Disney Story Realms, Part II: The Continued Journey Through a Reimagined Disney Adventure World at Disneyland Paris

Aside: Embodying the “Dark Age”

As you probably know, after Walt’s death, Disney entered a period of relative decline. Often called the Dark Age (or more charitably, the Bronze Age), the nearly-two decades between 1970 and 1989’s The Little Mermaid were marked by films that didn’t quite resonate with audiences. We can’t possibly leave the ’70s and ’80s out of this park, though, luckily, nearly all of the output of Disney Animation in the “Dark Age” were films based on books, giving us a lot of options.

For example, we could certainly adapt The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, the 1977 feature film debut of the character drawn from English author A. A. Milne’s 1926 children’s book. But I feel this is a bit of a cop-out. Disney Parks have plenty of Pooh, especially after the character’s pop culture resurgence around the New Millennium. (Ironically, Disneyland Paris is an exception among “Castle Parks” by not having a Pooh ride since it’s been in “suspended animation” since 1995 thanks to Walt Disney Studios.)

Anyway, I opted not to go this route. In part it’s because I already made a “Hundred Acre Wood” land for my Build-Out of Magic Kingdom. I think that’s a good place for it, because Pooh’s a little edgeless, universally pleasant, and somewhat “corporate,” which are words often assigned to Magic Kingdom. To insert it here would technically fit the bill of a film from this era based on a book, but Pooh certainly isn’t a great embodiment of the age as a whole and more of an exception.

Certainly 1973’s Robin Hood (the Disney rendition with the fox) would be a contender because it gives us that wonderful idea of a sort of author-less legend and folk tale; a soft version of the “swords and sorcery” element of literature that also captures dashing adventure and heroism beautifully. But ultimately, Robin Hood doesn’t feel so tonally different or environmentally distinct from Jungle Book as to create a compelling transition here. (Robin Hood famously features several scenes traced from Jungle Book, to give you a sense of the state Disney Animation was in in this Xerox era.)

Other “Dark Age” entries in Disney Animation including The Rescuers (1977), The Fox and the Hound (1981), and The Great Mouse Detective (1986) were more or less straight adaptations of books. Then you have Oliver & Company (1988) as a modern, New York-set retelling of Oliver Twist… On paper, any of them could fill this slot between Jungle Book and whatever we choose to represent the Disney Renaissance of the ’90s.

But the thing we’re meant to be selecting here is not just “any ’70s or ’80s Disney movie based on a book”; It’s something that can truly embody this era of entertainment – an era that was edgy, experimental, grunge, and literally, visually dark. This was the era of The Empire Strikes Back and Ronald Reagan; the time of He-Man and Robo-Cop and Ghostbusters and Michael Jackson and Terminator. The fact that Disney didn’t produce Back to the Future or The Goonies or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or E.T. shows just how far behind the studio was in pop culture.

So how do we represent this era faithfully? In the continued spirit of taking you behind the scenes of my thinking (like it or not!) here are a few ideas I liked, but ultimately didn’t choose…

• THE BLACK CAULDRON (1985). An adaptation of British author Lloyd Alexander’s “Chronicles of Prydain” book series, The Black Cauldron is famously the flop that nearly ended Disney Feature Animation forever. (It was such an embarrassing boondoggle for the studio, it was “vaulted” after its 1985 release and couldn’t be seen until it was released on home video thirteen years later. It’s on Disney+, and if you haven’t seen it, you might as well! And listen – it is a tough watch. It’s beautifully animated… like, akin to the Renaissance visually. But it’s muddled, meandering, and worse, boring.)
  
  That’s a shame because an epic “quest” filled with magic, mayhem, and genuinely frightening sights set in a Welsh fantasy world would be a perfect thing to slot in here, and it’s also the perfect IP to embody the “Dark Age.” Even though the film flopped, could a theme park be the place to redeem Black Cauldron’s reputation? Maybe, but someone more adept at understanding Alexander’s Prydain than I would need to take it on. (If you have designed a Black Cauldron land, I want to see it!)

