Frozen Ever After at Walt Disney World just got a major upgrade as the Audio-Animatronics figures of Elsa, Anna, and Kristoff have been given new faces that make them feel as if they jumped off the screen and into EPCOT. To learn more, we spoke with Ken Ricci, Executive Creative Development at Walt Disney Imagineering, about how the team brought this vision to life and why they chose now to update this beloved attraction for the first time in forever.
Ricci and I sat down in a lounge above Frozen Ever After to chat for a few minutes after I had the chance to check out these new upgrades for myself, and I am delighted to report that they do make a huge difference. I still believe the original designs were very impressive in their own right, but these feel so much more true to the films and, in my opinion, will withstand the test of time much better.
For those unfamiliar, Frozen Ever After opened on June 21, 2016, replacing the Maelstrom attraction in the Norway Pavilion at EPCOT's World Showcase. It was a groundbreaking moment in Disney history for many reasons, including being the first attraction to feature all-electric Audio-Animatronics and the first to combine electric motors and 3D printing. They also used rear-projection mapping to bring their faces to life, which was the main item addressed with these new updates.
"We're always looking at smoothing out our Audio-Animatronics figures' profiles, how they move, and how we can make them more human-like and realistic," Ricci told me. "That's something that's very, very much a passion of ours, as our goal is to hide the fact that they're robots."
That is obviously easier said than done, but the 10 years since Frozen Ever After first opened provided the team with a unique opportunity to make this change much more quickly than would have been possible for an original project
Since its debut, Frozen Ever After has opened at both Hong Kong Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea. Furthermore, the fourth Frozen Ever After is about to welcome guests on March 29 when it opens alongside World of Frozen at Disneyland Paris' Disney Adventure World.
And yes, that's where you'll be able to see the way-too-adorable next-generation robotic figure of Olaf, who will literally be walking, talking, and interacting with guests around World of Frozen.
Hong Kong Disneyland's Frozen Ever After was actually the inspiration for EPCOT's upgrade, as that's where these advancements in these Audio-Animatronics figures were first seen. This was a huge deal because they were able to bring over the data and learnings from these other Frozen Ever Afters to save tons of time when upgrading EPCOT's.
"When we're updating an attraction, It's very important to us to minimize the amount of time it has to be down," Ricci said. "We did a lot of work on the backend to make sure we could port these heads over from Hong Kong without having to reanimate the figures. In order to do that, we had to match the kinematics of the figures exactly to Hong Kong, and that's the mechanical vibrations.
"We also updated the show control processors on the cabinets overnight, even before we started the downtime, and we had to update the wrists on Anna and Elsa just to make sure those motors and designs were the same as Hong Kong. At that point, it was just an exercise of porting that show data over from Hong Kong and tuning the motors to accept that show data so we didn't have to reanimate it."
This meant there was no need to adjust the animation frame by frame to ensure the dialogue was in sync with the movements of the figures, as that was already done for Hong Kong Disneyland! And yes, that original animation did come from Walt Disney Animation Studios, it just had to be "tweaked to work within the mechanical limitations of a robot."
