Disney Imagineers are always up for a challenge. They’ve proven this since the early days, back when the idea of the Happiest Place on Earth was simply a thought bubble in Uncle Walt’s head. Today’s Imagineers face a challenge that the first generation of attraction architects couldn’t imagine, though. On occasion, 21st century Imagineers must rebuild and repurpose existing rides and building spaces to craft original concepts.
The most famous recent example of this resides at the space once used for Maelstrom in the Norway Pavilion. This wonderful attraction dutifully entertained guests for more than 25 years. Sadly, it had one design flaw it couldn’t overcome. It didn’t feature either Elsa or Anna, the royal princesses of fictitious Arendelle, a place eerily similar in look and tone to Norway. Once Frozen became a global box office sensation, Maelstrom’s fate was sealed, even though it had done nothing wrong.
Image: Disney
In the wake of Disney’s announcement to close Maelstrom forever, fans of the ride commiserated as they expressed horror about the decision. Disney was killing an iconic part of Epcot’s World Showcase in favor of the flavor of the month, a decision they’ve since repeated with Guardians of the Galaxy. It was a business strategy, yes, but it also was a clever attempt to reinvigorate the World Showcase with a new attraction, something the company hadn’t done since 2007 with the Gran Fiesta Tour Starring The Three Caballeros.
Frozen Ever After is a bold new usage of the same space at the Norway Pavilion. It’s also considered the first step toward reimagining the entire World Showcase for the 21st century. Let’s take this opportunity to go Behind the Ride to identify all the tricks of the trade Imagineers employed on their latest signature ride. WARNING: This article will include spoilers about ride elements.
The Experience: Preventing the Maelstrom
The Trick: Killing two elements of the old attraction
While the Frozen license guaranteed instant popularity for the new ride, the conversion process came with its own difficulties. The primary challenge with Frozen Ever After was overcoming its limited space. The Maelstrom land didn’t offer many good options for expansion.
The first step was choosing what could stay and what could go. A couple of hard calls were required. The first of them was to kill a unique element of Maelstrom. Cast members walled off the part of the ride that opened to the outdoors. This bit of construction prevented onlookers from getting a view of the boats from outside the attraction. It also turned Frozen Ever After into a literal dark ride, unlike the occasionally bright portion of Maelstrom.
Disney execs also quickly decided to toss out the post-Maelstrom movie, The Spirit of Norway. Functioning as a virtual time capsule by this point, the 1988 film was more than 25 years old and ridiculously dated. The celebration of pure Norwegian vocations such as sailing, fishing, and ski jumping (no, really) seemed like an Americanized perspective of the country akin to having an Australia Pavilion with a restaurant named Shrimp on the Barbie. Amazingly, the Norwegian government had input on every phase of this video, and that’s why it’s so cheesy that it circles back to fun. Even so, its removal barely caused a blip on the Disney fanatic radar. With the most Maelstrom-ish elements in mothballs, Imagineers could reboot the ride parts that remained.
The Experience: Turning Maelstrom into Frozen Ever After
The Trick: Repurposing and altering existing track
The company used this additional space in unexpected ways. Frozen Ever After’s dimensions indicate that it has 964 feet of track, making it exactly the same length as Maelstrom. The placement of the track is different in some key locations, though. The loading section for Maelstrom is now where we see Olaf for the first time. Disney altered the previous unloading section so that it can handle loading duties as well. Changes like this seem trivial but are actually critical to the new version of the attraction.
Frozen Ever After features movie scenes. It’s actually blocked that way. By changing the loading area and adding some curved track where the Maelstrom version had nothing else, Olaf can sing “Do You Want to Build a Snowman,” setting the stage for the entirety of the attraction. Snow and ice are somewhat important to Elsa’s story.
