The Happy Ride with Baymax

The Happy Ride with Baymax
Park	Tokyo Disneyland
Land / area	Tomorrowland
Type	Whip ride
Opened	September 28, 2020
Designer	Walt Disney Imagineering
Status	Operating

The Happy Ride with Baymax is a musical whip ride in Tomorrowland at Tokyo Disneyland in Urayasu, Chiba, Japan. Themed to Walt Disney Animation Studios' 2014 film Big Hero 6, it was the first Disney park attraction built around that film. Riders sit in small vehicles towed by Baymax figures — the inflatable healthcare robot from the film — and are swung from side to side as the vehicles round a rotating course, to a soundtrack written specially for the attraction.

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History

The ride formed part of the largest expansion in Tokyo Disneyland's history up to that point, a programme that also added the Enchanted Tale of Beauty and the Beast attraction and a new Fantasyland area, Minnie's Style Studio in Toontown, and a new theatre. In Tomorrowland it took the place of the former Star Jets, on a site near Space Mountain.

The expansion was first planned to open on April 15, 2020, the park's anniversary date. Tokyo Disney Resort closed in late February 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the opening was postponed. The new facilities were eventually introduced together in the autumn: The Happy Ride with Baymax soft-opened on September 21, 2020, and opened officially on September 28, 2020, the same day as Enchanted Tale of Beauty and the Beast.

The Oriental Land Company promoted the ride from the start as a centrepiece for Baymax-themed programming. Its "Happy Fair with Baymax" programme, presented in Tomorrowland from January 13 to March 18, 2021, built food, merchandise and decorations around the new attraction. In summer 2025, as part of the resort's Summer Cool-off event, a special version of the ride used a song by the Japanese band Mrs. GREEN APPLE in the evening programme, a further sign of how closely the attraction's identity is tied to its music.

Experience

The premise is supplied by Hiro Hamada, the teenage inventor in Big Hero 6. In the story created for the ride, Hiro has taken Baymax's lesson that good health begins with happiness and built a ride intended to raise it, with each guest paired with a personal healthcare companion robot of their own. Lights on the vehicles respond as the ride progresses, presented in the fiction as a reading of the riders' happiness.

Mechanically the attraction is a whip ride, using a heavily modified three-table Zamperla Demolition Derby system with custom vehicles by Walt Disney Imagineering. A Baymax figure rides at the front of each unit, linked by a swinging hitch to the passenger bench behind it; a free-swinging element under the bench lets it drift outward and snap sideways through the turns, so the motion feels loose and unpredictable rather than fixed to a simple circle. The same broad family of ride system is used, in different forms, by Mater's Junkyard Jamboree at Disney California Adventure and Alien Swirling Saucers at Disney's Hollywood Studios.

Music is central to the experience. Six original songs were composed for the attraction, and one is selected for each cycle, with the lighting changing to match the track in use. An album collecting the songs — in regular, dialogue-free and instrumental versions — was released on November 27, 2020. Cast members working the ride perform loose, semi-choreographed dances to the songs, a habit that Japanese television coverage in 2023 credited with drawing crowds of watching and dancing guests around the attraction and spreading its reputation on social media well beyond the people actually riding.

See also

• Tokyo Disneyland
• Tomorrowland
• Enchanted Tale of Beauty and the Beast
• Monsters, Inc. Ride & Go Seek
• List of Tokyo Disneyland attractions