• THE LAST UNICORN (1982). Though not a Disney film, Rankin / Bass’s adaptation of Peter S. Beagle’s renowned fantasy novel (regarded as among the best fantasy books ever written) is as beautiful and delicate as its source material. The Last Unicorn, too, is a sort of dark fantasy quest as the titular creature ventures out of her sacred Lilac Wood and into the world of man in search of her lost sisters – stolen by the fiery Red Bull and herded to the far-off castle of the evil King Haggard.
  
  I don’t even mind that The Last Unicorn isn’t a Disney film – it’s still a great icon of animation in this era. If there’s a reason I chose against it, it’s that it’s a beautifully reflective book and film that are ultimately about the fragility of mortality and the weight of regret. It has moments of adventure, but it’s more of a revelation and a reflection than its Medieval lean and mythic creature would have you believe at first glance. It felt somewhat frivolous to make it, like, a dark ride, flat ride, and restaurant, you know? So while I highly recommend that you make a beeline for Beagle’s novel or watch the movie, it doesn’t feel like the right fit for this park.

• THE DARK CRYSTAL (1982). Billed as the first live action film to feature no humans on screen, The Dark Crystal is a masterpiece developed, directed, and produced by Jim Henson. Frankly, it’s an almost unbelievable display of Henson’s brilliance to do something so vast and extraordinary as this dark fantasy, set on the dying planet of Thra. In the approach to a rare alignment of the planet’s three suns, two elvish Gelflings are called to quest across Thra, confront the hideous and vain Skeksis that rule in immortal misery, and restore the great Crystal whose power will save Thra from its millennia-long blight.
  
  Like so many features of the ’80s, The Dark Crystal was divisive in its time, leading Henson to the lighter and more musical (but similarly weird) 1986 film Labyrinth starring David Bowie as his next epic fantasy outing. But The Dark Crystal has since become a critically acclaimed cult classic, inspiring a vast fandom and expanded universe, including the absolutely spectacular 2019 Netflix limited series Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (really, a must-watch). I think it could work in the theme park space beautifully, but it’s neither a Disney property nor based on a book… So even though I probably should’ve just broken my own rules to include it, but if we start making exceptions now, then nothing matters!

• THE PRINCESS BRIDE (1987). You can almost imagine Michael Eisner’s Disney being furious that Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride (based on the fourth-wall-breaking fantasy novel by William Goldman) was a 20th Century Fox film given that the quintessential family-comedy fantasy-adventure film feels like exactly the sort of output Disney should’ve had in the era. This was meant to be a Disney film. Thankfully, that historic wrong was righted when Disney bought 20th Century Fox in 2019 for $73 billion, adding The Princess Bride to Disney+’s content catalogue.
  
  If we were to have added a Princess Bride land to Story Realms, it would’ve likely been some incarnation of the Kingdom of Florin – the British-inspired Medieval kingdom much of the action revolves around. I think we could’ve done it, but Florin doesn’t really come across as a distinct physical place that would be recognizable in any way. Also, does a comedy film translate (literally) to a multicultural park? Is The Princess Bride something we need a dark ride of, or might it be best represented by having a turn on the Theater in the Woods we added back in Storybook Forest? (A Princess Bride musical is officially in development by Disney, with Frozen’s songwriting duo at the helm.)

Sincerely, all four of these (plus Robin Hood, Pooh, The Rescuers, et al) could so easily and cleanly be theme park lands, and in their own ways, each could be valiantly defended as the right choice for our Disney Story Realms and the slot around the lagoon we want to devote to a film from the ’70s or ’80s.

But listen, when we’ve got the chance to be “Blue Sky,” I think we ought to use it. So I’m going to propose a land that probably should’ve been part of my Build-Out of Disney’s Animal Kingdom, but can fit so nicely into our Story Realms and give us an environment not quite like any other we’ll feature here…

Chapter Six: VALLEY OF DECAY

A thousand years after a nuclear war lead to a widespread ecocide of Earth’s environments, the world has been decimated. Nearly all land is covered in an expanding toxic jungle populated by gigantic insects. One of few oases of human life in this vast, poisoned landscape is the Valley of the Wind – home to the princess Nausicaä. An explorer, adventurer, and pacifist, Nausicaä seeks a way for humans to coexist in the hostile world that’s arisen thanks to her ancestors, and to stand against fellow human outpost kingdoms that seek to eradicate the insects instead.

Though it predates the formation of the Studio Ghibli he co-founded the next year, Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is often considered the first of the studio’s films – and indeed to some, the magnum opus of the master storyteller. In it are all the hallmarks of Ghibli and Miyazaki – a protagonist whose optimism and kindness is her strength; antagonists who aren’t straightforward villains and whose views are relatable; deep messages of environmentalism; a moral lesson about the dangers of acting out of fear; transcendent landscapes and settings that defy anything seen in animation before…

Nausicaä is a perfect IP for Story Realms because it brings with it a unique literary origin story (a manga written by Miyazaki himself two years prior to the film), a setting that’s totally distinct from anything else in the park, and a world that – frankly – needs no exposition. We need not know the plot of the film; we need not know its characters; hell, we don’t even have to have heard of this movie or the world.

Just as Pandora: The World of Avatar works completely severed from knowledge of its source material, I think that this post-apocalyptic world of fungal growths overtaking the ruins of humanity tells a story we can instantly grasp. And actually, it works even more to the point of the story if we initially understand this space as a hostile and dangerous one, only to discover its beauty and benevolence as we trek further in…

Nausicaä’s visuals aren’t “high fantasy” so much as they’re “psychedelic sci-fi.” A dense forest of floating spores, fungal growths, and bioluminescent plants, always spreading and consuming. (This satisfies me enough to cut the idea of including “Area X” from 20th Century’s Annihilation based on one of my favorite books – the 2014 novel by Jeff VanderMeer – which I initially sketched out for this park. But with Nausicaä, we check off the same sort of weird fiction, ecological cosmic horror setting with an animation-rooted approach that’s far more… family accessible.)

In the manga, the decimated regions overtaken by the expanding bloom are called the “Sea of Corruption,” translated to English as “Sea of Decay,” which I think sets the wrong expectation for 90% of visitors to this park who are likely not familiar with the IP. The Disney dub produced in 2005 (with Miyazaki’s blessing after a dub he did not approve) calls it the “Toxic Jungle,” which I think muddies the concept since it’s next to our Jungle Book land. So I settled on the “Valley of Decay,” which is expository and foreboding!

It begins in an outdoor valley overtaken by the toxic bloom We don’t get many opportunities in theme parks to visit spaces that are “beautiful but hostile.” Maybe, Big Thunder Mountain; Expedition Everest; Kilimanjaro Safaris; Rise of the Resistance… It seems to me that when we do get to visit a “hostile” place, it’s on a ride where we know everything will resolve by the end, so we get to claim victory and wash our hands of the conflict and head home to put it out of our minds.

I think this would be different; to be in this dense and supernatural woods of toxic blooms and drifting spores and see two buildings – in this case, a restroom and a retail space – literally encased in fungal growth… it’s striking, which I think is the point. There is no easy solution to this ecocide, and no ride we ride will magically “fix it” and let us off the hook for our impact on the Earth. We’d have to commit to change today in hopes that our great-grandchildren will reap the benefits – something we as a Western civilization of the 21st century aren’t so good at.

As you can see above, my attempt here was to create a small outdoor land, but to also include an enclosed, indoor complex. (Any time I’m envisioning a park outside of California, I think it’s wise to include as many weatherproof spaces as you can… (I’ve done that with an indoor “A Bug’s Land” in my Build-Out of Animal Kingdom and a Luigi’s Mansion sub-section in my Build-Out of Epic Universe.) An indoor/outdoor land works functionally in a park that rains and snows.

My benchmark for the way I planned it here is Rust, Germany’s Europa-Park – a theme park owned by the Mack family, and thus a testbed for ride technologies used on Mack Rides around the world (including, for example, Epic Universe’s Stardust Racers). They have a really interesting land themed to the French book series Arthur (not to be confused with PBS’s aardvark) and the 2006 Arthur and the Invisibles film it inspired. Europa-Park’s Arthur land is basically built around and inside of an substantial indoor complex.

