybe making Walt an attraction in his own theme park is in bad taste.
This argument is at least understandable. However, after visiting The Walt Disney Family Museum (whose board, made up of many Disney family members, supports the attraction) earlier this month, I have come to the opposite conclusion, just as Walt himself once did.
Walt Created Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln As A Way To Connect Guests With The Real Man
When Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln debuted at the 1964-65 World’s Fair, it was a revelation. A full-size human audio-animatronic. Lincoln could stand up from a sitting position and speak. It was so real to the assembled audience that many reportedly believed it was simply an actor in costume. But it was a completely mechanical man, only voiced and programmed by real people.
Walt Disney had a particular love for Abraham Lincoln, and it was important to him that other people understand Lincoln in the way that he did. Over the holiday, I made my first (but not my last) trip to the The Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco, one of the best places to celebrate the life of Walt Disney, and when walking through the section about the New York World’s Fair, I noticed a quote from Walt which read…
We didn’t present the Gettysburg Address here in any form for the simple reason, I mean, everybody hears it everywhere. And I think a lot of people think that’s the only thing that Lincoln ever said, and I think a lot of people even think that it was written by a fellow by the name of Gettysburg.
When I read those words, I began to look very differently at the idea of a Walt Disney audio-animatronic. Walt saw his technology not as something that disrespected Lincoln, whom he adored, but as something that could bring greater respect and understanding to a man who deserved it.
Walt’s suggestion, that maybe people didn’t have the proper context for Lincoln and didn’t really understand him, or understand that he was even real, could also be said of Walt Disney himself. To many people, he’s just a name, a stylized signature used as a brand.
At the very beginning of the Walt Disney Family Museum, there’s a Peanuts cartoon from 1963, three years before Walt passed away, that sees Sally watching TV before asking Charlie Brown “Do you think there really is a person named Walt Disney?”
Most of what any of us have seen of the man comes from the old TV show he once hosted. If somebody said that Walt Disney was a character played by an actor on TV, it wouldn’t be hard for somebody without all the information to believe that.
Walt Disney Is An Important Historical Figure, Just Like Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln had been dead for nearly 100 years when his audio-animatronic version debuted at the World’s Fair. Walt Disney will have been dead for less than 70 years when Walt Disney: A Magical Life debuts at Disneyland in May. Still, most of the people who knew Walt Disney well are also gone. Two major names, former Disney Parks chairman Dick Nunis and songwriter Richard Sherman, have both passed away in just the last few months. Soon all the people who could teach us about Walt Disney will be gone, just as he is.
Walt Disney: A Magical Life has the potential, if done right, to preserve the legacy of Walt Disney in a way that few other methods possibly could. It would make it “real” in a way that only audio-animatronics can.
And if the technology is acceptable for Abraham Lincoln, surely it’s worthy of Walt Disney. Walt didn’t win a war, but he changed the world nonetheless. These are two great men; two of the greatest to ever exist in their particular fields. If immortalizing one in this way is ok, it has to be ok for the other.
And it’s not like Walt Disney Imagineering doesn’t understand the tightrope they’re walking. There’s another quote at the Walt Disney Family Museum, right next to the one from Walt mentioned earlier. It’s from Imagineer Harriet Burns, and it specifically mentions the complex issues that come with this sort of an attraction, because they were the same considerations that were made when Disney made Lincoln. Burns said…
I thought, this was going to get us in trouble. Because he was a historical character and people know what Lincoln was like, and we’re going to get in deep stuff if we don’t get it right.
Disneyland has to get it right, that goes without saying. But the Imagineers got it right with Lincoln, and so I have to believe doing it again with Walt is possible.
Disney has made a few statements about just what we’ll get and what we won’t when Walt Disney: A Magical Life debuts in May. Most importantly, the company has said that the voice of Walt will not use AI to create statements he never made. Whatever Walt says will come from the man’s actual statements throughout his life. This is vital.
Secondly, we’ve been told that the Walt animatronic will be a state-of-the-art creation, using technology we haven’t seen before. While this has the potential to drop animatronic Walt right in the middle of the uncanny valley, it’s the least that can be done to try and make the experience as real as possible.
It's been suggested that Walt Disney himself would never have wanted to be an attraction in his own park. His alleged statements to that effect are questionable at best, but I can certainly imagine he would have felt that way. Walt never saw himself on par with his idols like Lincoln, Henry Ford or Thomas Edison. His attempt to build Epcot was in part an attempt to do something to truly make the world a better place.
I would argue Walt Disney had already done as much to change the world as his heroes. Like Lincoln, Walt is just as much a legend as a man. Perhaps this new attraction can use the legend, to help us all know the man just a little bit better.
I can’t promise that Walt Disney: A Magical Life will be perfect or even good. I do, however, believe that the show can be great and that it’s a perfectly acceptable way to honor Walt Disney.
