After-Action Report: “it's a small world” (Part 1)

What would you say is the most overrated ride at Disneyland? That is, which one has the biggest gap between overall public acclaim and actual quality, with the quality on the low end of the equation?

I had to do some hard thinking to come up with my answer, but I think it's the Mad Tea Party.* It's an iconic ride, but iconic is not the same as impressive and if anything, it's a testament to the power of theming. Without its Wonderland morphsuit, it's just that old carnival standby, the Tilt-a-Whirl. An adorable paint job and familiar music have kept it successful for 60 years. Me, I've got better things to do with my Disneyland day than work a 90-second shift as the Amazing Human Spirograph.

Now, how about the most underrated ride? Which ride in the park is the most unjustly maligned by the public despite being in every way a classic? This one was a much clearer choice. The Mark Twain and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride both deserve longer lines than they get, but they lack the one trait a ride needs to be truly unfairly dismissed, and that is visibility. They aren't underrated so much as overlooked.

But there is one ride that has it all—an original concept, innovation, extraordinary artistic design, accessibility to all ages, an uplifting presence, and even its own theme song—yet routinely suffers outright mockery from the general public, from Disney's competitors, and from actual Cast Members.** That ride is the one, the only, “it's a small world.”

But you already knew that from the post title.

Have I ever mentioned how much I love this ride? (Spoiler: I have.) I'm sure part of it is nostalgia; one of my earliest clear memories of Disneyland is of the early Eighties renovation of Fantasyland, when Small World was one of the few rides left operating. But I remember already being particularly enamored of it and really glad it wasn't subject to the remodel so I could still go on it. I was five or six, already familiar with Peter Pan and Snow White and Alice, but their rides I could take or leave, while “the happiest cruise that ever sailed” was a must-see.

Back then, the façade looked like this:

Much the same that it does now (and did when it opened), except that for some reason, the central clock tower was painted in shades of pastel blue. To me, that light blue-white-gold color scheme was as vital to the experience of “it's a small world” as the theme song. On several separate occasions, I spent hours patiently trying to draw the façade, working from a single photo we had...and then being disappointed that my markers didn't include enough pale blues to represent it properly. I was almost devastated when they gave it the candy-rainbow treatment in the early Nineties, and ecstatic when it went back to all white. (I still miss the blue sometimes, but I know that's nostalgia talking. White with gold accents is objectively better as a decorating scheme than white-except-for-this-one-big-section-that's-light-blue with gold accents.) The colors were pretty in their way, but the all-white version is not only the classic original, but serves functional purposes relating to the theme of the attraction.

I don't know to what extent this was deliberate vs. required by the existing layout and features of the park, but “it's a small world” stands at the northern end of a long, broad walkway. The southward-facing façade thus catches full, brilliant Southern California sunlight most of the day. Besides the wholly practical benefit of white paint not fading in sunlight (there's nowhere left for it to fade to), the light bouncing off all that white and gold creates a “shining city on the hill” effect that draws people toward the ride and advertises the depiction of Utopia within. White and gold are universal; they go with everything. The ride façade presages its finale, when all the nations of the world come together in a room decorated primarily in white.

This ties in neatly with the main thing “it's a small world” does really well, the thing that elevates it from a pleasant and modestly educational ride for children to a magnificent work of multimedia art that everyone should appreciate. In at least three different ways, this attraction portrays a multitude of nations, peoples, and cultures using variations on a single theme.

The Art

The “it's a small world” façade does not, truthfully, have much to do with the ride's content. If you scan along the top you'll see a few international monuments—the Eiffel Tower, a pagoda roof, an onion dome—and of course there's the parade of dolls in native costume every fifteen minutes, but on the whole, the exterior is too abstract to scream “nations of the world.” Rolly Crump's instantly recognizable design looks more like an outsized toy set than anything else.

Inside, however, Mary Blair's design sensibility takes over, and the results are remarkable. The varied landscapes and architectural marvels of the planet are far more fanciful than realistic, depicted via her trademark swooping curves, geometric patterns, and blocks of bold color. This is the world as it might appear in the native art of its inhabitants, and Blair's designs manage—somehow—to stand in for the folk art of countries from Sweden...

...to Thailand...

...to Brazil.

And yet throughout, the consistency of her style holds the whole thing together so that we believe all these disparate cultures are parts of a single whole.

The Dolls

One of the common complaints about this ride is that the dolls are creepy.

Um, what?

Some people find dolls inherently a bit creepy; my disagreement is not with them. For the rest of us, there is a general consensus on what makes some dolls creepy. Antique porcelain dolls with blank expressions, made to an aesthetic of cuteness that went out with the Victorian era? Kinda creepy. Early models of dolls that close their eyes when they lie down, after they've gotten a bit worn out and at least one lid is always drooping and maybe one of the eyes has fallen out leaving only a dark hole? Definitely creepy. Dolls coming at you with a butcher knife while the string section of the orchestra plucks their instruments randomly? You get the idea.

