At one point during a recent Zoom conversation, Rohde downplays his work. “A niche,” he says, noting that so much of it was a diversion from Disney’s usual projects.
Animal Kingdom, for instance, has a heavy message about conservation. Aulani in Hawaii explores the cultural history of the islands. Villages Nature at Disneyland Paris is an experiment in sustainable tourism. Heck, even Pandora — The World of Avatar is about the triumph of the environment and the horrors of an endangered species.
“I do wonder — I mean, that’s a niche — how it mutates in order to survive, once it’s not this person,” Rohde says, reflecting on his imprint and how it will evolve without him. “Not that I held it up with my bare hands, but the work we do is a feedback loop between the person doing it and the nature of the work. So I expect to see this stuff mutate as another generation of people engage it.
“It will change,” he continues. “But one of the things that is interesting about all of this is the degree to which this work demonstrates how serious the company can be.”
Joe Rohde in his Altadena backyard. The longtime Imagineer is moving on from Disney.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
The nearly decade-long challenge of bringing Animal Kingdom to life has been well documented, be it the financial feasibility of constructing a 110-acre wildlife reserve or the legwork needed to simply show that Disney could approach the caretaking of so many animals with, well, seriousness. There were also heated discussions about the tone of Animal Kingdom — this isn’t a “Zootopia”-like world of talking cartoon animals, but one that grounds its settings in the influence of Africa and Asia and reflects humanitarian causes such as conservation and the dangers of poaching and commercialism.
It is North America’s most detailed theme park, one where realism tops fantasy. “I had established, well known Imagineers working on that project who were outraged at the idea of what we were doing,” Rohde says today.
“Not just realism, this politicized, gritty realism that’s about real-world stuff,” Rohde says of the project’s contrast to the romanticized New Orleans Square of Disneyland or World Showcase of Florida’s Epcot. “It was, ‘What are you doing? That’s not what we do.’ In a sense they’re right. We were trying to extend a paradigm, and you can’t do that because you want to do it or you think it’s a good idea. You have to prove it.”
A look toward Expedition Everest in Walt Disney World’s Animal Kingdom park.
(Disney)
Animal Kingdom was a natural place to experiment with such an approach. The stars, of course, are the animals that lend an air of unpredictability to the experience.
But so too does the very design, which almost immediately offers guests diverging paths and invites attendees to not sit back and be entertained but to lean in and explore. “You can choose to ignore detail and just come to ride two rides,” as Rohde himself said on a media tour of Pandora before its 2017 opening. But if you do, he added, “you’re wasting your time at Animal Kingdom. Please pay attention to detail.”
Those who pay attention are constantly rewarded. See: Expedition Everest, one of Walt Disney World’s most popular attractions, in which the coaster is modeled after a steam train. Since putting a steam engine on a roller coaster isn’t advised, there’s some below-track trickery to create the steam effect. And since steam trains don’t clickety-clack in the same way as a coaster, the ride’s anti-rollback system had to be rethought to more accurately mimic a train.
Most guests likely wouldn’t notice if such details were absent, but it’s an extension of the original Disneyland idea that if guests are to have a starring role, the sense that this is theater should disappear. Perhaps authenticity is an aid in such an endeavor? As Rohde says, “What happens when we switch from fantasy to vérité?”
“It’s about freeing you,” Jupiter says.
“His methodology, his parks, are all about them being a gateway to your adventure,” she adds, noting he taught his teams to use stories and brands as familiar entry points to “spiral out” onto larger themes rather than to “spiral in” on recognizable characters and movie scenes. “People confuse plot in a theme park to the plot of a story or a backstory. This is your world. This is your plot.”
It’s a belief that theme parks are more than rides or characters or so-called “intellectual property.” We like all those things, of course, but the difference between product and themed entertainment is when the latter is used as a vehicle to deliver something grander, to use design to show something familiar, but then to lead us to a place of curiosity.
Guardians of the Galaxy — Mission: Breakout! is Rohde’s biggest contribution to the Anaheim parks.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Consider a talk Rohde gave last year at the Getty Museum.
Alongside representations of Disney park staples, Rohde included images of work by artists such as Thomas Moran, considered one of America’s foremost landscape painters, and Caspar David Friedrich, a leader of the German Romantic movement, in his presentation. A thesis began to emerge as the artworks intermixed with pictures of thrill rides such as Disneyland’s runaway mine train and Walt Disney World’s Expedition Everest. To understand the reason so many pilgrimage to a place such as Disneyland or Walt Disney World, Rohde posited, we need to rethink how we talk about theme parks.
