Olaf animatronic coming to Disney's Hollywood Studios

attractionsmagazine.com: The Olaf figure will be part of Olaf Draws!, a new attraction debuting inside The Magic of Disney Animation. Disney revealed Olaf Draws! on Feb. 23, 2026, following the initial summer 2025 announcement of The Magic of Disney Animation at large.

Frozen Ever After upgrading animatronics in 2026 at Epcot

attractionsmagazine.com: The boat ride debuted in 2016 at the Walt Disney World park near Orlando, Fla., with projected faces for Elsa, Anna, and Kristoff. When a new version of the ride opened in 2023 at Hong Kong Disneyland, fully sculpted faces were utilized instead of the projected faces. These versions of the Audio-Animatronics figures are now coming to Epcot.

How Choreography Can Help Robots Come Alive

WIRED: Consider this scene from the 2014 film, Ex Machina: A young nerd, Caleb, is in a dim room with a scantily clad femmebot, Kyoko. Nathan, a brilliant roboticist, drunkenly stumbles in and brusquely tells Caleb to dance with the Kyoko-bot. To kick things off, Nathan presses a wall-mounted panel and the room lights shift suddenly to an ominous red, while Oliver Cheatham’s disco classic “Get Down Saturday Night” starts to play. Kyoko—who seems to have done this before—wordlessly begins to dance, and Nathan joins his robotic creation in an intricately choreographed bit of pelvic thrusting. The scene suggests that Nathan imbued his robot creation with disco functionality, but how did he choreograph the dance on Kyoko, and why?

Monsters, movies, and biomechanics: Celebrating Ray Harryhausen

theconversation.com: It’s the early 1980s and I’m about ten years old. On the TV is a fantasy movie replete with swords and ships. And monsters: monsters of metal, monsters of bone. Creatures of the imagination. And they are all brought to life with frightening realism on the screen before me. Those creatures lit up my young mind. The movie was Jason And The Argonauts, which was my introduction to the wonderful world of animator and movie-maker, Ray Harryhausen.

Catie Cuan on Why Robots Need Choreographers

Dance Magazine: Robots often get a bad rap. "There's an impression that they're much more capable than they really are," says Catie Cuan. Whether it's a fear that "robots are coming for my job" or "robots are coming to kill me," Cuan believes those ideas are largely driven by how robots are portrayed in fiction and storytelling.

Disney Made a Skinless Robot That Can Realistically Stare Directly Into Your Soul

gizmodo.com: One of the obvious giveaways that you’re interacting with a robot is their blank dead-eyed stare. The eyes don’t connect with yours the way they would if they were, you know, human. A research team at Disney is trying to fix that using subtle head motions and eye movements that make the robot seem more lifelike—despite it lacking skin and looking like pure, unfiltered, nightmare material.

Robotic dolphins could replace live creatures at theme parks

blooloop: Special effects company Edge Innovations has created a robotic dolphin to potentially replace live cetaceans in captivity in aquariums and theme parks across China.

In response to the coronavirus crisis, China has implemented strict limitations on the import and export of wild animals.

Animax: Character building

InPark Magazine: Chuck Fawcett likes to say that he’s already seen the future. He can’t reveal too much about it, for fear of altering things, but he can tell you that it involves disruptive innovation and endless possibility. After nearly three decades of successes, setbacks, challenges, and change, his company, Animax Designs, finds itself in a position to help drive that disruption, barreling towards Fawcett’s golden vision of tomorrow.

Animatronic Puppet Takes Cues From Animation Software

Hackaday: Lip syncing for computer animated characters has long been simplified. You draw a set of lip shapes for vowels and other sounds your character makes and let the computer interpolate how to go from one shape to the next. But with physical, real world puppets, all those movements have to be done manually, frame-by-frame. Or do they?

Disney Imagineering has created autonomous robot stunt doubles

TechCrunch: For over 50 years, Disneyland and its sister parks have been a showcase for increasingly technically proficient versions of its “animatronic” characters. First pneumatic and hydraulic, and more recently fully electronic, these figures create a feeling of life and emotion inside rides and attractions, in shows and, increasingly, in interactive ways throughout the parks.

What Disney Can Do With Haunted Mansion Conventions is Incredible

Theme Park University: Something the general public rarely gets to see is how Disney Meetings can create unique events for corporate groups using their spaces for conventions. Last year, we broke a story about Disney offering one-of-a-kind escape rooms with live actors available to convention guests. Now, they are showcasing just what they can do with unique convention after-party events. This one has a Haunted Mansion theme and it’ll knock your socks off.