Walt Disney's return as a robot? His granddaughter is against it

“I think I burst into tears. To me, it didn't look like him at all.” Last April, the Disney group presented to the public a draft of a sculpture representing Walt Disney (1901-1966). It was intended to illustrate the ongoing research to create an animatronic of Mickey Mouse's creator – a sort of robot that would move and speak like the American producer and animator – delivering excerpts from speeches and presentations.

This animatronic must be at the heart of Walt Disney's A Magical Life , a new show launching this summer at the Disneyland Resort in California, which will celebrate its 70th anniversary. Opened on July 17, 1955, by Walt Disney, it is the oldest of all the group's theme parks.

The animatronic is intended to represent Walt Disney in 1963, when he was 62 years old. At the time, his granddaughter Joanna Miller was 7 years old, and she has vivid memories of her beloved grandfather. Interviewed by the Los Angeles Times , she said she burst into tears when she discovered the robot project. As early as November 2024, in a Facebook post, she had deemed the Disney group's initiative "dehumanizing."

Joanna Miller's argument: she maintains that her grandfather, although a technology enthusiast, would never have wanted to become an animatronic. And that her daughter, Diane Marie Disney (1933-2013), Joanna's mother, had also declined such a project when she was president of the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco.

In a letter to Disney CEO Bob Iger, Joanna Miller wrote that she "speaks on behalf of her grandfather and mother." She is the only one speaking out among the nine heirs of Walt Disney and his brother Roy, his business partner (and minority shareholders in the group). But her first problem, the Los Angeles Times points out, is that Walt Disney is dead. So are his daughter Diane Marie and most of the people who could have testified to his desire not to impersonate a robot. No written record of his wish has been found.

The second problem, the heiress is only too aware of: “Her family's biggest mistake, according to her, was selling its rights to the Walt Disney name, image, and likeness to the group [that bears his name] in 1981, in exchange for $46.2 million in stock,” reports the Los Angeles daily. That's around €40 million. To put it bluntly: the Disney heirs no longer have a say.

The controversy, however, highlights that creating an animatronic of a real person who has descendants raises different issues than producing a robot of a character from a Disney production, whether Snow White or Pirates of the Caribbean, the Los Angeles Times argues. However, according to the Californian daily, it seems that some among the younger generations simply no longer know that Walt Disney, before being a brand, was a person of flesh and blood. From this point of view, the controversy could have a positive effect.