The rat is out of the bag, and it’s official. In 2021 – Walt Disney World’s 50th Anniversary year – Disney will continue its multi-year transformation of Epcot with yet another anchor attraction: Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure. In this frantic new family ride, Disney promises that “guests will be able to shrink to Remy’s size and scurry to safety in a dazzling chase across a kitchen with the sights, sounds and smells of Gusteau’s legendary Parisian restaurant.”
But of course, as Imagineering fans know, this controversial Epcot adventure isn’t exactly an Orlando exclusive… In fact, the newest headlining attraction headed for the France pavilion at World Showcase is already thrilling riders in the real France, where Ratatouille: L’Aventure Totalement Toquée de Rémy literally helped save Disney’s most pathetic theme park…
Image: Disney / Pixar
To our count, that makes this Disney•Pixar E-Ticket a pivot point for two of Disney’s theme parks (reshaping the ongoing revitalization plans at each), and that’s all the evidence we need that the rat-sized adventure belongs in our growing library of MODERN MARVELS: in-depth stories tracing the real-life histories of the best rides on Earth, like Indiana Jones Adventure, Revenge of the Mummy, The Enchanted Tiki Room, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and so many more.
Ready to venture into the streets of Paris to explore the origin story, experience, and future of this Epcot-bound attraction? Let’s start at the beginning…
Parisian pitfalls
Click and expand for a much larger and more detailed view. Image: Disney
When the new EuroDisneyland opened in 1992, Europeans indicated that there was a fundamental flaw with the French park: that it was located in France. The Parisian press famously launched a media blitz against the “cultural Chernobyl,” decrying the park as a piece of American imperialism; a corporate invasion akin to installing a McDonald’s atop the Eiffel Tower.
Disney famously combated that perception by remaking the very-American concept of Disneyland into a romantic, literary park more fit for French audiences. There, Imagineers tweaked tried-and-true attractions to layer sensational stories decadent drama, creating fellow Modern Marvels: Phantom Manor and Space Mountain: De la Terre á la Lune, perfectly appealing to European taste.
Image: Disney
Still, the French resort that was meant to mark the height of Michael Eisner’s tenure as CEO instead crashed-and-burned. Despite Disneyland Paris being among the most beautiful Disney Parks on Earth, the overbuilt resort limped its way through its first decade (and even today struggled to balance its finances). But if Disneyland Paris was slow to grow in its first ten years, things were about to get a lot worse…
Box-office bomb
Make no mistake – Disney has endured its fair share of box office bombs over the company’s history. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Just ask the teams behind John Carter, Mars Needs Moms, The Country Bears, The Black Cauldron, or The Lone Ranger. Of course, those film flops have something in common. While they may amount to pop culture punchlines and represent massive fiscal year write-offs, they are – by their nature – impermanent. Flops come and go, migrating to DVD bargain bins and streaming services where they can recoup some of their cost, before disappearing from pop culture altogether.
But on the rare occasion that Disney misses the mark with one of its theme parks, time doesn’t cover the wound; it makes it worse.
Image: Disney
Such is the case with the second theme park added to Disneyland Paris. Just imagine: the financial failure of the resort made Michael Eisner nervous about big projects, and in the wake of Paris’ opening, budgets were slashed and projects were cancelled across Disney Parks for decades… including cutting the budget big time for the second park Disney was contractually required to build in Paris… Oops…
So reviled, low budget, and under built was the French resort’s second gate, it earned its own in-depth feature, Declassified Disaster: Walt Disney Studios Park that includes a walk-through of the pathetic park as it was when it opened in 2002.
Born in the wrong era
Click and expand for a larger and more detailed view. Image: Disney
What can we say about Walt Disney Studios Park? Clocking in at about 30 acres (compared to next door Disneyland Paris’ 90 acres), the miniscule movie park opened with three (yes, three) rides – a pointless “studio tram tour,” Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster, and a magic carpet-themed spinner. That’s it.
