Yesterday, Walt Disney World confirmed that Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, the attraction replacing Splash Mountain, would open this summer, indicating the new Disney World attraction will arrive a bit earlier than previously anticipated. Along with that news came a look at the first full-motion animatronic that will appear on the ride, one of several versions of Tiana that riders will see. Fans have not been able to stop praising the character, because Tiana has a real face.
Depending on when an animatronic was built, it can look quite different compared to others. The previous generation of humanoid animatronics, while they had unparalleled physical movement, possessed projection-mapped faces, which theoretically allowed for greater expression. However, they didn’t actually look as “real” as the traditionally molded design and were, reportedly, more difficult than expected for Disney Parks to maintain. Fans breathed a sigh of relief that Tiana won’t be using the older design. As Disney character YouTuber Disney Dan put it...
WOW. She looks so good.
The responses to Dan's now-viral tweet have echoed that sentiment. The difference in the two designs can most easily be seen in the two different versions of the Frozen Ever After attraction. The first version of the ride, which is at Walt Disney World’s Epcot, used the projection-mapped face, and fans didn’t love it. It doesn’t look as natural, it tends to malfunction, and while it looks worse in photographs than it does in person, there’s just a bit of an uncanny valley situation going on. Per another user on X:
Frozen showed Disney the errors of their ways using screen faces.
In contrast, the version of Frozen Ever After that opened late last year at Hong Kong Disneyland, and will open at Disneyland Paris, uses the newest model of animatronic. It includes a more advanced, but more traditionally molded, face, and Elsa looks absolutely incredible there. It has caused many to ask Disney to replace the Epcot version with the new animatronic. @JohnTheMon2 said:
Need this on the Frozen ride.
Disney Parks says there will be multiple Tiana animatronics at various points of the ride. Eagle-eyed viewers of the original Disney Parks TikTok also spied what appears to be an animatronic of Tiana’s mother, Eudora. We also know based on the Tiana's Bayou Adventure details that have been shared, that there will be several smaller animal animatronics. They may be repurposed parts of the original Splash Mountain attraction, which was itself largely made of recycled animatronics, or they could be entirely new. Either way, we expect they’ll look just as good. With that, @SRanger1071 posted the following:
This was my ONLY requirement for this ride - a real Tiana with a real face! And she looks wonderful!
Recent testing at Tiana’s Bayou Adventure indicates that work on the ride is moving fairly quickly. That might suggest that we could see an opening as early as May, which is “summer” based on the way Disney Parks look at the calendar. Disneyland’s version of the ride is still set to open later. Splash Mountain closed at Disney World about five months before the West Coast version, so that ride opening this fall seems likely. While there's still time left before the attraction opens its doors, the fact that this animatronic -- which contributes to a major aspect of the ride -- is being well received thus far.
