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| Tomorrowland: how Walt Disney’s strange utopia shaped the world of tomorrow | Tomorrowland: how Walt Disney’s strange utopia shaped the world of tomorrow |
| (about 1 hour later) | |
| Welcome to the future. Or is it the past? In Tomorrowland, Disney’s new adventure movie, George Clooney and friends risk life and limb to reach the utopian realm of the title, and it looks pretty much like we expected the future to look, at least back in the 1960s: a pristine, shopping-mall sort of place with soaring glass spires and flying trains and happy people of all nations wearing coloured boiler suits. But here in the real world (a relative term, admittedly) you can visit Tomorrowland today. As many millions of visitors know, it is already an area of Disney’s theme parks, devoted to the same type of optimistic techno-futurism Tomorrowland the movie espouses. You do not have to risk life and limb to get there, but it could cost you an arm and a leg. | Welcome to the future. Or is it the past? In Tomorrowland, Disney’s new adventure movie, George Clooney and friends risk life and limb to reach the utopian realm of the title, and it looks pretty much like we expected the future to look, at least back in the 1960s: a pristine, shopping-mall sort of place with soaring glass spires and flying trains and happy people of all nations wearing coloured boiler suits. But here in the real world (a relative term, admittedly) you can visit Tomorrowland today. As many millions of visitors know, it is already an area of Disney’s theme parks, devoted to the same type of optimistic techno-futurism Tomorrowland the movie espouses. You do not have to risk life and limb to get there, but it could cost you an arm and a leg. |
| You can see the synergistic synapses firing in Disney’s corporate brain at the prospect of a movie that retrofits a backstory on to its theme parks. What is more, it comes just in time for the 60th anniversary celebrations of the original Disneyland park in Anaheim, California, which kick off tonight with a huge show presented by Mickey Mouse and Oscars host Neil Patrick Harris. | You can see the synergistic synapses firing in Disney’s corporate brain at the prospect of a movie that retrofits a backstory on to its theme parks. What is more, it comes just in time for the 60th anniversary celebrations of the original Disneyland park in Anaheim, California, which kick off tonight with a huge show presented by Mickey Mouse and Oscars host Neil Patrick Harris. |
| All of this serves to highlight the fact that, 60 years on, we are still not sure what to think about Disneyland. It is a place of paradox and contradiction. Both utopian and dystopian. Kind of cheesy, yet great fun. Eagerly forward-looking yet stiflingly conservative. It is neither pure fantasy nor is it quite reality. More like a portal between the two: a place where cinematic dreams take on three-dimensional form, while punters travel in the opposite direction, leaving behind their outside existence to become actors in a giant cartoon. | |
| Queuing alongside families to sample the Disney fantasy over the years have been philosophers and cultural commentators of every stripe, all primed to decipher its meanings – and perhaps to suffer a trip on the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. Perhaps it was the French theorist Jean Baudrillard who returned the most damning verdict: “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real,” he pronounced in his 1988 book Simulations, “when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation.” Reality has become a map without a territory, Baudrillard snootily surmised, and it is basically all Disney’s fault. | Queuing alongside families to sample the Disney fantasy over the years have been philosophers and cultural commentators of every stripe, all primed to decipher its meanings – and perhaps to suffer a trip on the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. Perhaps it was the French theorist Jean Baudrillard who returned the most damning verdict: “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real,” he pronounced in his 1988 book Simulations, “when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation.” Reality has become a map without a territory, Baudrillard snootily surmised, and it is basically all Disney’s fault. |