You can imagine that a starved, under-built, low-budget second gate was the last thing that the still-strangled Disneyland Paris needed… Because now, any money the resort could muster up for improvements and expansions would have to go to the Studios park, leading to a decade of neglect for Disneyland Paris itself…
Image: Disney, via wdsfans.com
And indeed, in the ensuing years, the tiny park was “plussed” with attractions like the Crush’s Coaster indoor family ride, a version of The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, a Toy Story Land of family flat rides, and new shows. But here’s the problem: each new attraction – while it may have drawn in more crowds – was like a Band-Aid on a broken bone; a dozen new E-Ticket attractions couldn’t really fix Walt Disney Studios Park.
So what was really wrong with it? A glut of “movie studio” themed parks had cropped up across the world in the ‘90s (led by Disney’s own Studio park in Orlando, then Universal Studios Florida). Those parks and their sisters are marked not by detailed, themed “lands” or immersive storytelling, but by their big, beige studio “soundstages,” mished-mashed intellectual properties, and flat, empty “façades” meant to make guests feel as if they’re on a backlot. In such “studio” parks, The Muppets and Star Wars can be neighbors across a concrete industrial plaza with designers able to shrug and say, “Why not? It’s a movie studio!”
By time Walt Disney Studios Park opened in 2002, the age of the “studio” park was largely over… And Disney should’ve known that, since they’re the ones who ended it!
Image: Disney
After all, it was Disney’s Animal Kingdom (opened in 1998) that kicked off the new era of theme parks, with Universal’s Islands of Adventure (1999) and Tokyo DisneySea (2001) following close behind, with the Wizarding World of Harry Potter (2009) cementing that new era. This new set of parks set guests down inside of totally immersive, cinematic, all-surrounding worlds, like Harambe at Animal Kingdom or The Lost Continent at Islands of Adventure. Suddenly, bland, beige, industrial, concrete “studio” parks looked a lot different in the eyes of the public… they were low-budget cop-outs…
So while Crush’s Coaster and Toy Story Land and Tower of Terror might’ve given the park much-needed attractions and much-needed capacity, they failed to solve the real problem… they failed to begin the park’s transformation away from the “studio” style…
But Disney had just the film to change that… Read on…
Ratatouille
Ratatouille is a stewed vegetable dish originating in Nice, France, comprised of onions, zucchini, eggplant, peppers, fennel, basil, and sautéed garlic cooked together with a tomato base.
Image: Disney / Pixar
Until 2007, that is, when it was redefined in pop culture thanks to the eponymous Disney•Pixar film. That animated feature produced and directed by Brad Bird (The Incredibles and Tomorrowland) follows the exploits within Gusteau’s – a fancy French bistro whose recently deceased namesake just so happens to have inspired a rat named Remy to become a chef himself. Needless to say, rats aren’t exactly welcome in fancy French bistros, leading to Remy’s team-up with a young garbage boy / wannabe-chef named Linguini.
Though – arguably – Ratatouille hasn’t been as enduring in pop culture or in Disney’s long game strategy as Cars, Monsters Inc., Toy Story or Nemo, the film was nonetheless yet another clever addition to Pixar’s nearly-uninterrupted pattern of releasing top-notch, unexpected animated films that feel like they exist outside of any pre-existing formula or familiar plot.
Image: Disney / Pixar
Oh, and in France, the film broke records as the highest grossing animated film ever. Viewers, the press, and – most surprisingly – prominent French chefs gushed over the film…
And like most of Pixar’s portfolio, Ratatouille earned nearly perfect critical reception, was nominated for five Academy Awards (winning one – Best Animated Feature), and made $650 million at the box office against a $150 million budget.
And that’s when rumors began to swirl. Insiders said that Walt Disney Studios Park would soon expand its “Toon Studios” area (home to Crush’s Coaster, Magic Carpets of Agrabah, and a Cars themed family spinner ride) with a Ratatouille attraction… But for Imagineers, that wasn’t enough.
Bringing it together
In March 2013 – about six years after the film’s debut – it was official. Walt Disney Studios would indeed add a new attraction themed to the 2007 film – Ratatouille: L’Aventure Totalement Toquée de Rémy. (It’s a pun! Get it? No? In French, “toque” means “crazy,” but also is the name of a chef’s hat.)