“They are kind of like walking into those great landscape paintings of the 19th century,” Rohde said of the parks as depictions of Moran’s paintings appeared. “They are very consciously modeled on their sensibilities, sometimes so directly so that they are almost direct quotations. Most of you probably recognize Big Thunder Mountain. Thomas Moran.”
Heady words for someone who had no dreams of working for Disney.
‘The edge of real’
In conversation, Rohde regularly punctuates a point he wants to make by ending a sentence with the declaration “this is a thing” or a variation such as “that is a thing.” While many an Imagineer has grown up idolizing the parks or even working at them though high school and college, for Rohde, Disney was not much of a thing.
“I was not that tuned into that,” he says. He spent a significant portion of his childhood in Hawaii, where his father worked as a cameraman, before his family moved closer to the film industry.
In his early 20s, Rohde taught in the theater department at the San Fernando’s Valley’s Chaminade College Preparatory, where his mother had also worked as a theater instructor. The father of one of his students happened to be a Disney executive, who recruited him to work for Imagineering. Rohde blew him off.
The showcase of Walt Disney World’s Animal Kingdom is the Kilimanjaro Safaris attraction, a re-creation of an African safari.
(Disney)
But realizing that Imagineering was closer to the film industry than his gig at Chaminade, he relented, starting in 1980 in the model shop, where he struggled, bouncing around various projects. Rohde was part of teams that worked on the Mexico Pavilion at Epcot and later the Michael Jackson-staring sci-fi 3-D film “Captain EO,” for which he helped devise the film’s original characters.
A bit of luck, as well as his love of theater and extravagant costumed parties, forever changed his career path. In the mid-1980s, in a Walt Disney World area that is now part of the shopping/dining center Disney Springs, the company was developing a nightclub-focused locale called Pleasure Island. The executive in charge, after visiting Rohde’s home, which is filled with masks, art and trinkets from his world travels, essentially gave Rohde his first major break.
The resulting project, the Adventurers Club, was ahead of its time, presciently predicting today’s all-encompassing theme park worlds populated with living characters, ongoing narratives and unexpected interactions. Filled with puppets and not-so-hidden rooms and goofy songs, the Adventurers Club was more or less immersive theater with tropical drinks, all dedicated to a love of exploration.
“It foreshadowed Animal Kingdom,” Rohde says. “Is that real real? Is that make-believe real? I can’t find the edge of real. Many of those artifacts were totally real. Some of what came out of people’s mouths was totally historical and real. Some was not.”
It’s important to note that Rohde was building upon a legacy. These concepts hearkened back to Walt-era Disneyland, when shops throughout Adventureland and New Orleans Square were celebrations of distant locales full of one-of-a-kind merchandise and props. What was different was how the Adventurers Club made the communal feel personal, and how it shifted Rohde’s thinking in how and why we’re drawn to themed environments.
“When people think of the Adventurers Club, everybody focuses on adventure — the artifacts, the spears, the carvings,” he says. “But really, thematically, emotionally, the Adventurers Club is all about ‘club.’ It’s all about coming to a place where you’re made to feel special. You’re being welcomed, and weirdly included and being recognized. It was the club of the Adventures Club that made it work, not the adventure. It could have been the Fishermans Club.”
This was a pivot from a passive to more active approach to entertainment, a tradition soon entrenched by Animal Kingdom and one that has extended to Universal’s the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, to Disney’s “Star Wars”-themed Galaxy’s Edge lands and to the experiential art of the interactive exhibition spaces created by the New Mexico-based Meow Wolf. It’s also, for those paying close attention, how Rohde views his daily life. Design shouldn’t flat-out mimic our world, but it should make it more … fun.
Early in the pandemic, for instance, Rohde spent weeks re-imagining the cracks in the sidewalk outside his home, crafting fantastical worlds and asking social media followers to theorize who could live in them, what their history could be, and what it may be like to visit them. It was a creative exercise, but also a reminder, says Jupiter, to be present in the moment.
It was also a love letter, amid our current stay-at-home lifestyle, to expertly designed themed environments.
“These environments are needed,” Rohde says. “Not that they wouldn’t be needed if someone chose to do them to as urban design in the urban environment, but they tend to not. I think there is a profound feeling that you get from the sense of unity. Whether you believe in Disney or not, whether you sit in the theater with your arms crossed trying not to have this thing affect you, there is a story for you at some point in your life.”
And there, ultimately, is the key take-away from Rohde’s work at Disney and how it will live — and morph — without him. When Rohde talks about, say, landscape artists of the 19th century and how their work set a template for the modern theme park, he’s making a point.
Theme parks don’t exist in a vacuum; they transcend the brands that own them. They are part of our shared story. That is a thing.