Attention is drawn to the notion that there must be more to the land when an Inverted Powered Coaster bursts out of the indoor complex and briefly banks over the heads of pedestrians before racing back into the building.

The Mack Inverted Powered Coaster is a really useful and nuanced ride system. A “powered coaster” is essentially one that does not rely on gravity, but is instead supplied with continuous power through the track that propels it forward. Mack’s version positions riders four across in trains that are suspended beneath the track. Each row can undergo active rotation throughout the attraction, turning to face show scenes during fairly elaborate dark ride sections or to reorient the train. And then, it can accelerate through family-friendly coaster maneuvers, including the thrilling little acrobatics viewed by guests when it breaks out of the showbuilding.

This ride model has been used elsewhere (including a Jurassic World aerial tour at Universal Studios Beijing and even a How To Train Your Dragon dark ride at MotionGate Dubai), but I think it’s sort of perfect for this world of Nausicaä.

If we disguise the enclosed portion of the land behind cliff faces and walls overtaken by the toxic growth, then we end up with a really visually compelling outdoor space – water pouring down from a rocky wall and carving out this Valley of Decay, powering water wheels that seem to connect to the SPORE SAILS flat ride (a pedal-powered Zamperla Magic Bikes); then, a plant-lined break in the cliff that offers us a path deeper into the otherworldly sci-fi jungle.

Passing inside, guests would ideally have the same realization that Nausicaä does: the plants that inhabit this wasteland earth aren’t inherently dangerous; they’re merely made that way by feeding through soil poisoned by humanity’s war a thousand years earlier.

In fact, the plants of the Toxic Jungle are filters, absorbing the airborne toxins with such efficiency that the caverns beneath the jungle called the “Vaults” are filled with clean water, spores that have been made inert through crystallization, and the potential for new life to form. Our indoor complex, then, becomes these explorable, bioluminescent vaults.

In this glowing, sci-fi forest, we have a wonderful (climate-controlled) exploration zone and play area I call THE OHM’S NEST – named for the gigantic, armored insectoids that inhabit the jungle. I’d also include POD PLUNGE – a pair of indoor Zamperla Jumping Towers that would provide a family-sized thrill in the build-up to The Queen’s Fortress.

And yes, we can have a powered inverted coaster break out and soar over us down in the jungle below. Like Europa Park’s Arthur, a vast majority of this ride would actually be indoors. As I said, I don’t think this land’s success necessarily hinges on understanding the underlying source material, so I’m not sure we even need a “storytelling” ride. (Again, Pandora doesn’t have one.) However, given the unique storytelling capabilities of the ride system, I framed this ride as NAUSICAÄ AND THE VOYAGE OF THE WIND.

Voyage of the Wind would cast our suspended trains as modifications of Nausicaä’s mehve – a hyper-lightweight, durable, powered glider crafted through biocircular use of ohms’ exoskeleton. And as our “story” ride for the land, it would propel us through dark ride scenes recalling the story of the film.

I added one additional attraction that I called RIVER OF DECAY. I wanted this to give Story Realms an equivalent of the Na’vi River Journey – a sort of plotless, atmospheric boat ride where “nothing goes horribly wrong.” No drops, no villains, no height requirement… Just this sort of odd juxtaposition of the idea of a sailing down a “River of Decay” and then a tranquil, astounding trip through this bioluminescent jungle of otherworldly beauty.

It’s important for a few reasons, not the least of which being that when we provide this enclosed, climate-controlled space, we need to actually give people something to do in there if they have children smaller than could enjoy the family drop ride or the inverted coaster. This needs to be a space people can linger in and make an afternoon out of on a stormy day, so equipping the indoor complex with a flat ride, dark ride, and coaster feels like a robust enough collection, especially since this is a Build-Out.

With the “Dark Age” of animation covered in a sort of left-of-center way – and with just one plot of land between Nausicaä and Frozen – we have to make some hard choices around how Disney Story Realms can make the “Renaissance” of animation incarnate…