Ratatouille would be a true headlining dark ride that would instantly rocket to the top of the park’s billing. And, as concept art revealed, the new anchor attraction would use some superb technologies to do it.
First of all, Ratatouille would take the core concept of Universal’s legendary Modern Marvel: The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man, physically whisking guests through a showbuilding from scene to scene, with physical sets blending into screens. The animation on those screens would “squinch” (a term developed by Spider-Man’s designers), with the perspective adjusting as vehicles move past, truly making the screens into “windows” to expand the world.
Image: Disney
But rather than Universal’s patented “SCOOP” ride vehicles, guests in Paris would instead be seated in circular “Ratmobiles,” designed to resemble toy rats (a curious choice, for sure) with no track to guide them! Indeed, Ratatouille uses Disney’s LPS (that’s local positioning system as opposed to global) ride system to dispatch four vehicles at a time into the ride where they can turn, reverse, and even move around one another to diverge down separate paths. You’ll find the same system in use on another Modern Marvel: Mystic Manor at Hong Kong Disneyland, as well as its original uses at Tokyo Disneyland (Pooh’s Hunny Hunt) and Tokyo DisneySea (Aquatopia).
Naturally, the ride also includes a custom score by Michael Giacchino (who also scored The Incredibles, Alias, LOST, Up, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Disneyland’s own Space Mountain and the Incredicoaster).
Image: Disney / Pixar
But perhaps even more telling than what it is is what the new Ratatouille attraction is not. It is not, for example, placed on a large studio “soundstage.” Instead, a brand new cul-de-sac off of Toon Studio would lead to a sub-area themed to a Parisian courtyard… And that’s where our adventure begins… Ready to see what Epcot’s newest E-Ticket has in store? If you’d rather be surprised, this is your chance to skip to the last page…
Ratatouille: L’Aventure
Image: Disney
Passing through the entrance to Ratatouille, guests find themselves queuing along the romantic rooftops of Paris at night, beneath the glowing incandescent sign advertising Gusteau’s. Occasionally, Chef Gusteau himself comes to life, speaking to guests and welcoming them to the City of Lights. “So many hungry faces! You’ve come to the right place. Everyone knows the best food in the world is made here in Paris, and tonight ze toast of ze town, Chef Remy, will prepare for you a culinary masterpiece!”
Rounding the corner, guests emerge among the same rooftops, but now they appear much, much larger. That’s because we’ve been ceremoniously “shrunk” down to the size of a rat for our culinary journey, as from the darkness emerge our “Ratmobiles.” Seating six guests in each, these simplified rats set out among the rooftops where our adventure begins…
As always, the best way to tell the tale is with an on-ride video captured of the ride, from our friends at SoCal Attractions 360 (whose videos are shot with special low-light cameras, often showing more than the human eye does in person!). If you don’t mind spoilers about the new experience soon to come to Epcot, this is your chance to see it before its U.S. debut…
As you can see, Ratatouille is a whimsical, scurrying dark ride that’s grand in scale and execution. Cleverly, it’s also Disney’s first attempt at “fusing” its fan-favorite trackless dark ride a la Mystic Manor with the screen-based wow-factor of Universal’s Spider-Man.
To be clear, Ratatouille never reaches the heights of either, and while Disney Imagineers likely envisioned this as a resort-defining E-Ticket, calmer heads would probably rank Ratatouille as a D-Ticket despite its pomp and circumstance and the technology it employs. Put another way, it’s almost as if Ratatouille is the modern equivalent of a Fantasyland dark ride in terms of its function; it just happens to be by way of much larger sets and much more current technology.
(A likely culprit? While screens act as “windows” on Spider-Man by extending physical sets, they’re used more like “windshields” on Ratatouille, responsible for the frantic “thrill” of scurrying around on the floor… an illusion that’s broken when your peripheral vision notices that the physical sets and floor around you are also coming along for the ride. The “Ratmobiles” also lack the motion simulating capabilities of Spider-Man, simply rumbling and rotating.)
Image: Nicolas Bailly, Flickr
However, in true Disney fashion, it’s the physical sets and spectacular scale of the project that’s most unbelievable, with new props and effects to notice each time. (Did you notice the moving cart wheels when the Ratmobiles scurry under the moving cart? Linguini lifting the cart’s red velvet skirt?)
