You don’t have to know much about Disney Parks history to know the story of Disney California Adventure. Opened in 2001, this “next generation” Disney Park placed just opposite the original Disneyland fell well short of matching its older sister in esteem and attendance. In fact, “DCA 1.0” is remembered as a park with few rides, almost nothing for families, and a serious attitude problem.
The story of Disney’s California (mis)adventure is one we told in an epic two-part special feature; a multi-decade tale of transformation from a park that was “too much California, not enough Disney” to one with precisely the opposite problem. In its so-called “DCA 3.0” phase, the park has been crammed (sometimes inelegantly) with Disney + Pixar + Marvel. Fans have come to expect the unexpected as Imagineers just can’t seem to stop tinkering with California Adventure.
Now, a final space in the park remaining from its opening day is officially under the knife to receive its mandated IP overlay. Like Pixar Pier before it, some fans suggest that this transformation amounts to a “label slap” – a stickered-on franchise tie-in; an IP for the sake of having an IP; corporate synergy that ultimately signifies nothing… So after we walk through the details of this quickly-assembling project together, tell us in the comments below – do you think Disney California Adventure’s San Fransokyo Square is a plus, a minus, or something in between?
Big Hero 6
It all started when Disney purchased Marvel in 2009 for $4 billion (a sum that we can all agree in retrospect was money well spent). As part of the transaction, Disney inherited well over 7,000 characters that inhabit the panels of Marvel’s comic book empire, and CEO Bob Iger reportedly encouraged divisions across the company to dig deep into the archives and find ways to use them. That’s when director Don Hall stumbled on a relatively young and obscure series that he liked the name of: Big Hero 6.
Only loosely based on its comic book origin, Disney’s Big Hero 6 follows the adventures of a young tech whiz kid named Hiro Hamada and his inflatable “healthcare companion” robot Baymax as they assemble a team of tech-powered teen heroes to take on a masked, nanobot-wielding villain. The film debuted in 2014 to both commercial success and critical acclaim – eventually winning the Best Animated Feature Academy Award.
But beyond its characters and its anime-influenced style, one of the greatest triumphs of Big Hero 6 was the world it’s set in: San Fransokyo.
San Fransokyo
In 1906, the city of San Francisco was struck by a cataclysmic earthquake. (That’s true; it’s remembered as one of the most disastrous geological events in recorded human history.) In the world of Big Hero 6, though, that earthquake was a nexus event yielding a brighter future.
After all, the mythology of Big Hero 6 tells us that it was San Francisco’s Japanese immigrant community that stepped up in the wake of that earthquake, integrating Eastern architectural methods to bring seismic stability to a reborn city. The result is that in this alternate universe, San Francisco was officially renamed San Fransokyo as both a tribute to the Asian citizens who saved the city and to symbolize the influence and connection between America and Japan.
When we see San Fransokyo in Big Hero 6, it’s perhaps in a “near-future” as opposed to our own world… And in this multiverse, well over a century after the earthquake, we see a modern, technological metropolis born of two worlds. San Fransokyo is a breathtaking city retaining the eclectic, nautical, clapboard, Victorian influence of Europe and the wood, hip-and-gable roofs, shoji doors, and torii gates of Asia.
This is a true pan-Pacific port; one rooted in the past, but set in the future. Wind turbines float over the city, tethered to skyscrapers; a multiversal variant of the Golden Gate Bridge instead adorns the 8,000-foot-long crossing with torii gates; high-tech video screens and efficient mass transit carry young students to the glass and steel campus of the San Fransokyo Institute of Technology while tourists hop aboard Asian-style streetcars.
San Fransokyo is a vivid, colorful, technological world; a fast-paced, epic city of high-tech wonders, skyscrapers, and authentic Asian influence. It’s rich, historic, futuristic, and cultural. It’s also (and this is true!) set in California. Which begs the question, why would anyone object to seeing San Fransokyo brought to life in California Adventure?!
But in this case, naysayers may have some reason to be disappointed… Read on…
Disney Parks fans have spent the last decade complaining that California Adventure has become “too much Disney, not enough California.” And yet here – with Big Hero 6 – seems to reside the answer! San Fransokyo is distinctly Disney, and authentically Californian insomuch as the setting (like the best of “DCA 2.0”) has real history and actual culture behind it while also being timeless, filled with character, and like a great environment to explore.
Put simply: San Fransokyo feels immensely “theme-park-able,” and its inclusion in California Adventure sort of feels like a no-brainer! A from-scratch theme park interpretation of the land would even bring to life real Californian landmarks – like the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco’s iconic street cars, and the Ferry Building of the Embarcadero – just re-stylized to fit this sci-fi superhero fantasy world. So why aren’t people happy? Well… In this case, it seems like fans are fairly frustrated not by the content, but by the delivery…
The idea of a San Fransokyo land at Disney California Adventure may conjure images of an entire “Living Land” of cross-streets, wharfs, trolleys, dining halls, and docks; a bustling cityscape to serve as a “Tomorrowland” for the park, anchored by a thrilling E-Ticket ride where you take the skies alongside the Big Hero 6 team to fight a comic-book-inspired kaiju that’s arisen from the Pacific.
But… nope.
Reimagining Pacific Wharf
The long and short of it is that the name “San Fransokyo” is merely being added to one of the park’s existing spaces – Pacific Wharf. Inspired by San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf and the waterfront of Monterey, Pacific Wharf is a rare, nearly untouched remnant of “DCA 1.0.” But despite that, there’s nothing really wrong with it.
Pacific Wharf is what you might call a “gentle but functional” section of the park, essentially made up of a row of wharf-style buildings set against a rocky inlet of the park’s Paradise Bay. Though it was upgraded from a sub-section of the park’s all-encompassing “Golden State” land to full, standalone land status in 2012, Pacific Wharf is – for lack of a better term – a well-dressed food court. Three quick service eateries share its large, open eating space.
The land contains just two “attractions” (in the loosest terms): a Ghirardelli chocolate retail space and a genuine Boudin sourdough bread bakery that guests can walk through, learning the process of how sourdough is baked (complete with a sample). There are no rides in the land, and no space to add any. (Pacific Wharf is entirely surrounded by Cars Land, Pixar Pier, and the park’s Performance Corridor.)
So how exactly will Pacific Wharf magically become a theme park version of Big Hero 6′s dynamic, technological, futuristic sci-fi superhero metropolis with a rich invented history all its own? Well…
The Problem
“San Fransokyo” will come to life at Disney California Adventure by, essentially, changing some of the Fisherman’s Wharf painted billboards to Japanese, replacing a beer truck with an outdoor Baymax meet-and-greet, and stringing Asian paper lanterns across the food court. That may sound cynical, but frankly, it’s about all Disney can do to turn this otherwise pleasant corner of the park into a cartoon-ified, IP tie-in.
Oh, and the transformation will also turn the existing iron bridge into Pacific Wharf into a poor man’s proxy for the Asian-influenced version of the Golden Gate Bridge from the film, basically by just building religious Torii gates over the existing bridge and painting the whole thing “International orange”.
(As “DCA 1.0” historians will tell you, that will make this the park’s second squashed-and-stretched, cartoon-proportioned version of the Golden Gate Bridge… A weirdly fitting landmark for the “3.0” era and its return to comic book aesthetic.)
At best, we can see calling this transformation “cute but dumb” – an oddly common refrain for Disney California Adventure’s most recent wave of quick, low-cost IP overlays. Much of the land won’t change at all, including – at least for now – its eateries. (It seems inevitable that its Asian, Mexican, and Deli restaurant will be renamed for “in-universe” eateries in Big Hero 6 like Noodle Burger and Lucky Cat Cafe, but so far that hasn’t been indicated.)
At worst, you might accuse the land of being downright unnecessary; a “label slap” about as authentic, essential, and thoughtfully integrated as Frozen diapers, Moana cereal, or an Inside Out carnival ride. You can look at the issue both ways and still wonder what the point is: Does Pacific Wharf need an IP? And is the Big Hero 6 franchise really served by having its name applied to Pacific Wharf?
And for that matter, does even a redecorated Pacific Wharf really serve as a stand-in for San Fransokyo? Doesn’t the relatively simple re-skin serve as a “brand withdrawal” from Big Hero 6? After all, this is not the city we saw in the film; nothing close. (Disney did smartly edit the land’s name from “San Fransokyo” to “San Fransokyo Square” re-opening, which at least suggests that this is just one small part of the city, suggesting that the actual downtown we saw on screen must exist just beyond the wharf district we can visit.)
That leaves San Fransokyo Square an unusual project… but frankly, not an unexpected one. The era of “DCA 3.0” is upon us, leaving the park with lands that recall historic, idealized places and times from the Golden State’s history, but where the rides inside those lands are exclusively themed to The Little Mermaid, Monsters Inc., Spider-Man, Cars, The Incredibles, Guardians of the Galaxy, and more…
At least Big Hero 6 is a film that’s actually set in California, and that even leans into Californian history and landmarks! But is this the way to bring this film to life? Would you say that California Adventure’s San Fransokyo Square is shaping up to be a plus, a minus, or something in between?