| Those contradictions were there from the start. Indeed, the split between fantasy and reality is embodied in the hybrid term Walt Disney coined for the creators of his theme park: “imagineers”. So, too, Disney’s Janus-like ambivalence toward progress is expressed in the plaque he unveiled at the opening in July 1955. “Here age relives fond memories of the past – and here youth may savour the challenge and promise of the future,” it reads. The sentiment was perfectly in tune with postwar America – a time and place of both space-age optimism and cold war uncertainty. More than fantasy, Disneyland provided security or as Karal Ann Marling’s definitive study of Disney design put it, “the architecture of reassurance”. | Those contradictions were there from the start. Indeed, the split between fantasy and reality is embodied in the hybrid term Walt Disney coined for the creators of his theme park: “imagineers”. So, too, Disney’s Janus-like ambivalence toward progress is expressed in the plaque he unveiled at the opening in July 1955. “Here age relives fond memories of the past – and here youth may savour the challenge and promise of the future,” it reads. The sentiment was perfectly in tune with postwar America – a time and place of both space-age optimism and cold war uncertainty. More than fantasy, Disneyland provided security or as Karal Ann Marling’s definitive study of Disney design put it, “the architecture of reassurance”. |
| Some have compared the layout of Disneyland to a map of Walt Disney’s own psyche: You start by walking down Main Street USA – a pastiche of 19th-century smalltown life, modelled on Disney’s sentimental memories of his childhood in Marceline, Missouri. Then you can branch off into other “worlds” of Disney’s imagination. Most of them are nostalgic: Fantasyland, with its Sleeping Beauty Castle; Frontierland, infused with the spirits of Mark Twain and Davy Crockett; the exoticism of Adventureland, which was as close to abroad as most postwar Americans got (the Jungle Cruise ride was modelled on Bogart and Hepburn’s The African Queen). | |
| And then there’s Tomorrowland, where technology and science point the way to a shiny, happy future of inventions and space travel and nuclear-powered everything. At the time of opening, Tomorrowland was actually barely finished. A great many balloons were needed to fill in the gaps, apparently. It had been hastily cobbled together from the leftover sets of Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and corporate-sponsored exhibits. There was the TWA “moonliner” rocket ship, the plastic “Monsanto House of the Future” with Jetsons-style interiors and a microwave oven to cook your (presumably GM-free) meal, and the Kaiser Aluminium Hall of Fame, turning kids on to the wonders of … er … aluminium. The “tomorrow” of Tomorrowland was originally set at 1986. At least we got the microwave. | |
| But Walt Disney sincerely believed in the future he was selling, possibly even shaping, at Tomorrowland. When it relaunched in 1959, it introduced the first working monorail to the US. Another remodelling in 1967 brought the PeopleMover – a mini electric train system intended to point the way for future urban mass transport (the California original closed in 1995, the Florida one is still in operation). Walt Disney’s futurist credentials led to him designing attractions for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, including the Carousel of Progress and It’s a Small World, both of which he then brought back to Disneyland. | |
| By this time Disneyland was a runaway success, and the public were anticipating an east coast sequel, especially when it emerged that Disney had secretly been buying up a vast area of central Florida – twice the size of Manhattan. But building another Disneyland didn’t really appeal to the company’s founder. “I would like to create new things,” Walt Disney told reporters at a 1965 press conference in Florida. “You hate to repeat yourself. I don’t like to make sequels to my pictures. I like to make a new thing and develop a new concept.” | By this time Disneyland was a runaway success, and the public were anticipating an east coast sequel, especially when it emerged that Disney had secretly been buying up a vast area of central Florida – twice the size of Manhattan. But building another Disneyland didn’t really appeal to the company’s founder. “I would like to create new things,” Walt Disney told reporters at a 1965 press conference in Florida. “You hate to repeat yourself. I don’t like to make sequels to my pictures. I like to make a new thing and develop a new concept.” |
| What really appealed to Disney about “the Florida project”, as it was then known, was not the theme park but the workers’ town next to it. Visitors to the top floor of the Carousel of Progress would soon see what Walt Disney had in mind. There was installed a gigantic model of “Progress City”, a town for at least 20,000 people, with lights and moving cars and the glow of a nuclear power station in the distance. | What really appealed to Disney about “the Florida project”, as it was then known, was not the theme park but the workers’ town next to it. Visitors to the top floor of the Carousel of Progress would soon see what Walt Disney had in mind. There was installed a gigantic model of “Progress City”, a town for at least 20,000 people, with lights and moving cars and the glow of a nuclear power station in the distance. |
