Le Passage Enchanté d'Aladdin
| Le Passage Enchanté d'Aladdin | |
|---|---|
| Park | Disneyland Park (Paris) |
| Land / area | Adventureland |
| Type | Walk-through attraction |
| Opened | 1993 |
| Designer | Walt Disney Imagineering |
| Height req. | None |
| Status | Operating |
Le Passage Enchanté d'Aladdin (French for "Aladdin's Enchanted Passage") is a walk-through attraction in Adventureland at Disneyland Park (Paris). Inside the Adventureland Bazaar building, a covered gallery of nine miniature scenes retells the story of Disney's Aladdin (1992) in detailed, animated dioramas. It opened in 1993 and is unique to Disneyland Paris.[1]
History
Disneyland Paris — then Euro Disneyland — opened in April 1992 and was, by its second year, struggling financially and short of things for guests to do. The park answered in part with an added-capacity programme of smaller, quickly built attractions, and Aladdin gave it an obvious subject: the film opened in France in late 1993, and Adventureland's entrance was already themed as an Arabian bazaar, making the land a natural home for a tie-in that needed no ride system, no vehicles and no queue capacity to speak of.
The passage was built inside the existing Adventureland Bazaar. It was among the first attractions at the park based on a film released after the park itself had opened, and it has proved unusually durable for a stopgap: sources covering the attraction note that it has seen no major documented changes since it opened, surviving decades in which much larger Paris attractions have been rebuilt around it.[2]
Experience
Guests enter beneath a mural of the Genie inviting them to say the magic word, and follow a dark, covered corridor decorated with rugs, stained glass and mosaics. The story is told in nine showcase windows, each with a bilingual text panel summarising the scene, so the passage can be followed in French or English at the visitor's own pace. There is no ride vehicle, no cast member stationed inside, and rarely any wait.
The scenes follow the film in order. The sequence opens with "One Jump Ahead," Aladdin fleeing the Sultan's guards through Agrabah after stealing food, and a view of Aladdin's home, where he gazes at the Sultan's palace. It continues with the Cave of Wonders — its tiger-shaped entrance, the lamp glimpsed deep in its throat, and the lamp again on its rock inside the cave — and with "Friend Like Me," the Genie's show-stopping appearance. "Prince Ali" brings Aladdin's triumphant parade back into Agrabah, with a furious Jafar watching. The climax is played in two windows: Jafar transformed into a giant snake, attacking Aladdin in the palace while Jasmine is trapped behind him, and Jafar defeated, drawn as a genie into his own lamp with Iago. The final scene, "Farewell," sends Aladdin and Jasmine soaring over Agrabah on the Magic Carpet beneath a smiling, moon-shaped Genie.[3]
The miniatures use lighting and Pepper's-ghost-style effects to give several scenes movement, and the passage rewards a slow walk: details such as a hidden Mickey are easy to miss at a glance. Guests leave past a closing mural of Abu riding the Genie — a small joke at the exit of the park's quietest attraction.