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

Background: The Disney Renaissance

If the plot between Nausicaä (the “Dark Age”) and Frozen (the “Revival”) must be dedicated to a product of the Disney Renaissance that’s also rooted in a book, then we have no shortage of options.

The legendary Disney Renaissance was the once-unthinkable streak when Disney released hit after hit at the box office. Over the course of a decade, Disney turned its once-fledgling animation division into a pop culture powerhouse whose characters defined Millennial life, introduced immeasurable billions of dollars in IP to the company’s coffers, and (maybe most importantly) helped Disney get its groove back after decades of flailing.

Park Lore Members can actually dig into a full standalone two-part Special Feature I wrote on the Disney Renaissance, but even if you don’t know its story, you certainly know its output. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Pocahontas, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Mulan, and Tarzan are products of an unbroken streak that lasted from 1989 to 1999. Nearly all of them (with the exception of The Lion King, despite its nods to Shakespeare’s Hamlet) are based on either an authored work or a sort of folktale in the literary tradition.

A crucially, every single one of them could be transformed into a full, standalone theme park land. Seriously, you could build an “Islands of Adventure” style park that just featured those nine films, and every single environment could be richly detailed and filled with color, character, and sensational attractions.

I actually set out here wanting to do something with Aladdin, which is one of those Renaissance creations that’s incredibly beautiful, timeless, and pervasive throughout Disney parks in nighttime spectaculars and songs and spinners, but has never been given E-Ticket treatment. Its fictional, highly-stylized kingdom of Agrabah has all the Technicolor makings of a wonderful land, and a flying carpet dark ride is about as obvious and needed as any Disney Parks concept could be. I think it would also be nice to feature a second story of non-Western origin after Nausicaä (even though technically, the authorship of “Aladdin and the Wondrous Lamp” is contested, and it may have been inserted into the One Thousand and One Nights compendium by Westerners).

But ultimately, I had a tough time reconciling this dense place with a relatively narrow plot we’re left with along the waterway that connects the bay to the park’s backstage marina. DisneySea did this well with its “Arabian Coast,” which somehow looks like a desert kingdom while also being nautical. But I just couldn’t quite figure it out here. As a result, I decided to go easier on myself and opt for a much simpler choice…

Chapter Seven: MERMAID LAGOON

The Little Mermaid really joins Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast specifically in getting the “too much, not enough” treatment in Disney Parks. The songs and the characters are everywhere, but there really isn’t much permanent infrastructure around these IPs… Or at least, there wasn’t until a pair of Mermaid Omnimover dark rides opened at Disney California Adventure and Magic Kingdom in the early 2010s. They’re fine for what they are (high-throughput family capacity) but they’re not headliners. In fact, both required fairly extensive rehabs within a year or so or opening to address some really strange oversights. It’s a shame that such a pivotal, timeless, exceptional IP finally got “ride” treatment two decades after its release, and the results are… fine. You know? But The Little Mermaid was remarkable in that it was the first fairytale adaptation by Disney in thirty years (1959’s Sleeping Beauty was the next most recent) and that it sort of made the company go, “Oh, duh. This is who we are. We adapt stories, legends, and fairytales into vivid, vibrant musicals.”

So even though nearly any Renaissance film could fill this space, what I like about the choice of The Little Mermaid is a couple of things:

• geographically, this fits well along the canal, giving us a natural waterfront fit for Eric’s kingdom;
• narratively, it’s neat that one of the first expansions penned for Disneyland Paris was a Little Mermaid ride, which never came to fruition thanks to financial difficulties but can now at last take its place at the resort;
• spiritually, it’s kind of neat that this and Frozen become neighbors, creating a little ode to the work of Hans Christian Andersen whose Snow Queen and Little Mermaid are paired up and indeed, share a little bay that we could call Andersen Bay if we wanted. Isn’t that sweet?

