Imagineering Theory: The Pixar Problem, Part 2

Last week, I identified the problem: Audiences love Pixar movies and therefore so does Disney's upper management, but the most easily marketable ones don't have a natural place to belong in the Disneyland Resort. There is serious tension between the profit motive and artistic integrity, and in the current business climate of the parks, artistic integrity gets kicked to the curb. Pixar IPs are slung into the Resort willy-nilly, and we're lucky if a flimsy justification is included.

Unfortunately, it can be hard to get the average guest to realize this is a problem. “So what?” they might say. “The kids like it.” An entire generation has come of age in the post-Pressler era, with no memory of what Disneyland was like before the synergitis metastasized. Those who are aware of the mismatch—fans of the art of theme park design—tend to have trouble coming up with a tidy solution.

You see, it's not just that individual Pixar movies don't gel with Disney's traditional theme park areas...the entire studio's storytelling style is a bit askew from its parent company's. This is in no way an indictment of Pixar, whose commitment to quality is so great that we even get excited about their sequels. However, people who think that because their movies are animated and have a castle logo at the beginning, Pixar = Disney...well, let's just say they're obviously not film students.

I am not a film student either, but if today I awoke from a ten-year coma and all I had to watch during my tedious physical therapy was Disney and Pixar's respect animated outputs from that past decade, with the studio bumpers removed, I'm pretty sure I could sort them correctly...not even counting the blatantly obvious ones like Winnie The Pooh and Toy Story 3.* Perhaps because I am not a film student, I have a hard time pinning down the essential Disney-ness and Pixar-ness that make it so easy to tell the two apart, but I know it when I see it, and it might be the key thing keeping Pixar IPs from meshing well with Disney theme parks. Said parks are designed from the ground up to capitalize on and explore Disney-ness, even in the case of non-branded attractions.

Some of the aforementioned theme park fans recognize this—or are at least aware that merely having a Disney label doesn't make something “True Disney”—and try to come up with a solution to the Pixar Problem that involves sequestering the Pixar stuff off in its own little area away from everything else. “What we really need,” they'll say, “is a dedicated land/park for the Pixar stuff,” perhaps followed by some elaboration of the concept.

It's an idea with its heart in the right place, but I'm going to be the jerk here and say that a themed land or a full park just for rides based on Pixar movies—a Pixarland, if you will—would not be...very...good.

I cannot stress enough that there is more to Disneyland—to any Disney park—than rides based on previously existing media properties. Try to imagine Disneyland with everything removed except its movie and character tie-ins: three out of four Mountains gone, no Haunted Mansion or Pirates of the Caribbean (remember, the ride came first!), no Jungle Cruise, no “it's a small world,” no Disneyland Railroad, precious little shopping and dining. Main Street would be a blank back alley, New Orleans Square an empty lot (with perhaps a single Nightmare Before Christmas merchandise kiosk).

And just in case you're thinking it would be just as good to have equivalent rides with characters inserted, there's more to these iconic features than simply being additional things to do. Apart from their own individual merits, the original concepts provide context and support for the IP-based attractions. It's all well and good to design a ride that replicates the high points of a beloved movie, but if there's no more to it than that, the guests might as well stay home and watch the movie itself on Netflix.** The joy of a theme park setting is the opportunity to enter the world of a beloved movie, which must of necessity be bigger than the movie itself, and that's where these non-movie-based attractions and shops and just overall atmospheric details come in. The entire concept of area theming is more than just a handy organizational tool. Fantasyland isn't just a place to put fairy tale rides; it's the very village that the protagonists of such tales typically start from.

Unfortunately, you can't really do this with the Pixar portfolio, where each franchise is self-contained and independent from all the others (Easter eggs such as the Pizza Planet truck aside.)*** There's no single type of environment that can serve as the “home base” for all of them...or even for more than one of them, really. This is if anything to Pixar's credit, since it demonstrates the studio's versatility that their stories are so distinct from each other, with such variable settings. But it does make it difficult to plan a theme park area around more than one of their works.

So why not go the other route, and do an entire Pixar theme park, with a land for each franchise? For all its well-deserved controversy, Cars Land is at least a sterling example of good theme park design. It not only recreates but expands on the setting featured in the film, with rides, shops, eateries, and background details arranged in such a way as to support each other and make the area feel “lived-in,” like a real place. “a bug's land” is not so superlative, but there's still pleasure to be had in just wandering through and taking in the clever details. It's easy to imagine an entire park that followed these principles, giving us additional lands themed to the other films.

