- Comments
100 U.S. Navy sailors and Marines get surprise day at Disneyland
While at the park, the service members had the chance to explore attractions and participate in Disneyland's daily flag ceremony. (Credit: The Walt Disney Company)
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!Disney’s Imagineers are working on a new animatronic of iconic American visionary Walt Disney, but some members of his family have opposing views about whether it celebrates his legacy or dehumanizes him.
Disney’s Main Street Opera House plans to unveil a new theme park attraction called Walt Disney – A Magical Life, featuring an audio-animatronic of the company’s founder.
But Joanna Miller, one of Disney's grandchildren, slammed the idea of an animatronic as "dehumanizing" in a viral Facebook post. Among her claims, she suggested that her grandfather had told early Imagineer Sam McKim he never wanted to be commemorated with an animatronic. She went on to speak to the Los Angeles Times about why she believes it goes against her grandfather's wishes.
Shortly after she wrote her post, she met with Disney CEO Bob Iger and Disney Imagineers to see the animatronic in production, crediting the current company head as being "very kind" and noting he listened to what she had to say. The robot itself, however, left her cold.
A statue of Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse. (Photo by AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)
AS 'SNOW WHITE' STRUGGLES, HERE ARE FIVE MORE DISNEY CONTROVERSIES THAT ROCKED THE COMPANY
"I think I started crying," Miller told the L.A. Times. "It didn’t look like him, to me."
She wrote in a separate letter to Iger, "I strongly feel the last two minutes with the robot will do much more harm than good to Grampa’s legacy," and worried people "will remember the robot, and not the man."
As for claims that Disney would not have wanted to be commemorated as an animatronic, Imagineer Jeff Shaver-Moskowitz said, "In all our research, we never found any documentation of Walt saying that. We know that it’s anecdotal and we can’t speak to what was told to people in private."
After Miller's comments were published, The Walt Disney Family Museum shared a statement with Fox News Digital indicating other family members feel far more positively about the animatronic of the Disney family patriarch and were included in the process of its production.
"Walt Disney Imagineering invited museum Board members—five of Walt Disney’s grandchildren and three of his great-grandchildren—to view the progress of the attraction’s development, which included a preview of the new Audio-Animatronics figure of Walt in its animated form," the statement said.
"As part of their meticulous eVorts to produce a historically accurate likeness, Walt Disney Imagineering also reached out to the team at The Walt Disney Family Museum for guidance in identifying items that Walt Disney regularly wore," it added.
22nd November 1946: American animator and producer Walt (Walter Elias) Disney (1901 - 1966) walking through St Stephens Green, Dublin, in the Republic of Ireland. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)