Imagineers had to get creative with the space they had. Otherwise, Frozen Ever After would feel rushed and incomplete. When they repurposed the track, they maintained almost all of the paths. The additions are crucial to the overall experience, though. Similarly, Disney added a couple of show pieces to enhance the pageantry and highlight the grandiose parts of Frozen Ever After. Palatial gates part to reveal the two seminal moments: Let It Go and the reunion of the sisters in their happily ever after poses. These seem like small inclusions for casual observers, but they build a mood and a feeling of expectation/excitement for the rider. The new doors are a wonderful example of the little touches that differentiate Disney from its imitators.
The rest of the track is similar, as are the beloved high spots carried over from Maelstrom. The 28-foot drop is still at the end, and the boats still turn backwards at one point before righting the ship (literally) just before the end. What’s clever is that Disney leveraged these two moments to feature the biggest scene from Frozen, “Let It Go,” and the most adorable characters, the tiny snowmen from Frozen Fever. The physical changing of direction of the Norwegian vessel synchronizes with fantastic story elements. It’s another classic Disney touch.
The only flaw with using Maelstrom’s old track and most of its loading system is throughput. Maelstrom could service a thousand guests an hour, and that was plenty for a hidden gem in the back of the World Showcase. Like Gran Fiesta Tour, it rarely had long line queues. A guest could jump out of the hot sun and enjoy a Viking sailing excursion in minutes.
A ride with the Frozen theme is a different story. A thousand guests per hour for Frozen Ever After is substandard throughput. In combination with frequent malfunctions, the wait for this attraction is rarely less than an hour. Disney doesn’t expect that to change anytime soon, either. Ah well, what’s an hour’s wait to a guest when an epic rendition of Let It Go comes at the end?
The Experience: Recreating the characters of Frozen
The Trick: The best audio-animatronics to date
Quick, when’s the last time you remember Disney adding new Audio-Animatronics to a ride? You probably thought of Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, but that’s kind of a cheat. Disney repurposed stuff they already had (a recurring theme in this article). They did this rather than building new Dwarfs from scratch. The reason is simple. It’s much cheaper to update what you’ve already got. The Dwarfs you see on that attraction ARE improved, but they’re not new.
Frozen Ever After can claim something special. The ride offers vastly superior Audio-Animatronics to any we’ve seen previously. The reason why is that technology has advanced dramatically since the last time Imagineers redefined the art of animatronics. They invented the craft in the 1950s and 1960s, but they’ve never stopped trying to perfect it. In the 21st century, the practice has received a boost from a long-awaited source.
Walt Disney himself dreamt of a world of functional robots. He even had a friend named Garco, a robot who cohosted the Disneyland television series during the 1950s. While talking machines were virtually non-existent during Uncle Walt’s time, they’ve quickly become a part of everyday life in the smartphone era. Humans query artificial intelligence programs named Siri, Cortana, and Alexa millions of times each day. Meanwhile, experts in the field of robotics have worked to build machines that can mimic humans almost exactly. Imagineers have dabbled with robotics for decades now, and Frozen Ever After represents the culmination of their research.
The Audio-Animatronics for the denizens of Arendelle combine two techniques at once. The realistic faces of Anna, Elsa, and the gang are a product of projection. Thanks to bitmap projection, Imagineers can replicate features from Disney films (or anything else) onto uneven surfaces such as Cinderella Castle or Arendelle’s royalty. The practice is the same. When you look at Olaf from any angle, his face will appear nearly identical to his CGI representation in Frozen. Thanks to this kind of asymmetrical CGI, audiences quickly buy into the premise that their Viking boat has transported them to the faraway land where Anna and Elsa are the benevolent rulers.
While you appreciate the faces, Disney moves the bodies thanks to state-of-the-art robotics. Frozen Ever After’s characters claim historically unprecedented movement abilities. The mechanical parts of the Audio-Animatronics have a flow that is almost perfectly realistic…or at least as realistic as there can be for a living snowman. When Anna and Elsa hold hands at the end of the ride, any sense of artificiality is absent from the proceedings. That’s in stark contrast to classic Audio-Animatronics from even just a few years ago such as Captain Jack Sparrow on Pirates of the Caribbean. At this moment, Frozen Ever After has the best Audio-Animatronics ever built. But that target is always moving at Disney theme parks.