The problem with that is that you're then left with an entire park of single-IP lands. I have made my feelings about single-IP lands abundantly clear, but in case you're new to this blog and haven't yet combed the archives, I'm gen'rally agin 'em. They can be done well, obviously, but it's a dangerous habit to get into because it's so inherently limiting. Any one franchise can only provide so much material to adapt, and not all titles provide natural hooks for expansion, especially in the highly specialized theme park medium. Furthermore, the more real estate devoted to an IP, the greater the loss when its star eventually fades. An entire park of such lands, especially when the IPs themselves all come from a single animation studio, may not provide anywhere near enough breadth of experience for an all-day tourist destination.

So is Pixar a lost cause when it comes to theme parks? Not necessarily. It just can't be the sole motivation for creating a park or area of a park. Again: Disney theme parks are about far more than their IPs.

What a Pixar park would need, in order to be worthy of the effort, is the same approach used to design Disneyland itself, back at the start. Walt Disney was not out to create a place for rides based on his movies and TV shows, but a place to house all the big concepts that fired his imagination. It's not that Disneyland came from his motion picture creations, but that both it and they grew out of the same roots. The original batch of themed lands represented the broad motifs that formed the basis of some of his many interests, which naturally also came out in his media projects.

Hence I suspect that the best way of incorporating Pixar into the theme park oeuvre is to find recurring themes and motifs across the studio's works and using those, not the individual franchises themselves, as the basis for one or more area themes. Here are some possibilities:

• “Hidden worlds.” At about the time Finding Nemo came out, I noticed that all of Pixar's movies to date had focused on adventures hidden right under our noses—societies of children's toys, common backyard bugs, and sea creatures, or a monster world linked to this one through our closet doors. Further movies added possibilities such as secret superheroes living in our neighborhoods, or rats having their own culture inside the walls of our homes and businesses. This broad concept is an incredibly rich well of material, because practically any location in the real world could be the setting for such a hidden world, and the worlds themselves are exactly the sort of thing that theme parks can elaborate upon in fascinating ways. Related to this...
• The world we know, seen from a different perspective or scale. To an insect, a songbird is a terrifying monster. To a car, tires are shoes and a mechanic is a doctor. To an intelligent dinosaur, a human is a strange hairy creature that might be either a nuisance or a pet. To see familiar things through alien eyes would make for an absolutely fascinating theme park experience.
• Friendships, especially odd ones. Most Pixar movies ultimately boil down to “buddy” adventures, with two main characters forging, developing, or reaffirming a friendship of some kind. This is harder to do in a theme park since it requires getting guests to play along with an internal journey, but it's worth a thought.
• Creative answers to the sorts of silly questions we all ask when our minds wander. How do toys feel about being played with? What if the princess was a tomboy who didn't want to find true love? If all the monsters do is jump out and scare people...why do they do it? Are there little people in our minds controlling our reactions to things? If Pixar had a team analogous to the Imagineers, with the job of coming up with more of these questions, and answering them with theme park attractions instead of movies...well, the idea should speak for itself.

These are just the first few cross-franchise thematic connections that come to mind; there are surely others. The point is that a land or even an entire park that is to Pixar what Disney's existing parks are to Disney, has so much more potentially going for it than just rehashes of the studio's existing movies, or even sets from those movies built to a scale that we can explore in person.

The most serious obstacle, unfortunately, might be public opinion. Disneyland was built at a time when the Disney name was attached to a decades-established multimedia reputation. Walt had given the world short subjects, feature-length animated and live-action films, television shows, even comic strips, and people were excited to see what he might do next. Pixar, by contrast, only produces CGI animation and is usually considered nothing more than an arm of Disney. Would the mainstream public even be receptive to “Pixar” concepts that they don't remember from movie screens?

We'll probably never know, as all this is highly speculative to begin with. Pixar's movies are proven successes, and the Disney corporation is too risk-averse these days to assign theme park-sized budgets to anything but proven successes. The Pixar Problem will be with us for some time yet.

* Brave and Wreck-It Ralph might throw me off, though. What a weird year 2012 was.

** Chill optional.

*** Since I just know someone is going to bring up the Grand Unified Pixar Theory, I just want to say that I don't subscribe to it, and more importantly, I think it would be too heavy and complicated to use as the basis for a theme park. The vast majority of people aren't going to get it, and if they did, would likely consider the idea of a millennia-spanning struggle between factions too dark for a family vacation.