Cultural Imperialism

Yup, this is France. Or at least, it's IN France.

If you ever want to laugh at the superior attitude of the French, you should read about the uproar from critics when Disney announced the planned building of Disneyland Paris. More importation of American culture! It was called a "cultural Chernobyl." One journalist went so far as to write, "I wish with all my heart that the rebels would set fire to Disney."

Others were more accepting, pointing out that France has started adopting American culture all on their own. English creeps insidiously into French language, and it takes an official government organization (Le Académie francaise) in order to ward of the Anglicization.

From the initial announcement of the park opening to the cries of dismay and accusations of American cultural imperialism, Disneyland has struggled with where it sits on the cultural spectrum. Mostly, the critics have calmed down by now about encroaching American values, 22 years after its opening. The park itself balances precariously between being French and being American, staying mostly American but with occasional nods to its French location through language and over-use of Beauty and the Beast.

Disney itself didn't really seem to know what it should be. In 1992 when Disney finally opened a resort in Europe, it was called Euro Disneyland. In 1994 (maybe in case anyone would be confused where they were) it became Euro Disney Resort Paris. 2002 came Disneyland Resort Paris. And today, it is Disneyland Paris. Or Parc Disneyland. Actually, it's Disneyland Paris the resort, or Parc Disneyland, the park.

Even they don't seem to know. Here are two different entrances to the park, both leading into the same place. True one is French and the other is English, but they don't seem to be able to decide if it's Park or Paris. The Disney fans just refer to it as DLP - simultaneously covering "park" and "Paris" at the same time.

For much of its life DLP seems to have had some identity issues. The audience, however, comes from everywhere. While Disneyland Anaheim draws largely from southern California and Walt Disney World Orlando from all over the US (with some overseas visitors), the guests at DLP seem to come from all over Europe. Standing in line for Peter Pan, you might hear some German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, British, French, Polish, and probably at least a few languages you won't recognize. There's also a bit of Chinese and even Japanese.

The sheer linguistic diversity of the park is staggering, especially on Easter Week when the crowds peak and mill all around you. Disney has done a good job of keeping up with the languages, hiring cast members who speak both French and English and often at least one other language, and providing brochures in six languages.

It also has gone and fitted one of its auditoriums with headphones tunable to five different language channels so that if you can't follow the French narration, perhaps one of these other ones will work.

Every seat has a set of these to let you watch the show.

But translation gets more complex when it's live, and simultaneous translation is both exhausting for the translator and a wildly expensive skill to have working 12 hours a day so Disney doesn't do that in the shows. In the "Stitch Live" show where an escaping Stitch talks live from his spaceship to children in the audience, they alternate between English and French shows.

Which kind of works, except that Stitch doesn't know his Welsh and Scottish names, so when a kid says his name is Carwyn, Stitch asks him to repeat it three times before giving up and saying "Welcome to Carin from Wales!"

Communications also extends beyond language and names.  Humor and spontaneity become incredibly hard to do at DLP with its multicultural audience. Germans, French, and Brits don't really share the same sense of humor.

DLP's saving grace is the shared common culture of Disney mythology. People arrive already knowing the Little Mermaid and Snow White and Rapunzel, whom they've seen on screen at home in their own language. With enough references to these links, the experience holds together for any culture that has been exposed to the Disney stories, allowing people to draw from much more than just what they are seeing during the day in order to build richer experiences.

Nowhere else but at DLP have I seen such a diversity of people from completely different cultures sharing the same experience. They walk through the turnstiles, step onto Main Street, USA, and explore different lands. They eat popcorn and hot dogs, meet Mickey Mouse, ride the Mississippi steam boat through the bayou.

And here I can see the French critic's objection. Disneyland is a slice of not just America but of Americana. It's folklore, history, culture. Plopped into the middle of the French countryside, it not only attracts the French to enjoy it, but invites people from all over Europe to come to France and see America.