| Progress City is surprisingly in step with current ideas of urban planning. With it, Walt Disney intended to right the wrongs he perceived in Los Angeles: too many cars, no pedestrian access, no civic centre, characterless modern architecture. Progress was a garden city of concentric rings, three miles wide. At its centre stood a 30-storey hotel surrounded by a compact indoor retail and business district, air-conditioned against the Florida humidity. Around that was a green belt with schools and leisure facilities, then a ring of low‑density suburbs, with industrial parks beyond. The roads were all underground. The primary means of getting around would be public transport: a monorail, a system of people movers, and walking. He redubbed it the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow: Epcot. | Progress City is surprisingly in step with current ideas of urban planning. With it, Walt Disney intended to right the wrongs he perceived in Los Angeles: too many cars, no pedestrian access, no civic centre, characterless modern architecture. Progress was a garden city of concentric rings, three miles wide. At its centre stood a 30-storey hotel surrounded by a compact indoor retail and business district, air-conditioned against the Florida humidity. Around that was a green belt with schools and leisure facilities, then a ring of low‑density suburbs, with industrial parks beyond. The roads were all underground. The primary means of getting around would be public transport: a monorail, a system of people movers, and walking. He redubbed it the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow: Epcot. |
| Smarter still was Walt Disney’s idea of how the city would operate: he would invite corporations to test their products on its citizens. If General Electric was developing a new microwave oven, for example, one would be put in every Epcot home for real‑world testing. Visitors would come to see what the city of the future looked like. “It will always be in a state of becoming,” he explained in a promotional film. “It will never cease to be a living blueprint of the future, where people live a life they can’t find anywhere else in the world.” | |
| “It was a very clever concept,” says Sam Gennawey, an urban planner and Disney historian, who conducted an unofficial feasibility study of the original Epcot. “Walt was an empirical-data sort of guy. Everything he planned had been tested somewhere else. Everybody thinks of him as this master innovator, but his greatest skill was taking what he saw and knew worked and recombining it in ways that seemed new and novel.” | “It was a very clever concept,” says Sam Gennawey, an urban planner and Disney historian, who conducted an unofficial feasibility study of the original Epcot. “Walt was an empirical-data sort of guy. Everything he planned had been tested somewhere else. Everybody thinks of him as this master innovator, but his greatest skill was taking what he saw and knew worked and recombining it in ways that seemed new and novel.” |
| The only downside to Disney’s utopia was the governance. Disney would own everything, and Epcot citizens would only be permitted to live there for up to a year, after which they would have to move on. Thus, nobody would ever acquire voting rights and subvert Disney’s programme. Disney also cut a favourable deal with the Florida authorities, Gennawey explains. “They could go ahead and build a nuclear power plant or an airport without the permission of the state of Florida. They have rights within that property that are generally greater than those of most counties in the US.” | The only downside to Disney’s utopia was the governance. Disney would own everything, and Epcot citizens would only be permitted to live there for up to a year, after which they would have to move on. Thus, nobody would ever acquire voting rights and subvert Disney’s programme. Disney also cut a favourable deal with the Florida authorities, Gennawey explains. “They could go ahead and build a nuclear power plant or an airport without the permission of the state of Florida. They have rights within that property that are generally greater than those of most counties in the US.” |
| For better or worse, Epcot never came to pass. Disney’s utopianism died with its master in 1966, and no one else had the stomach to build his dream city. Rather than the city of the future, Epcot became another theme park, more like a corporate-sponsored World’s Fair. The only surviving vestige of Disney’s prototypical community is the Disney-owned town of Celebration, Florida, a surreally twee place whose orderliness has drawn comparisons to Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives. | For better or worse, Epcot never came to pass. Disney’s utopianism died with its master in 1966, and no one else had the stomach to build his dream city. Rather than the city of the future, Epcot became another theme park, more like a corporate-sponsored World’s Fair. The only surviving vestige of Disney’s prototypical community is the Disney-owned town of Celebration, Florida, a surreally twee place whose orderliness has drawn comparisons to Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives. |
