-
Welcome to the WDWMAGIC.COM Forums!
Please take a look around, and feel free to sign up and join the community.
News Remy's Ratatouille Adventure coming to Epcot
- Thread starter wdwmagic
- Start date
Chelsey Boren
Member
Darn
lazyboy97o
Well-Known Member
Have people just become completely unaware that shutters had an actual purpose? That’s they’re actually supposed to be able to close and are not just something nailed to the side of windows?
peter11435
Well-Known Member
Disney’s been making that mistake for decades now.
owlsandcoffee
Well-Known Member
Weirdly enough decorative shutters are a thing. I think Disney loses something though when they focus on the decorative, rather than the practical. Liberty Square even themes their shutters to the time period. Everything should be used to tell a story.
So has suburbia for the past half century.
I want to slam my head into a wall seeing windows boarded up with plywood during major storms and those windows have decorative-only shutters. If they were real shutters that could close, you wouldn't need to keep hammering in plywood for every major storm!
lazyboy97o
Well-Known Member
All sorts of architectural nonsense are a thing. Decorative shutters are an imitation of actual shutters which means they should look plausible. The story of this area is too much McMansion pastiche than traditional French architecture.
180º
Well-Known Member
I’m very much with you on the shutters-that-won’t-shut hate train, but I don’t see any of that in this area. Would you mind pointing it out? Disney usually does pretty well with this.
EDIT: Nevermind; found it. They’re tacking on balconies below the windows on the blue façade, so the shutters there are useless.
lazyboy97o
Well-Known Member
The ridiculous blue building. The second level window/door things that make no sense because there is an actual door right there for scale. Flower boxes are being installed at the bottom that would block the shutters from being closed.
180º
Well-Known Member
Yup, I caught it right after I posted. We truly live in a post-Riviera world.
Animaniac93-98
Well-Known Member
It's more like Shanghai's Mickey Avenue* than EPCOT, unfortunately.
*which also has a Ratatouille reference
lazyboy97o
Well-Known Member
That is a very good comparison. Mickey Ave is a similarly disjointed mess of scale and proportion. Like far too many recent projects it was designed with this idea that forced perspective is just making things smaller, but there is no consistency in how things are made smaller or how they relate to other objects that provide a reference to scale. That's part of what is so maddening about the blue building. That second level door sets a scale that is not kept consistent within the facade itself but also the adjacent grey facade. They're adding a crane above the door which is itself not something unusual but it establishes a references for the second level floor. The height of the windows establishes a very tall floor-to-ceiling height with the flower boxes being just under eye level blocking your view out of the window. If the windows aren't oddly high, then there's a weird split level thing going on but that means you hoist something into the door and then still have to carry it up a few feet of stairs, and the whole point of the door is to skip the stairs. These same 7 foot tall windows are on the third floor, which is fine except that the grey facade tries to use forced perspective for its third floor. Those windows are now obviously too small because there are larger windows immediately adjacent for comparison. The blue facade is this jumbled mess that tries to ignore the actual floors of the building of which it is a part and maintain the false levels of the green facade with the ridiculous cornice, but that effort at maintaining a certain scale is then immediately ignored.
Animaniac93-98
Well-Known Member
What's frustrating is that what you're describing is not so much an issue of budget, as it is poor design choices.
You'd think an expensive design firm that wrote the book on theme entertainment could do better when adding on to an existing example.
Animaniac93-98
Well-Known Member
Place de Remy was designed from scratch for Disney Studios Paris. It's the Pixar version of Paris as depicted in its own self contained courtyard.
France at EPCOT is supposed to take a more authentic, though still romanticized approach.
Disney tried to recycle as much as they could of the WDSP exterior, while also looking to cut corners on new additions [painted flats] and it just doesn't fit with the existing pavilion. Yes, it's all "French", but that doesn't mean any French inspired design will work. Material, shape and colour all matter and they really could (and should) have done better.
France at EPCOT is supposed to take a more authentic, though still romanticized approach.
Disney tried to recycle as much as they could of the WDSP exterior, while also looking to cut corners on new additions [painted flats] and it just doesn't fit with the existing pavilion. Yes, it's all "French", but that doesn't mean any French inspired design will work. Material, shape and colour all matter and they really could (and should) have done better.
aladdin2007
Well-Known Member
at least its all sorta kinda on the backside of the pavilion and not in your face along WS...we can still pretend we have the original France pavilion, if they would just bring back Impressions de France and get rid of that hideous sing along.
lazyboy97o
Well-Known Member
This project is not alone in the issue being one of design and not budget. In some ways it is the problem of people wanting to be theme park designers. They study theme parks, not the real world and specialization means there is a disconnect between aesthetic “creative” design and infrastructural “facility” design. All of this is compounded by the inward, self-referential focus on being “Disney” instead of creating a place. How something should work is now of less concern as the environment is no longer an imitation of the real but a knowing imitation of the fake. There is no purpose beyond being ornament to be counted as “theme” has been reduced to a measurement of stuff.
It doesn’t help that even in the real world we have surrounded ourselves with the same sort of bad, cheap design that equates a lot of foam junk glued on to gargantuan spaces with status and prestige.
Last edited:
I’m sure if they agree with you they will open it.
EricsBiscuit
Well-Known Member
I disagree. I don’t think the goal is to “imitate the real.” The real is what we’re trying to escape from in a theme park. The imagination says Paris is a place of beautiful architecture, good food, great culture, etc. While the real Paris has all those things, it also has quite a bit of other shall we say less desirable elements that shouldn’t be replicated in a theme park. That’s why it’s important to imitate the “fake” as you call it. Play off what people think of when they hear “Paris.” This is IMO a successful design strategy for a theme park or any entertainment facility.
edit: Epcot is not a museum or university, it never was. It has and always will be a theme park meant to entertain its guests. That’s not a knock. That’s not saying theme parks are lesser. It’s just that the goal is different.
lazyboy97o
Well-Known Member
Romanticizing is not imitating the fake in the sense of my comments. The real is spaces occupied by humans. It's the difference between a window that is actually too small creating the illusion of being habitable and one that is obviously a small window with nothing behind it. When people think of Paris they don't think of inoperable shutters, bizarre split levels and fake Mansard roofs.