Ouch.

Prejudice, Part II

When I rebooted my Disney addiction by taking my niece (12) and nephew (8) to Walt Disney World in 2011, they were shocked that kids not that much younger than them were riding around in strollers. We saw kids stuffed into strollers with gangly arms and legs not even fitting, dragging on the ground as their parents pushed them through the park.

Now I'm no parent, so I don't know if these kids were 5 or 6 or even 10 years old, but clearly they were able to walk. Have we gotten so lazy as a society that even kids that age, known for their boundless amounts of energy when excited, can't go to Disneyland on their own two feet?

I started looking at stroller occupants when I visited Japan. While Japan has its fair share of strollers, the kids never seemed more than 2 or 3 years old there. And even then, most of them ran along in the park on their own.

My first reaction, of course, was to condemn the parents who let older kids ride in strollers, as well as developing a fair amount of contempt for the kids themselves. I stewed in this holier-than-thou attitude for several trips, watching these lazy big kids kick back with their giant sodas and thinking of their future lifetime of fitness issues and weighing down our health care system.

But a lightbulb went off around the 289th time I encountered this site in the US. Disneyland is the ONLY place where I see kids this old in strollers. I don't see them in the mall, or the city park, or Safeway. Kids everywhere else in America were just like those in Japan - riding around in strollers until the age or 2 or 3, then walking around on their own.

So what's happening at Disney? Walking. Lots and lots of walking.

On an average day at Disney, a person taking a sane loop around the park can expect to clock 6-10 miles. This accounts for all the zigzagging through lines, doubling back to get a churro, running to catch a parade. If that person isn't sane - like if they were me and running around gathering Fastpasses in both parks in order to skip lines - they can expect to do 10-15 miles a day. Many people spend consecutive days at Disney, so this easily gets to 20 or 30 miles on a trip. (Sidenote: one day I will go on a weight loss camp, and it will consist entirely of spending all day in the park for a week. No churros or turkey legs.)

No normal kid is able to handle this amount of walking, probably not until they're into their tweens. If a parent wants to make sure their family gets to experience the entire park, they need to bring or rent equipment to make this possible. With the park opening at 8am and closing at midnight during peak hours, kids are already up early and down late. Mealtimes are disrupted and overstimulation is everywhere. Better use the stroller to save energy where possible, so they can enjoy all that the park has to offer.

This makes a lot of sense to me, but it doesn't explain what's happening in Japan.

I've been to Disney Tokyo about 10 times now, and I don't think the Japanese kids are as tuckered out from their walking as the American kids are from their sitting. I do notice lots of Japanese families just sitting in the shade on their picnic blankets, waiting for a parade or just letting the kids play games with each other. They're not crisscrossing the park seeking Dumbo for the third time.

And therein lies the difference. Americans have created a society of doers - we value getting things done and we'll move mountains to get to the bottom of that list of things we want to do. We'll facilitate our children getting those things done too, in whatever ways we can. They might be asleep between Small World and Peter Pan, but by golly they will get on every single one of those rides before the end of the trip.

There are some very different values at work here. I'm not making any judgements (for a change) about what's right and wrong. But it's possible to be the parent who makes sure your kid does everything there is to do, or to be the parent who goes at your kid's pace, even if that pace means missing most of the available experiences.

The strollers with big kids don't look like diabetes-creating machines to me at all any more. They're an expression of these values we've formed as a society - about maximizing experiences, about choosing more rather than less, about making sure the pack keeps moving together at the speed of the fastest rather than the slowest member. These values have helped us achieve an awful lot of things as a society, but it leaves a gnawing feeling in my gut about how we got here.

Too philosophical for a Disney blog? Let me know if I should be covering Disney snack foods in the next entry. I hear Disneyland Paris has Nutella-filled Mickey Mouse bread rolls.

Looking forward to these snacks. One of many examples found on one of many Disney food blogs.