The “it's a small world” dolls are definitely not creepy in the conventional sense of the word. They're adorable. Look at these little angels:

Plump-cheeked, smiling, brimming with sincerity of belief in their message. You would have to have a heart of stone to perceive them in an overall negative light.***

You know what else they are? Facially identical.

It was Walt Disney's idea that the dolls' faces should all be cast from the same mold (well...three molds, depending on whether they're singing, playing a wind instrument, or just smiling) and all racial or ethnic differences should be expressed through coloration, hair texture, and costume. (Gender coding is similarly limited to superficial elements.) The message is as true as it is obvious: Our differences only float on the surface; at heart we are all one people.

Not only is this a heartfelt statement of belief in the essential unity of humanity, it's a really unconventional design choice. One of the seemingly ironclad laws of cartooning is that you should always exaggerate features so that they “read” instantly to viewers. Since the Disney Renaissance, when it finally dawned on the animation studio that they didn't have to make movies about white people (or animals) all the time, the animators have struggled with finding the balance between making POC characters look racially authentic (i.e. not just tinted Caucasians) without calling to mind the bigotry-driven caricatures of political cartoons in times past. For the most part, they've done a great job, but it's still interesting that Walt and Blaine Gibson achieved an overwhelming success as far back as the Sixties. None of these children look like they're wearing the wrong costume:

It probably helps immensely that these are children being depicted and caricaturing their age can take precedence over anything else. But this in no way undercuts the achievement of giving the whole world of human diversity a single sweet face, or the message entailed therein.

The Song

And now we get to the part of the ride that catches the most flak from the most people: that cheerful, heartwarming Sherman Brothers ear worm that starts a good half a football field before you even get in line and follows you from continent to continent throughout the ride. Here again, I find that the most common complaints are off the mark. People often bash “It's a Small World (After All)” for being “too repetitive.” But is it, really? Maybe if you imagine (or assume) that the exact same verses and choruses play back to back through the whole thing...yes, that would be repetitive by definition.

But the song varies considerably from scene to scene. The lyrics are sung in different languages—fourteen in all—and periodically dropped, leaving only instrumentals. The instrumentation and background rhythms change in order to reflect different styles of folk music. Even the melody transitions from a major to a minor key and back again in accordance with the scales traditionally favored by different cultures. As a result, you're never really listening to the same thing for very long at one stretch.

More to the point, this is the third way in which the ride represents the diversity of humanity using a single theme with variations. “It's a Small World (After All)” would never be mistaken for genuine world music, but it's remarkable how well this little ditty—which the Shermans supposedly knocked out in just a few minutes once it was realized a single theme tune was needed—adapts to instruments as different as Irish fiddles and Peruvian flutes and rhythms ranging from polka to samba. It sticks in the mind, to be sure...but is that such a bad thing? (And before you say “Yes! God, it's so annoying!” ask yourself whether you're remembering an official or professional rendition of the song...or just someone making fun of it and turning up the screech in their voice.)

What's Missing

We can potentially learn as much about “it's a small world” and its message from what the designers left out as what they included. Specifically, there are no strong markers of national identity, which is not the same thing as cultural identity. It's fairly common knowledge that the original plans for the ride called for the children in each scene to be singing their own national anthem, until they realized what an aural catastrophe that would be. There's no practical reason, however, that each scene couldn't have been adorned with the corresponding national flag...but these too were omitted.

This is a powerful statement all on its own. National states are political entities; removing direct references to them suggests that world peace is fundamentally an apolitical achievement. These are after all young children, who are aware of the culture they experience on a day-to-day basis but may not yet have internalized which abstract team they're supposed to be on. The idea here is that peace is our natural state and national identities mess things up by making us pick sides.

I don't know if I agree with that entirely—the tendency to form some kind of group loyalty is also probably natural to humans—but I don't think there's much controversy in the notion that children start out pretty accepting and have to be taught prejudice.

Another thing the creators didn't put into “it's a small world” was any great emphasis on the United States. In 2009, this situation was reversed...but you'll have to wait until next week to get my thoughts on that, the introduction of dolls representing Disney characters that occurred at the same time, and the seasonal overlay of the ride that accompanies the Christmas makeover of the park.

See you then!

* You thought I was going to say Star Tours, didn't you?

** Granted, these Cast Members are usually Jungle Cruise skippers.

*** The fact that some people—not the aforementioned doll-phobes—do in fact perceive them negatively says more about those people than it does about the dolls or the ride.