Voila! Disney Invades Europe. Will the French Resist?

A child’s smile, lighting up as he enters Euro Disneyland, knows no language barrier. Nor does the thrill of fear scooting up a young French spine at the sight of Monstro the Whale at Les Voyages de Pinocchio or the dragon in Le Chateau de la Belle au Bois Dormant (Sleeping Beauty’s Castle). When a kid alights from the Big Thunder Mountain railway and exclaims “Genial!” everyone nearby can tell he means “Awesome!” You need no French diploma to read a gamine’s serene exhaustion when she staggers out on penguin legs at the end of a 12-hour day at Euro Disneyland, Europe’s biggest, drop-dead- gorgeousest theme park, which opened last Sunday.

Theme park? Think bigger. Mickey Mouse’s custodians have spent $4.4 billion on an all-weather wonderland comprising a high-tech retro-cute amusement park, six ambitious new hotels (containing 5,200 rooms), 50 restaurants, a convention center, a campground, an 18-hole golf course and a cluster of nightclubs. They also got one big political hotfoot.

Euro Disney is not a French adaptation of the company’s parks in California and Florida. The Gallic accent is muted. There is no Moliere’s Magic Theater, no Mad Marcel Proust’s teacup ride. Euro Disney is the familiar all-American park somehow landed on 5,000 acres of wheat fields and beet fields in Marne- la-Vallee, 20 miles east of Paris. The attractions do not presume to explain Europe to Europe; instead they celebrate America the bland and beautiful, and reinvent it, Disney-style. Hence the transcontinental, cross- cultural ruckus.

Few sights are as droll as that of the European intelligentsia trying to have a rotten time. Five years ago, when Disney executives announced plans for the park at a ceremony in front of the Paris Bourse, they were pelted with eggs and tomatoes. Where their children (who buy 10 million copies of Le Journal de Mickey) see a mouse, French intellectuals smell a rat. They called the project “Euro Disgrace,” “Euro Dismal,” “a cultural Chernobyl.”

But when the French select Mickey Rourke as a patron saint and Mickey Mouse as the antichrist, they are simply proving their obsession with things American. U.S. pop is their guilty pleasure. The French love American culture even as they love to hate it. Four of their five top-grossing films are from Hollywood, tepid versions of U.S. game shows blanket French TV, and it isn’t just American tourists who patronize the Burger King restaurants on the Champs Elysees.

To be fair, there is no consensus among the French. (How could there be? They’re French!) The naysayers — those who approach someone returning from a visit to the site and ask, with anticipatory glee, “Well, is it grotesque?” — are simply not Euro Disney’s customers. One must remind them that this is an amusement park, a place of diversion for children and their indulgent parents. Attendance is not mandatory. Neither is the wish of the locals that an American entertainment complex take on Impressionist colors (though Euro Disney does, handsomely) and French subtitles.

So Euro Disney offers few sops to European traditions. Wine may be as mother’s milk to the French, but they will find only “mocktails” at the restaurants inside the park; they must get their hand stamped at the turnstile, walk a few yards to the nearest hotel bar and drown their rancor there. The Pinocchio and Star Tours rides, among others, provide French dialogue, but visitors who have no English will miss the verbal nuances that lend the park its impish wit.

The folks behind the reception desk at the Hotel Santa Fe speak an aggregate of 13 languages. Perhaps not all perfectly. Prince Charles has said that the universal language is bad English, and much of that can be heard at Euro Disney. “I gezz zare was a mizunderstood,” apologizes a French staff member who boasts, “I speak British.” Fractured franglais is also spoken here. At Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show — a dinner theater where you eat chili and spareribs while watching Annie Oakley fire at cowbells that play La Marseillaise — the host tells his auditors, “If yer hungry, let me hear you shout, ‘Nous avez faim!’ ” But there can be charm in Babel when the tower has such comely flying buttresses, and when the 12,000 villagers (i.e., cast members) are so eager to please. Where else will you hear a pretty attendant chirp “Bon appetit!” as she hands you a box of sugared popcorn?

This arrogance, if such it is, flows from the challenge Disney believes it can uniquely meet: to entertain everyone, of every age, from every land. Walt Disney proved that this was possible with his first cartoon features and his first theme park. To aim for every taste is to sacrifice tang — the movies and parks can lack edge; the thrills may be as flat as the main courses in some of the specialty restaurants. But it is a noble goal, beyond commerce or compromise — especially today, in an age when every form of pop culture has at least as many enemies as fans. With Beauty and the Beast and Euro Disney, Walt’s successors try and, substantially, triumph.

On a second-floor window in the park’s grand thoroughfare, there is a legend: “Main Street Marching Band, leading the parade since 1884. Conductors: Michael Eisner, Frank Wells. We work, while you whistle.” In fact, Eisner, Disney’s CEO, and Wells, the company’s president, have headed the procession only since 1984, when they turned Mickey’s mausoleum — a slumbering empire of tranquil theme parks and tepid movies — into Walt II. Or, rather, Walt 2, for Disney has expanded exponentially, its ambition and energy personified by the two bosses. At 4 a.m. one day last week, each man could be seen wandering the park like a parent wrapping a beautiful new toy for his child on Christmas Eve, or like the child waiting to unwrap it. They were showing by example how Disney does things, with Japanese-style management that predates the Japanese system: order, loyalty, pitching in, a fanatical and productive meticulousness.

Most of the park’s attractions will be familiar to veterans of the California and Florida venues, though some have been retooled and upgraded. La Cabane des Robinson (Swiss Family Robinson Tree House) includes cunning new cave trails of “rock” artfully sculpted by the Disney team. Pirates of the Caribbean is a spookier and more elaborate cruise among brigand lowlifes. Big Thunder Mountain has been refined into one of the great coaster rides, with new ascents and dips and two hurtling trips in the dark.