Again, we don’t have much space to work with, and there’s a relatively steep grade leading down to the canal. So I tried to use that fact to embrace the aesthetic of the (few) shots we get of Eric’s kingdom. First of all, attempts to figure out where on our Earth this kingdom would be based on architecture are scattershot, because it’s sort of this pan-Mediterranean old world stone and tile village. Entering through a gatehouse and a stone bridge over an inlet below; red tile roofs, fluttering flags, seaside shutters, windmills, docked fishing boats… It’s just effortlessly pleasant, romantic, storybook, and nautical.

Across the bridge, we’d arrive at a sort of “town square” fashioned from this relatively tight space, with little snack windows and outdoor market spaces semi-enclosed by the surrounding stone architecture, but with occasional peeks at the cliffs and water that reside to the left. Here in the town square is where we find the HARBOR HOUSE, a quick-service eatery with a back patio overlooking an inlet and surrounded in pounding waterfalls feeding into the harbor below.

There’s a flat ride here, here, perched on a grassy cliff over the water. Accessed via a queue beneath climbing roses and wooden trellises is TIDE POOL TWIST a Zamperla Watermania. While it’s relatively low-capacity, it’s got that “as fun to watch as it is to ride” thing going for it, which I always feel adds at least incremental value beyond the hourly throughput. This ride positions guests in barrels over a water-filled “tidal pool,” armed with hand-crank water guns. That allows riders to gently spray not just each other, but (in this case) ocean-carved rocks covered in starfish, anemone, and mussels, all set amongst the crates and fishing nets of the village.

Successfully spraying these animals would cause them to react by spinning, blooming, or even spraying back! With instrumentals of “Fathoms Below” and crashing waves that refract off of rocks and fill the tidal pool, I think this would be a really visual, fun, unique flat ride for the park. That’s good because while most Disney Parks suffer from not having enough “filler” rides, Walt Disney Studios was nearly all filler. So I’ve tried to be judicious in adding just enough flat rides to build capacity while not just having six Dumbos that are all clad slightly differently, you know?

Finally, crossing a bridge down to the beach, we arrive at the land’s E-Ticket dark ride. Eric’s seaside castle has already been proven to be a really nice and “theme-park-able” structure via Magic Kingdom’s New Fantasyland. Especially here, supported by a land that’s established this phenomenal kingdom of cypress and stone and wave-carved rock, we can do some really good stuff with a larger-scale version of the castle, set on its own raised harbor that spills into the canal. (And there, in the water, is the Rock! You know the one.)

The Castle and its surrounding caverns and cliffs house, of course, an ARIEL’S GROTTO meet-and-greet space, as well as our headliner for the land, THE VOYAGE OF THE LITTLE MERMAID. As I mentioned, a Little Mermaid dark ride was once designed specifically for Disneyland Paris’ Fantasyland. Thanks to a bonus feature on a DVD release of the film, you can actually enjoy a virtual ride through what could’ve been!

This version of the ride (which would’ve used a suspended ride system like Peter Pan’s Flight) got a lot right that unfortunately didn’t end up in the completely separate concept built fifteen years later in the U.S. To my thinking, one thing it did well is that its vehicles would be independently dispatched, allowing each scene to reset and unfold just for you (as opposed to the Omnimover ride system, which requires continuously-looping scenes that you passively drift through).

It also manages to include the “epic” aspects of The Little Mermaid – shipwrecks and storms and a high seas showdown with Ursula… Those are all elements omitted from the genteel singalong rides we ended up with, which really tell a Cliff Notes version of a ride that’s already a book report. (Even the never-built French version struggles with ordering given that it has to tell a linear story that goes back and forth between sea and land several times, leaving “Kiss the Girl” to happen after Ursula is defeated.)