| In the theme parks, too, Tomorrowland ceased to anticipate the real future and instead focused on futuristic attractions: Captain EO, the 3D Michael Jackson musical, directed by Francis Ford Coppola; Star Tours, the Star Wars-themed simulator ride; the Space Mountain rollercoaster (look closely and you will spot it on the skyline of the film version of Tomorrowland). | In the theme parks, too, Tomorrowland ceased to anticipate the real future and instead focused on futuristic attractions: Captain EO, the 3D Michael Jackson musical, directed by Francis Ford Coppola; Star Tours, the Star Wars-themed simulator ride; the Space Mountain rollercoaster (look closely and you will spot it on the skyline of the film version of Tomorrowland). |
| Tomorrowland the movie is a sincere attempt to address this lack of belief in the future, without which humanity could be doomed, it suggests. | Tomorrowland the movie is a sincere attempt to address this lack of belief in the future, without which humanity could be doomed, it suggests. |
| Looking at the present-day landscape, the real influence on the city of tomorrow was not Tomorrowland or Epcot but Disneyland itself. Many an architect and planner has admired it and borrowed from it. In 1963, Harvard professor James Rouse called it “the greatest piece of urban design in the United States today”. Disneyland is a self-contained, controlled, pedestrian-friendly retail monoculture whose functions are overlaid with a veneer of narrative and fantasy, invisibly serviced and governed by regulations so repressive that employees have only been permitted to sport moustaches since 2000. As such, it has become the model for many an aggressively themed new residential development, shopping mall or casino resort, from Las Vegas to China to Dubai. Baudrillard’s prophesy seems to have been fulfilled. | Looking at the present-day landscape, the real influence on the city of tomorrow was not Tomorrowland or Epcot but Disneyland itself. Many an architect and planner has admired it and borrowed from it. In 1963, Harvard professor James Rouse called it “the greatest piece of urban design in the United States today”. Disneyland is a self-contained, controlled, pedestrian-friendly retail monoculture whose functions are overlaid with a veneer of narrative and fantasy, invisibly serviced and governed by regulations so repressive that employees have only been permitted to sport moustaches since 2000. As such, it has become the model for many an aggressively themed new residential development, shopping mall or casino resort, from Las Vegas to China to Dubai. Baudrillard’s prophesy seems to have been fulfilled. |
| “Disney invokes an urbanism without producing a city,” wrote architect Michael Sorkin in a scathing essay titled See You in Disneyland. “Rather it produces a kind of aura-stripped hyper-city, a city with billions of citizens (all who would consume) but no residents. Physicalised yet conceptual, it’s the utopia of transience, a place where everyone is just passing through.” Umberto Eco agrees. In his 1986 essay Travels With Hyperreality, he writes: “As an allegory of the consumer society, a place of absolute iconism, Disneyland is also a place of total passivity. Its visitors must agree to behave like robots.” | “Disney invokes an urbanism without producing a city,” wrote architect Michael Sorkin in a scathing essay titled See You in Disneyland. “Rather it produces a kind of aura-stripped hyper-city, a city with billions of citizens (all who would consume) but no residents. Physicalised yet conceptual, it’s the utopia of transience, a place where everyone is just passing through.” Umberto Eco agrees. In his 1986 essay Travels With Hyperreality, he writes: “As an allegory of the consumer society, a place of absolute iconism, Disneyland is also a place of total passivity. Its visitors must agree to behave like robots.” |
