November 26, 2025, 6:22 PM ·
During my tour of the new projects at Disneyland Paris last week, Walt Disney Imagineering invited me to be part of a small group that met with two of the design leaders on these projects.Walt Disney Studios Park opened as Disneyland Paris’ second gate in 2002. It was one of three parks opened in the 2000s that several company sources now concede did not live up to Disney’s established creative standards, with the others being Disney California Adventure and Hong Kong Disneyland. That gap was made even more glaring by the creative success of the fourth new Disney park in that decade – Tokyo DisneySea. Over the years, Disney has worked to improve these parks, with projects such as Cars Land and Buena Vista Street in California, and Mystic Point and the Castle of Magical Dreams in Hong Kong. Now, it’s Walt Disney Studios Park’s turn, with its impending transformation into Disney Adventure World.I wrote earlier this week about these changes in What to expect in Disney’s World of Frozen and Adventure Way. But I want you to hear directly from the Imagineers who helped lead and design these projects, as well.In this video, you will hear from Michel den Dulk, Vice President, Portfolio Executive Creative Director, Walt Disney Imagineering Paris, and Kyle Laughlin, Senior Vice President, Research & Development, Technology & Engineering, Walt Disney Imagineering.Here is an edited transcript of highlights from their talk.On reimagining Walt Disney Studios ParkMichel: We had a great opportunity here to create something that I think is unique to Disneyland Paris. We have what I consider the most beautiful castle park that we ever designed. And next to that, we had a much smaller effort. Now we’re finally walking into the next chapter and building on this park and creating something that finally can stand on its own legs and compete.It was a wonderful opportunity to create new areas, new worlds. We partly thought about the European audience, so creating spaces that are green, that are lush, that there’s a breathing space, some decompression spaces in there. And you see that primarily in the Adventure Way. It has architecture that’s an elements that are inspired by our films, but you’re not stepping into the worlds of these films in this area. We tried to create an area of its own, inspired by old world fairs. There’s architecture in there, and it’s called eclecticism. It’s an architectural movement early 1900s where they experimented with styles. You can see that in the buildings that we designed that I think give it a really unique styling. Every building and facility in that part of the park has something that relates to another building in the expansion. It can be roof tiles that have the same color that another facility uses, or it can be the same color paint, or can be same-styled windows. So with that, we really tried to create a nice, comfortable place for you to transition into the immersive worlds, which is really the new concept of the park – to bring into these immersive worlds. Frozen, of course, [is] the first one, and it’s beautifully located on the other side of the lake. I really love how you see the panoramic view and quality of World of Frozen here, as builds up to the North Mountain, sort of builds off on the other side, with the castle and then the little lighthouse. It’s really esthetically pleasing to watch. Long story short is that we are trying to really set up this park for the future, and you’re seeing the first results of that.On R&D tech and the creation of OlafKyle: We have a rich history when it comes to robotic characters, across many of our properties. It started with Lucky the Dinosaur, our first electronically actuated character. And now we’ve had our most recent characters with BDX Droids. We took so much time to really hand-animate each of those characters, kind of throughout our history, and that took a lot of time and a lot of effort to be able to do that. But what’s really happened really in the last 18 months or two years or so, has been a branch of artificial intelligence that we call reinforcement learning. And reinforcement learning is the ability to take a robot and bring it into simulation. Like a toddler learns, we use reward systems to train the robot in simulation, and what it does is it really allows us to ensure that the artist’s intent – the animation that was created for that robot – to be almost perfectly executed in terms of what actually then shows up in the physical world. That has allowed us, as Imagineering and within research and development, to bring these robots to our guests faster than ever. What used to take years to develop in the past, now we can deliver, day and date, in mere months. It’s really through a partnership also recently with Nvidia that we’ve been able to use their hardware chips to ensure that we’ve got the latest and greatest technology inside our robots. But it’s also their software that allows us to focus our time and effort on the precision that is Olaf and all of the unique mannerisms that that character has, and focus that from from a creative perspective. Now we’re able to deliver these robots faster than ever in more places than ever, and do so with that creative precision that the artists had intended from the beginning. That’s been a huge unlock for us overall, from a research and development perspective.On Adventure Way and its musicMichel: I really wanted to create a comfortable, romantic, nostalgic place that could form a function as this transition area from the original park into the new immersive worlds. We have some references to film there. We