All that is to say that our Voyage of the Little Mermaid gives us a chance to do this story justice in this medium. Neither the unbuilt French version nor the real American versions should serve as precedent here. I think a suspended ride system is a good idea, but I don’t want this to be a “Fantasyland-style” ride. I think this story deserves massive scenes, real Audio Animatronics, and hitting the real emotional beats, with the same budget and sincerity as in Tokyo’s Frozen ride.

Speaking of which, across our little channel of water resides the would-be anchor of Adventure World that we’ve sort of arranged our “timeline” around…

Chapter Eight: THE WORLD OF FROZEN

Background

After a decade of relative disappointment post-Renaissance, Disney Feature Animation found its footing again in a return to fairytale adaptations via 2009’s The Princess and the Frog. The start of the so-called “Disney Revival,” the film reignited a period of critical and commercial success (even if it also saw the end of hand-drawn animation). 2010’s Tangled certainly continued Disney’s winning streak, but both were eclipsed by the cosmic event that was 2013’s Frozen.

Frozen began its life as an adaptation of “The Snow Queen” by Hans Christian Andersen (writer of many fairytales and folk stories, not the least of which being “The Little Mermaid”). But the story’s episodic nature and its cold, aloof, barely-present antagonist had long left “The Snow Queen” in a category of tales that Hollywood had deemed “unfilmable.” For Disney’s part, legend says that the breakthrough came with the song “Let It Go,” which singlehandedly reshaped the bitter and sinister “Snow Queen” from early drafts into a reluctant anti-hero who didn’t want the icy powers she was born with, positioned opposite a sister who wants to break down her isolated sister’s emotional walls.

You can’t argue with the result. Among its countless accolades, Frozen took home two Academy Awards, two Grammys, and a Golden Globe Award. The film’s soundtrack topped the Billboard charts for thirteen weeks and was certified 8x Platinum, with “Let It Go” itself peaking at number five.

Frozen easily became the highest grossing animated film of all time, earning $1.28 billion. But more to the point, it was the kind of all-consuming cultural phenomenon that a modern Disney had arguably never experienced before… (Elsa, notably, rocketed from the 400s to the 88th most popular girl’s name in 2014). “Frozen Fever” was official. And no one seemed less prepared to meet the demand than Disney.

Actually, Disney had been fairly conservative in incorporating its high-earning films into theme parks, even during the boon of the Renaissance. It wasn’t until the 2010s, for example, that 1989’s The Little Mermaid or 1991’s Beauty and the Beast received dark rides in Disney Parks; Aladdin andThe Lion King still don’t have any! But Frozen changed that. Though it began with the customary studio-funded “meet-and-greets” meant to last only as long as the film’s promotional period, waits of up to six hours to meet Anna and Elsa continued well into 2014. As a result, Disney raced to expand retail and entertainment capacity around Frozen. In October 2014 – less than a year after the movie’s big screen debut – Disney shuttered the Lost Legend: Maelstrom in EPCOT’s Norway pavilion.

In its place would rise the Modern Marvel: Frozen Ever After. Repurposing the former ride’s layout and general show structure, Frozen Ever After would inherit a 1,000 foot long flume (including a backwards section), a 28-foot drop, and a somewhat brief sub-five-minute ride time. To its credit, the ride cleverly avoided the “book report” retelling that fans often criticize, instead sending us on a new adventure (but one where the film’s familiar songs can be reprised) – we arrive on “Winter In Summer Day” in the Scandinavian kingdom of Arendelle, set to celebrate the day when Anna’s love for her sister thawed an eternal winter.

Given the very quick infusion of Frozen in the parks (and the once-unthinkable intrusion of animated fare in the sacred World Showcase), there was a lot of #discourse around the move. Sure Frozen made a lot of money, but did it deserve a permanent ride? What if it didn’t have staying power? What if it didn’t “stick” and merely faded away?

In retrospect, it’s clear that Frozen did deserve a ride. Actually, what we can mostly agree on is that it probably deserved a better ride than even the best-case-scenario reskin of Maelstrom could’ve produced – a relatively short experience whose “shoe-horning” can occasionally be sensed.