But this is only half the story… On the next page, we’ll explore the way that this sensational family attraction is headed stateside where it’s set to shift another park’s direction. Read on…
Image: Disney
Every bit as beautiful as Epcot’s France pavilion, the courtyard outside of Ratatouille: L’Aventure Totalement Toquée de Rémy really ought to have been designated a “land” in and of itself. Though the Ratatouille attraction is the star, you’ll also find shops and a restaurant perfectly situated along the lifelike streetscape. In short, it’s the kind of area you’d like to visit, explore, and spend time in – arguably, the first such area for Walt Disney Studios Park.
That means that Ratatouille: L’Aventure not only gave the park an exclusive attraction worth talking about; it also made a very clear distinction: going forward, this park will shed its original concept and instead invite you to step into your favorite Disney and Pixar films!
For Walt Disney Studios, that is perhaps the most spectacular news yet…!
For Epcot, the same proclamation is a little more worrying…
World Showcase?
Image: Disney
If you ask most Disney Parks fans what Epcot is, you’ll need to endure a few moments of silence before they can come up with a satisfactory answer. Here’s our best shot: An evolution of an abandoned plan to build a functional, experimental, progressive city in Central Florida, EPCOT Center instead opened in 1982 as a “permanent World’s Fair” theme park purposefully excluding Disney characters and instead featuring two “realms” – one dedicated to futurism / technology and the other to globalism / culture – each populated by large “pavilions” (centered around areas of industry and international countries, respectively). Each pavilion contains attractions, restaurants, and retail complementing the pavilion’s themes, with those offerings shifting radically over the decades from educational dark rides through industry to character-centered experiences and thrill rides loosely connected to the park’s original concepts. Phew!
There’s no park on Earth with as many Lost Legends as Epcot, with (quite literally) every single pavilion of Future World having its own in-depth feature as part of that collection.
Image: Disney
Less debated is the park’s southern half – World Showcase.
In fact, even as characters “invaded” Epcot’s Future World beginning in the early 2000s, fans tended to have less worry about World Showcase and its cultural pavilions dedicated to Mexico, China, the U.K., Norway, Canada, and a host of other countries. Though Disney had strategically placed character meet-and-greets in the country most closely resembling their own (for example, Aladdin in Morocco), surely World Showcase was immune from full-blown character overlays…
Image: Disney
Except that in 2014 – just as Ratatouille: L’Aventure was opening in Paris – Disney announced that Epcot’s Norway pavilion would bid farewell to its Lost Legend: Maelstrom. That sailing dark ride through the myths, legends, and history of Norway was, by that point, a retro-nostalgic walk-on through non sequitor scenes, emptying into an ‘80s film about Norwegian industry… World Showcase 101, really. So maybe it was time to freshen up the ride anyway.
But Disney’s 2013 juggernaut film Frozen isn’t what fans had in mind.
Image: Disney
When the Modern Marvel: Frozen Ever After opened in Maelstrom’s place in 2016, most fans found the opening bittersweet. A spectacular attraction in its own right, there’s simply something odd about Frozen – set in the Scandinavian-inspired, but decidedly fictional kingdom of Arendelle – becoming the focus of the Norway pavilion… Not to mention the feeling fans had that Frozen was exhaustingly overplayed and yet undervalued by Disney executives, deserving much more than a retrofit of the existing, 4-minute Maelstrom – admittedly, a rush job to fit Frozen into the parks as quickly as possible.
It’s for those reasons that we frankly asked way back in those in-depth features, are fans really upset about characters coming to World Showcase? Or are they specifically disappointed that Frozen came, and in the form it did? We even specifically wondered aloud, would fans be as fatalistic if the (then-new, shiny, and technological) Ratatouille-themed ride from Disneyland Paris were duplicated at World Showcase…?
Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure
Image: Disney / Pixar
On July 15, 2017, we found out. At Disney’s semi-annual D23 conference, the announcement was made that the Ratatouille ride would indeed become the second big-budget character attraction at World Showcase – just one of a slew of IP-rides on the docket for Epcot leading up to Disney World’s 50th Anniversary in 2021. There, the ride will be named Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure (which is somewhat nonsensical when you think about it… We prefer the long-rumored Ratatouille: Kitchen Calamity name as indicated on official artwork below, but which was obviously passed over).
And to answer our earlier, experimental question… no, most fans don’t seem to be enraged about the Ratatouille ride. While some will doubtlessly chalk that up to Disney fans increasingly “cutting their losses” with Epcot and agreeing to disagree with its current direction, we ask: Why should they be enraged?
Image: Disney
The ride is being built from scratch in a brand new showbuilding that will be added onto the existing France pavilion. “No Epcot classics were harmed in the making of this attraction,” so how could Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure be anything but a net gain? If you’d prefer characters had never come to Epcot, it’ll be easy enough to walk past this attraction not even knowing it’s there.
It’s expected that Epcot’s version of the ride will be a carbon copy of France’s but for being entirely in English, and the typical kind of “live-and-learn” improvements such clones always include. (For example, the trackless vehicles are known to have worn groves into the attraction’s flooring in Paris, frazzling computers and requiring an undesirable refurbishment and total floor replacement; naturally, Epcot’s version will have accounted for that, as well as higher resolution, better projectors, and other technological improvements that such screen-based rides require.)
Though construction is already well underway in Epcot’s France pavilion, insiders are projecting the ride’s opening for late spring, 2020. That would help draw guests to the resort rather than putting off their visit for the Anniversary celebrations in 2021, when Epcot’s new Guardians of the Galaxy roller coaster and Magic Kingdom’s Modern Marvel: TRON Lightcycle Power Run are likely to be the heavy-hitters.
Paris Precedent
Image: Disney / Pixar
Though fans will likely debate the merit of adding characters to Epcot for the rest of the park’s lifetime (or theirs), at least we can all agree that if characters are going to make their way into World Showcase, this is how it should be done: in spectacular E-Ticket dark rides that at least pay homage to the cultures and stories of the countries they’re meant to celebrate. (Which, by the way, is why we sure hope that if a Mary Poppins attraction does come to the U.K. pavilion, it’s as one of those spectacular dark rides rather than the current rumor that Parks chairman Bob Chapek would much prefer a Dumbo-style carnival spinner ride themed to the film be plopped down in the pavilion… all too believable given the projects he’s overseen.)
In some ways, it’s funny to think that Future World lost so many of its classic, lengthy, grand dark rides (having been systematically replaced by technological thrills like Test Track, Soarin’, Mission: SPACE, and Guardians of the Galaxy) and that now we’re seeing classic, lengthy, grand dark rides created for World Showcase instead!
Image: Disney / Pixar
Like the movie Ratatouille, we don’t expect Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure to radically alter Walt Disney World in the same way that the resort’s 2021 additions are meant to. It’s likely that – like the film that inspired it – Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure will spend a year as the talk-of-the-town, and then become a familiar, comfortable, beloved staple of Epcot rather than a resort-defining anchor. That’s probably exactly what Epcot and World Showcase need!
Ratatouille set Walt Disney Studios Park on a new course, reorienting the ship and pointing it toward immersive, cinematic lands that let guests step into Disney and Pixar films rather than into beige soundstages.
Ratatouille is set to change the course of Epcot’s World Showcase, too… And given that it’s going to be a spectacular, technological, heartwarming, and fun family attraction, we’re ready to start armchair Imagineering how World Showcase’s other pavilions could host spectacularly-scaled dark rides of their own…
Image: Disney / Pixar
If you enjoyed our in-depth look into the Ratatouille ride that’ll soon be opening at Epcot, be sure to read our Disney•Pixarland feature on the history of Pixar rides in Disney Parks, or make the jump to our Legends Library packed with other Modern Marvels as well as the in-depth stories of closed classics and never-built Possibilitylands that could’ve changed Disney Parks forever… Then, use the comments below to let us know: is Ratatouille a step in the wrong direction for Epcot and World Showcase? Or is it exciting evidence that the inevitable character invasion of Epcot might at least bring some great E-Tickets to the park?