| Do we still need Disneyland now that the rest of the world has been Disneyfied? Disney certainly thinks so. Walt Disney may be long gone but the corporation is bigger and hungrier than ever. Disneyland’s model has been replicated outside the US in Tokyo, Paris and Hong Kong. The theme park side of Disney’s operation earned nearly twice as much as its movies last year: $15bn versus $7bn. And it is still building. In the past 10 years, under its current chief executive Bob Iger, Disney has been on an unprecedented buying spree, snapping up prime movie properties Pixar, Marvel and LucasFilm for a combined total of more than $15bn. So as well as its menagerie of talking animals, its harem of fairytale princesses and its Pirates of the Caribbean, Disney’s universe now encompasses characters from Buzz Lightyear to Spider-Man and Han Solo. It is remarkable just how much of the popular imagination the company has monopolised. | Do we still need Disneyland now that the rest of the world has been Disneyfied? Disney certainly thinks so. Walt Disney may be long gone but the corporation is bigger and hungrier than ever. Disneyland’s model has been replicated outside the US in Tokyo, Paris and Hong Kong. The theme park side of Disney’s operation earned nearly twice as much as its movies last year: $15bn versus $7bn. And it is still building. In the past 10 years, under its current chief executive Bob Iger, Disney has been on an unprecedented buying spree, snapping up prime movie properties Pixar, Marvel and LucasFilm for a combined total of more than $15bn. So as well as its menagerie of talking animals, its harem of fairytale princesses and its Pirates of the Caribbean, Disney’s universe now encompasses characters from Buzz Lightyear to Spider-Man and Han Solo. It is remarkable just how much of the popular imagination the company has monopolised. |
| These franchise-friendly properties will doubtless help Disney rule the box office, but they also provide plenty of new material for the theme parks. Already, Iger has promised “a much larger Star Wars presence in our parks globally”, with rides based on as-yet-unreleased movies. After Tomorrowland and Pirates of the Caribbean, itself a ride that inspired a movie franchise, there are plans for another film based on an existing Disney attraction: The Haunted Mansion, directed by Guillermo del Toro and starring Ryan Gosling – a former Mouseketeer returning to the fold. | These franchise-friendly properties will doubtless help Disney rule the box office, but they also provide plenty of new material for the theme parks. Already, Iger has promised “a much larger Star Wars presence in our parks globally”, with rides based on as-yet-unreleased movies. After Tomorrowland and Pirates of the Caribbean, itself a ride that inspired a movie franchise, there are plans for another film based on an existing Disney attraction: The Haunted Mansion, directed by Guillermo del Toro and starring Ryan Gosling – a former Mouseketeer returning to the fold. |
| Disney is now working on Shanghai Disney Resort, one of the most ambitious and expensive projects in its history. The corporation has already pumped $5.5bn into the resort, which is set to open next year. That is more than it paid for either Star Wars or Marvel. It will contain the largest fairytale castle yet, a new Pirates of the Caribbean ride, a theatre playing the Lion King musical and a Toy Story-themed hotel. Chinese-themed landscapes will also blend with all the traditional areas and attractions that Walt Disney laid out back in the 1950s. It will probably be the most visited tourist attraction in the world. | Disney is now working on Shanghai Disney Resort, one of the most ambitious and expensive projects in its history. The corporation has already pumped $5.5bn into the resort, which is set to open next year. That is more than it paid for either Star Wars or Marvel. It will contain the largest fairytale castle yet, a new Pirates of the Caribbean ride, a theatre playing the Lion King musical and a Toy Story-themed hotel. Chinese-themed landscapes will also blend with all the traditional areas and attractions that Walt Disney laid out back in the 1950s. It will probably be the most visited tourist attraction in the world. |
| To shore up the client base, the corporation has been rolling out its Disney English operation across China, which teaches the English language exclusively through the medium of Disney characters, priming the next generation in the ways of Mickey and Donald. This all sounds a long way from its Walt Disney’s vision of the future. It is not yet known whether Shanghai Disney Resort will have a Tomorrowland, or what they will put in it if they do. At the moment, Disney’s tomorrow simply consists of more Tomorrowlands. | To shore up the client base, the corporation has been rolling out its Disney English operation across China, which teaches the English language exclusively through the medium of Disney characters, priming the next generation in the ways of Mickey and Donald. This all sounds a long way from its Walt Disney’s vision of the future. It is not yet known whether Shanghai Disney Resort will have a Tomorrowland, or what they will put in it if they do. At the moment, Disney’s tomorrow simply consists of more Tomorrowlands. |
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