Challenges In The Castle

Earlier in the week, here at DF'82, we looked at how Imagineers had to change their concepts of different lands to fit in with the European way and stylings. Another interesting detail from Tony Baxter, as read in The Art of Walt Disney book by Christopher Finch, is the challenges that faced them when creating the beautiful Sleeping Beauty Castle. We touched on this in this previous blog when we introduced you all to le Château de la Belle Au Bois Dormant.
For people like myself who live in Europe, we are used to seeing and experiencing real Castles and their beauty on an almost daily basis. This was something the Imagineers had to take into account when designing and building this weenie.

"We had to reinvent the castle, and our solution was to make it more like an illustration in a book of fairy tales - an illustration by someone like Arthur Rackham. So its built on a crag, and part of the second floor is supported by stone trees. The colours are fairy-tale colours and the architecture is deliberately distorted. There's a dragon living in a cavern underneath the castle and Merlin's workshop is in the middle of it all. And we've added a hedge maze, like the one at Hampton Court Palace in England, which is an interactive experience of the most primitive kind."

The Art of Walt Disney, p443