Which is why it’s very strange that when given the chance to provide Frozen with proper, greenfield treatment (and without needing to conform to the limitations of an existing ’80s boat ride), Hong Kong Disneyland… didn’t. Instead, they built an impressive “Living Land” – “The World of Frozen” – whose elaborate mountain backdrop and gorgeous Arendellian façades conceal… a near-copy of the mediocre EPCOT boat ride. At least Hong Kong’s land also comes with a (weirdly, also sort of anticlimactic) family roller coaster called Wandering Oaken’s Sliding Sleighs.

Still, the choice to recreate the decade-old Frozen Ever After in Hong Kong was such an odd and disappointing move that one could only assume it was some weird aberration…

… Except that then Disneyland Paris did the same thing, but worse? Again, remember that “The World of Frozen” (here without the family coaster) is being positioned as the keystone of Disney Adventure World. Indeed, the park’s new name is official as of March 29, 2026 – the very day that World of Frozen opens (if not “completing” the park’s rebirth, then at least signaling it has passed the threshold between old and new). And all of the pomp and circumstance (and yes, the gorgeous land itself) crescendoes in yet a third copy of Frozen Ever After.

This is thee ride meant to make Adventure World – and indeed, Disneyland Paris as a whole – into a must-visit resort destination. Cynically, it’s just a sort of poignant display of a lack of overall ambition to say out loud that Walt Disney Studios’ €2 billion “rebirth” pivots around a third copy of a so-so dark ride that opened at EPCOT a dozen years earlier, which is now going to be positioned as the resort’s headliner.

But I digress. The point is, The World of Frozen is simply one of those realities we have to accept in our build-out. But it doesn’t mean we can’t be a little more creative in giving this property a more fitting treatment!

In part, we’re aided by 2019’s Frozen II. In it, Disney Animation Studios did something I appreciate a lot, which is to recognize that the kids transfixed and transformed by Frozen at six or seven years old would be more like twelve or thirteen by the time the sequel dropped, and thus allowed the property to “age up” with them. The result is that Frozen II is remarkably more moody, contemplative, and even heavy.

It sees our band of heroes head “into the unknown” as they pierce through the mists of an ancient forest following a mysterious voice calling out to Elsa. Along the way, each protagonist contends with the wanted and unwanted change of evolving relationships, maturing, and figuring out one’s place in the world. If the first film touched on isolation and sisterhood, then Frozen II‘s major themes would almost certainly be… loss, self-identity, and the evils of colonialism? It’s weird, but it clearly worked. The sequel bested the original, with a $1.4 billion box office haul that made it the highest grossing animated film of all time… and simultaneously greenlit the in-production Frozen III and IV.

So yes, Arendelle is a perfect subject for a “Living Land,” with its sweet cobblestone streets, marketplace vendors, Nordic architecture, and picturesque location on a fjord…

… But at least during my viewing of Frozen II, the thing on my mind at every step was just how “theme-park-able” the sequel is when it comes to the medium of a ride. In Frozen II, we see the makings of a ride laid bare: going “into the unknown,” through an enchanted autumnal woods, of elemental spirits, along a river, to find Ahtohallan – a glacier in which the deep history of the region is crystalized, and where Elsa finally has her Sailor Moon style “magical girl” transformation into her most powerful form. The first movie created a habitable world, but the second movie makes it “sing” in a theme park.

So if recreating “Frozen Ever After” wasn’t a bummer enough, the idea of sailing up to Elsa’s ice palace to hear Elsa sing “Let It Go” in the year of our lord twenty-twenty-six, after Frozen II gave us a perfect ride-ready environment, is sort of frustrating. Is it too wild to imagine that Hong Kong could’ve had Arendelle, and Paris the Forest of the Northuldra, in the style of Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley? Probably. But we have what we have, and so our Build-Out will start there and then do some… redrafting…