After-Action Report: Storybook Land Canal Boats

Walt Disney loved miniatures. This interest seems to be part of a broader fascination with extremes of size that gave us Mickey Mouse’s battles against giants in “The Brave Little Tailor” and “Mickey and the Beanstalk,” the immense dinosaurs and minute pixies of Fantasia, Alice’s size-shifting escapades in Wonderland, the tiny animal sidekicks in films such as Pinocchio and Cinderella, and perhaps even Adventure Thru Inner Space. A dramatic change of scale is a dramatic change of perspective, and Walt was all about seeing the world in unconventional ways. Combine that with the delicate and nimble touch required to craft miniature models, and it's not hard to see why he loved them so much that he decided to put an entire country of them in his park.

Every Disneyland fan knows that Storybook Land's first incarnation was an attraction called the Canal Boats of the World, intended as a showcase of models of international landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower and Taj Mahal. However, the project ran so short of budget that it opened with no models at all, and would have been nothing but a tour of mounds of dirt had the landscapers not transplanted weeds from the parking lot at the last minute for greenery. Fantasyland might have evolved very differently if it had worked out.* Thanks to that fizzle, we wound up with Storybook Land instead.

Last year when I ran my 60 Diamonds series, Storybook Land was the first one on the list. I put forth the opinion then that it was underrated, and I still think so. In fact, for several years there I was one of the people underrating it. It wasn't that I didn't like the ride; it was just really low priority.

I'm not sure what changed, but nowadays I think I ride Storybook about every other time I visit Disneyland. It's not my favorite, not by a long shot, but it's one of the more uniquely charming attractions in the park. For one thing, even sixty years after its debut, it remains resolutely old-fashioned. A few scenes have been changed out for newer ones, a couple of the boats have been renamed in honor of more recent characters, but by and large Storybook Land seems to delight in celebrating relatively obscure vintage material from the Disney library.

For instance, I could mention the music loop that plays in the queue area.** It naturally consists of music from Disney movies...but no special effort seems to have been put into making the loop a preview of the ride itself as such. Of the seven films represented in the loop, only three also appear in miniature form on the ride. Furthermore, two of them aren't even animated and have been seen by probably fewer than 1% of park guests. I haven't even seen Babes in Toyland, that I recall. That's the most recent film on the playlist, by the way...and it came out in 1961. I'm fairly impressed that this loop has managed to resist being updated, especially since the Imagineers started tinkering with the attraction in the Nineties, when Disney's music as well as its animation was undergoing a Renaissance.

And then there are the boats. In classic fashion, these are named after female Disney characters,*** but it's not the barrage of Princesses you might expect given recent marketing efforts. Sure, there's Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel and Belle...but also Daisy (Duck), Alice, Wendy, and Tinker Bell. Even more surprisingly, each of the three Good Fairies from Sleeping Beauty—Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather—has a boat. So does Faline, who isn't even humanoid. So does Katrina. You know...Katrina?

Oh come now, you can't forget Katrina.

This gal:

If you're still scratching your head, this is the minx who egged on Brom Bones and Ichabod Crane in their rivalry for her affections. Not at all the sort of girl Disney likes to promote these days...but she still gets a boat on Storybook Land. They haven't overwritten her with Jasmine or Tiana or (god forbid) Elsa.

Another thing I like about the boats is that the designers didn't feel the need to underscore the point by including pictures of the characters in question. Each boat features the name of the character in a font reminiscent of her movie's title, plus some floral flourishes in an appropriate style and maybe a small creature or two: someone acquainted with her, but not the gal herself. It's a refreshing design choice in an era where you can't walk through a retail space without tripping over pictures of trademarked Princesses.

Come to think of it, there is very little character imagery in Storybook Land as a whole. There's the Monstro cave entrance (if you consider Monstro to be a character per se), the tiny statue of Peter Pan in the London Park model, and...that's it. You hear characters far more than you see them...and you only hear them in bits and snatches. The stars of the show are the miniatures themselves and the creative landscaping.

And they are wonderful miniatures—constructed to a 1/12 scale so all the designers need do is convert feet to inches to get the proportions right, and exquisitely detailed right down to working lightbulbs (and working doors so the maintenance crew can reach in to replace them). Befitting the “low-Marketing” vibe of the attraction, the locations depicted are not, for the most part, the flashiest ones seen in their respective films; we see villages and towns and cottages rather than the dramatic scenery of Wonderland or Neverland or Pleasure Island. This makes sense in the context of Fantasyland as a whole—it would be redundant for Storybook Land to contain such intense scenery when just yards away are dark rides allowing you to visit those places more intimately.