The Experience: Let It Go and other huge payoffs
The Trick: Master of synchronization and storytelling structure
One other element of the ride track required fundamental change. Maelstrom told an engaging story of Norwegian fables, including an ill-behaved troll. Frozen Ever After tells a story about the happily ever after that two sisters enjoy in the wake of the events of Frozen (and Frozen Fever). The way that Maelstrom was blocked, timing was important. Otherwise, riders would miss some of the corresponding audio. The way that Frozen Ever After works, timing is EVERYTHING.
As previously mentioned, Imagineers tell the Frozen story in blocks. Think of them as scenes akin to a movie. The introductory scene is especially thematic. A creature made of ice sings, “Do you want to build a snowman?” It sets the tone for a chilly trip through the mountains of Arendelle. Then, you meet trolls, but these are not the ones from Maelstrom. They’re kindly creatures who helped to raise Kristoff back in the day. Later, you get to watch Kristoff sing a duet with his beloved, Anna. Along the way, you meet a moose who has pulled a Flick from A Christmas Story. His tongue stretches helplessly against an icy pole. All of these scenes recreate popular moments from the movie in a more realistic way than ever before at a Disney theme park. Frozen Ever After is a (successful) attempt to place the rider in the movie for a few minutes.
The signature moment is exactly what you’d expect, too. Earlier in the ride, guests approach an ice castle, heightening the anticipation for the seminal moment. Once the vessel barges through the aforementioned palatial gates, they see Elsa for the first time. She immediately bursts into song. You know the one.
Even though “Let It Go” isn’t precisely the halfway point of the ride, it still feels like that’s the intent. The moments prior to “Let It Go” are an introduction to the beloved characters of Frozen. After Elsa, the boat sails backwards down an icy mountain river. The experience is almost as if Disney is letting the rider catch their breath after the dazzling rendition of the iconic song.
The scene with the performance of “Let It Go” is the highlight of Frozen Ever After. It’s probably also the pitch that sold Disney execs on the idea of rebooting Maelstrom. The musical recreation of this moment includes amazing staging. As the boat enters the area, Elsa dominates the point of view, but the room offers plenty more to enjoy. Adjoining projections on side walls emphasize the icy nature of Elsa’s castle. Fittingly, frozen fractals are all around as the ship approaches the stunning Snow Queen.
The audio ascends as Idina Menzel’s inimitable voice tears through the lyrics of the best Disney movie song of the 21st century (if not ever). This is Elsa’s moment, and Imagineers extended it as much as they could. The trip down the mountain includes images of ice, snowflakes, and Elsa. They’re little more than an excuse to extend the song as much as possible during a ride that’s exactly five minutes. And that brings us back to the timing.
Imagine how the showpiece of “Let It Go” would seem if the timing were inexact. Since Frozen Ever After features several musical performances, the boats have to “sail” to the correct spot at the right moment. There’s no give here like Imagineers had with Maelstrom. For this reason, the reason why Disney required almost two years to build Frozen Ever After is that they had to modify the tracks. Yes, they had the apparatus in place, but they had to update it so that the timing of each boat was precise to the microsecond. That’s also one of the main reasons why the attraction breaks down so often. Anything that significantly disrupts the timing of a Viking boat triggers a shutdown. It’s a small price to pay to enjoy the majesty of the center stage rendition of “Let It Go,” though.
Finally, here’s one miscellaneous note for you lovers of Maelstrom. Disney cast members felt a bit guilty about shuttering such a beloved ride. They felt it had nobly represented the great nation of Norway for many years and wanted to honor it. When they constructed the accompanying Arendelle Sommerhus, Imagineers removed the rune stones from Maelstrom and placed them at the entrance to the new area.