have our Raiponce Tangled Spin, and it has the lanterns from the lantern festival and the beautiful boats, and it reminds you of, but it’s not an exact implementation of, the film in the park. The Up-inspired attraction that we announced will take exactly the same sort of esthetic design route. So there will be a lot of references to the film and the characters, but it will be a unique design that really complements the rest of the story that you’ve tried to tell in this area, which is all about this beautiful park setting, sort of like a timeless, timeless area.For this area, I felt, well, wouldn’t it be nice if we had a beautiful piece of music that we write for this area that can sort of accompany you musically through the area? When I then started to think about, well, what could that be, I felt that wouldn’t also be nice if we give it a French touch, and we ask a French composer. So I went through my soundtrack collection of French composers, and there is a French composer called Philippe Rombi, and he does beautiful music. One of the things that I like so much about his music is, although he’s French, his music has a very Hollywood-esque quality. Because one thing I don’t want is that the music shall extend on its own in a way that doesn’t contribute to the Disney experience. We are here at Disney, so it needs to be Disney music, but it is going to be completely new theme. It’s not based on any of our movies, so I thought he was the right person to ask. We contacted him, and we had a great meeting here in the park, and he was very honored to be thought of and contribute to the project. I’m so happy with it. There were three words that I gave him as he started writing the music. One was a sense of horizon. I want to hear in the music this sensibility that there’s a horizon, like traveling to faraway places. Then a sense of nostalgia. The area that it plays in is very classical. And then, a light hearted adventure. So he has an A theme and a B theme, and these things were transported into the music. It’s really comfortable to listen [to]. It’s 45 minutes of music – new music. You walk through that area, and the music is guiding you through it. It really adds an emotional touch to the area that I think and hope people will enjoy. I certainly do.He did a special version for the Regal View Restaurant and Lounge. We were already working on the music for the restaurant. And there I said we need to have a Debussy kind of flavor for the music. So all the Disney themes that you hear in there, are inspired by that – the historic French composers. Then Philippe did a version for the restaurants. In the bar, you will hear just the piano version. And as you walk into the restaurant, it’s accompanied by orchestra. Again, like really beautiful, really elegant, and just pleasant to listen to it. So to me, it’s music that you can listen to over and over and over again, and it just gets better the more you hear of it. It’s not something you get to do often, because most of the time, of course, we use music that we inherit from our films. But now we had an opportunity actually, to do a new theme, which is not something you get to do often – so quite unique.On connecting the old and the new in the parkMichel: Obviously, we have elements that are of the original park. There’s the main entry, which looks like the studio. We are keeping the water tower. The conceit now, of course, is a little different. The park is no longer completely based on the magic of movie making, but we are keeping some of the original park. So we try to get a little bit of a mixture of elements. You get into the park, it’s a studio. That’s where it all originates from. You go into World Premiere – we say it’s a Hollywood street, and there’s a world premiere party, and then going through the theater and you end up in a kind of like a Times Square-type area where we have the majority of our theatrical attractions in the park. This part of the park also allow us to be very current with offerings. When new films come out, we can display them there. Then go into the immersive worlds, where you step into into the worlds that you know and love. The center of the park took a little bit of a different route, with a much more park-like setting and little bit more of a European flair. I think the European markets will really enjoy that area, with all the trees and the spaciousness. I really tried to step away a little bit from the from the Hollywood architecture for this area, and then create a transition point. I think they can complement each other, now that the park is no longer solely taking the magic of movie making as the core principle of every experience. On sharing more of WDI’s process with the publicKyle: I think the benefit that we’ve had by announcing these projects earlier is it’s been a great way to attract talent in an incredibly competitive landscape. So now we’re able to get some of the best robotics scientists in the world. The ability to tap into some of the computer scientists, creative technologists that bring these projects to life – exposing that Disney really, truly is a technology company, has changed perspective within the industry, and so that’s been a huge benefit to being more open about these things. Additionally, it also then puts the right amount of pressure to ensure that we’re delivering these things to our guests. These are not just projects that are hidden, but we’re really staking a claim to say this is how our characters are going to now show up, and leveraging the latest technology and tools to make that happen.
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