Three attractions — one flop, two smashes — are new to the world. The Visionarium film, shown on nine curved screens that wreathe the audience, is the least of the lot: a wan drama, with few aerial thrills, that puts Jules Verne (Michel Piccoli) into the time machine of his friend H.G. Wells (Jeremy Irons), with help from a friendly baggage handler (Gerard Depardieu). In the dungeon of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, a powder-puff piece of surreal estate inspired by Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, reposes a fabulous Audio- Animatronics dragon that snorts steam, flashes its stoplight eyes and bares claws nearly as long as Barbra Streisand’s in The Prince of Tides. Kids love teasing the reptile; take them to see it. And lose them, if you care to, in Alice’s Curious Labyrinth, a 400-yd. maze dominated by a tennis court-size Cheshire cat painted in flowers. You can get lost — really lost — among the high hedges and the pop-up Carroll characters.

Walt Disney World in Orlando is a theme park with hotels attached. Euro Disney is the reverse: a spectacular sprawl that confirms the company as a premier force in modern architecture. A decade ago, as architects began to shrug off their Modernist doldrums, they saw in Disney’s park designs an attractive blend of wit, glamour and function. Suddenly there was nothing wrong with places that were fun to look at and to live in. Eisner took advantage of the new spirit and hired such Postmodernist master builders as Michael Graves (for the whimsical but still somehow leaden Swan and Dolphin hotels in Florida) and Robert A.M. Stern (for the deliriously Disneyesque Casting Center).

Now when Eisner calls, architects listen. They know they will be encouraged to create show-bizzy, show-stopping showplaces that millions of people each year will see and enjoy. At Euro Disney, the Pritzker-prizewinning Frank Gehry designed the nightclub center called Festival Disney, whose plaza is guarded by giant towers of oxidized silver and bronze-colored stainless steel under a star-studded canopy of lights. It’s as if the monoliths from 2001: A Space Odyssey had dressed up and gone out to strut.

Euro Disney got mixed results from two architects named Antoine. Grumbach’s Sequoia Lodge is a nontoxic Rocky Mountain high — restful, woodsy, organic. Predock’s Hotel Santa Fe, once you get past its drive-in-theater billboard of Clint Eastwood, looks as bleak as a Southwestern insane asylum. For anyone who wants to get suicidally depressed at Euro Disney, this cinder-block shantytown is the place to bunk.

Stern’s Hotel Cheyenne is a theme park of its own, a fantasy re-creation of an Old West town. There’ll be gunfights around the covered wagon parked on Desperado Street, a sandy boulevard banked by “saloons,” “goldsmiths,” “jails” — all facades for the 14 two-story wood-frame buildings that house the guests. Stern’s other gem, the Newport Bay Club, is instantly a diamond as big as the Ritz. Bigger, in fact; it’s the largest hotel in Europe. The blue, white and cream colors of this seven-story megamansion suggest beachside elegance — a jaunty, yachty summer idled away with the Rockefellers or Von Bulows.

Graves’ Hotel New York has a stolid maroon, teal and coral facade. Inside, though, the joint comes alive. Giant floor designs of the Mets and Yankees emblems, an arcade evoking the city’s subway system, Broadway posters, corridor carpet that looks like carpet on tile, a lamp in the shape of the Empire State Building, and big apples (big apples!) everywhere. It’s Gotham without the crime or grime. Pure Gotham, pure Graves, pure Disney.

The Disney style need not be seen as the apogee of American culture; it can illuminate, it can suffocate, it can buoy or cloy. But when the Disney Imagineers get it right, they get it big. Euro Disney’s Disneyland Hotel, the Imagineers’ pink Victorian palace, boasts a giant Mickey Mouse clock and, at night, thousands of light bulbs that trace the spine of every ornate gable and cupola. The capacious lobby, with its 40-ft. ceiling, beckons you to collapse into its deep sofas and get toasty at the mammoth fireplace. In the guest rooms, a sculpture of Tinkerbell graces the highboy; in the bathrooms, Hyacinth Hippo, in her Fantasia tutu, cavorts in various poses on the bathtub tile.

As God might have said on seeing Disneyland, Walt is in the details. The spirit of Walt hovers over Euro Disney too. Mice with sewing needles and birds holding ribbons in their beaks adorn the capitals in l’Auberge de Cendrillon, the park’s only French restaurant (try the dessert they call Cinderella’s Slipper: chocolate mousse in a white-chocolate shoe mold). Dumbo snouts serve as the spouts for fresh water in man-made Lake Buena Vista. At the Hotel Cheyenne’s Chuckwagon Cafe, which has antlers in all of its decorating, plastic horseshoes hold the condiments, and nailed to the wall is a dinner bell shaped in a silhouette of Texas. On sale in the Trading Post of the Hotel Santa Fe are tins of pate de bison.

Like the ubiquitous religious art of medieval days, Disney iconography reinforces Disney ideology: it announces that this is a complete, hermetic world, an American world that Disney reflects and helped create. And like a pop Chartres, Euro Disney offers an overwhelming wealth of instructive ornament, commandeering the eye and the mind to ensure that visitors breathe, eat, buy and damn well dream Disney. But the riot of detail is also part of the show, maybe the best part. At other parks — Great Adventure, Magic Mountain, Universal Studios Florida — the rides are the attraction; with Disney, the park is the ride.

And what a joyous ride it is, for those with open eyes and minds. As an old Franco-American hit had it, “Ooh, la, la, la, c’est magnifique.”