The aggregate effect on this ride, however, is to make Storybook Land more of a gateway to worlds of fantasy, than a world of fantasy in itself. Indeed, one consequence of the scenes being rendered in miniature is that we can imagine we are viewing them from a distance—we are approaching the stories, not there yet. The models are more than pictures in the storybook for which the attraction is named, but less than the places themselves. Storybook Land is what folklorists refer to as a liminal space, a boundary or area of overlap between one place and another. Once we pass through Monstro's mouth (a great example of a Threshold Guardian, by the way, as well as being an awesome “face your fear” moment for preschoolers), we are no longer in the mundane everyday world, but nor are we quite in the magical worlds.

That, I think, is the source of Storybook Land's charm—it's not just that so much care has been put into creating and maintaining these scenes, but that they represent something very different from a typical Disneyland ride. We fans love to praise Disney's knack for bringing us into stories via the ride medium rather than just telling them, but there is something to be said for the way this ride does neither, but rather brushes us along the edges of the stories. The weakest parts, to me, are the parts where it tries to impress us with big show pieces—the rose arches and Cave of Wonders from Aladdin, Elsa belting out “Let It Go” from her ice castle. (By no coincidence, these parts were added to the ride in order to promote then-current movies.)

So yeah, Storybook Land is good stuff, and good in ways that are not necessarily immediately obvious. However, there are a few ways in which I think it could be improved:

Slow down. I don't remember the ride being over this quickly when I was a child. Now, I'm sure my sense of time's passage has shifted as I've grown up, but the fact remains that the boat jets by each scene too fast to really take in the details. The ride is not so popular that the operators can't afford to slow down a smidgen, maybe even briefly pause next to each model so the guests can admire it. This breakneck speed also requires the Cast Member to rattle off their spiel at uncomfortable speeds, then gun it for the next scene and the next part of the spiel. Which leads me to my next point:

Give the CMs more freedom with the spiel. The Jungle Cruise and Storybook Land are both spieling attractions, but there's a huge difference. Jungle Cruise skippers are working from a template, while Storybook guides are reciting a rigid script. I'm not saying the latter should be as jokey and irreverent as the former, but they should be allowed to improvise a bit, to make the role their own and maybe even emphasize their favorite aspects of a model. It would do a lot to improve Storybook's rather twee reputation if riding it didn't always get you the exact same lines delivered in the same syrupy tones. Imagine the possibilities if, for example, some guides focused on the romance in tales, others on the magic and mysticism, and still others on the craftsmanship of the models themselves. Each ride could be a different experience.

Make better use of the Disney film library. As refreshing as it is that this attraction has preserved so much of its original material even as Disney has gone marketing-mad, there is a lot of wasted or underused potential in the allocation of space here. Does Aladdin really need three segments all to itself? If it and The Little Mermaid were both deemed worthy of models, why not Beauty and the Beast? Disney has added enough fairy tales to its lineup that I wouldn't mind seeing more of them represented, especially since space for full-blown attractions is so limited. The key would be in designing scenes to maintain that sense of coziness and liminality.

As for where these additional scenes could possibly be placed, I have a few ideas. I mentioned above that Aladdin claims more real estate than it really needs. Reduce its footprint to the Cave of Wonders, and that opens up the entire Agrabah pad to use for something else. The space currently taken by the rose arches could also be transformed, although Disney tries to keep the models in spots where they can't be seen from the general walkways. Beyond that...would it be beyond the pale to suggest that perhaps the Giant Patchwork Quilt doesn't need to be quite so giant? Of all the Disney productions referenced on this ride, “Lullaby Land” is the most obscure by quite a wide margin.**** Maybe it doesn't need an entire hillside all to itself? Landscaping that area is tricky because of the Casey Junior tracks, but they managed to find space to relocate Toad Hall; it could be worth a shot.

Despite minor issues such as these, I maintain that Storybook Land deserves more praise than it typically gets. In a park growing top-heavy with thrill rides and state-of-the-art special effects, I'm glad we still have this example of simple and humble beauty, providing an alternate perspective on the themes of Fantasyland.

* For one thing, Walt hated to repeat himself, so we might never have gotten “it's a small world” if there had already been one international boat ride around the place. Sobering thought, that.

** The speakers are actually located on the opposite bank in the hedges, which is why no good recordings of the loop are available.

*** With one exception: Flower, the (male) skunk from Bambi.

**** Here, have a YouTube video, but...it's pretty weird. Don't say I didn't warn you: