Joanna Miller, Walt Disney’s granddaughter, has doubled down on her criticism of Disneyland because it plans to debut an audio-animatronic model of her grandfather at a brand new exhibit subsequent month.
Miller has beforehand posted on Fb, accusing the California theme park of “dehumanizing him” through a “robotic grampa,” a transfer she described as making “no sense” and mentioned would come off as “empty of a soul or essence of the man.”
Miller instructed the Los Angeles Occasions that whereas its powerful for her to knock the corporate so pricey to her household, it’s essential that she communicate out.
“He’s ours,” Miller mentioned. “We’re his family.”
Miller revealed that she met with Walt Disney Firm CEO Bob Iger and the Imagineering staff behind its theme parks after her Fb criticism final 12 months.
Whereas Iger was “kind” and let her do her “spiel,” she mentioned she wasn’t satisfied by his vow to guard her grandfather’s legacy via the robotic portrayal.
“They’re different people. He’s a businessman, grampa was an artist,” she mentioned.
She revealed that she began “crying” on the sight of the animatronic when she first noticed it.
“It didn’t look like him, to me,” she mentioned.
Her feedback on the exhibit notably battle with these from different grandchildren and descendants of Disney, together with Chris Miller, Disney’s grandson and director of the Walt Disney Household Museum, and Tamara Miller, Disney’s great-granddaughter and vice chairman of the museum board, who mentioned they have been consulted and expressed confidence within the challenge.
tom nebbia/Corbis through Getty Photographs
First introduced final 12 months, the Walt Disney – A Magical Life attraction seems to be to pay tribute to the enduring animator and entrepreneur through a 17-minute presentation that includes a robotic in his likeness to have fun the seventieth anniversary of Disneyland’s opening in 1955.
The attraction is ready to interchange Nice Moments with Mr. Lincoln — an endeavor that Disney championed in his lifetime and options an animatronic model of President Abraham Lincoln.
After the primary 12 months of the brand new robotic’s operation, the corporate mentioned, the Lincoln exhibit will return and share the theater with the Walt Disney attraction on a rotating foundation.
The Lincoln robotic, which was rolled out on the 1964 New York World’s Truthful, grew in reputation and located a house at Disneyland the following 12 months.
Disney, in a throwback clip on the Lincoln attraction, burdened that his firm exhaustively researched Lincoln to make a “faithful likeness of this honored man” that’s “so lifelike, you might find it hard to believe.”
Don Kelsen/Los Angeles Occasions through Getty Photographs
Joanna Miller has argued her grandfather didn’t wish to be immortalized as a robotic, telling the Occasions that her late mom, Diane Disney Miller, as soon as dismissed that includes such an animatronic at San Francisco’s Walt Disney Household Museum.
“[She] wanted to show him as a real human,” Miller mentioned.
Disneyland didn’t instantly reply to a HuffPost request for remark.
