Here’s a youtube video of robo-Walt in action.
What do you think? Me, I think it’s an impressive piece of technology, but it gives me the willies.
Are we certain that’s all robot, and not Walt’s unfrozen reanimated head attached to a robot body?
(Well, somebody was going to make the joke- may as well be me 
)
I do think those Disney animatrons are pretty cool. The animatron Lincoln was the only thing I enjoyed about Disneyland (I was a bit too old at the time- I’m the oldest of 3 kids) and the Hall of Presidents is the only thing I’d want to see at Disneyworld.
Quite disturbing. Only a lighting change away from “Friday Night at Walt’s.”
If only there were a cadre of real people trained to dress up and act like other people. But that’s crazy talk.
Nice of Disney to create the definitive example of the uncanny valley for people who aren’t sure what it quite means.
Animatronics are an important part of Disney’s whole deal. Hell, I’m pretty sure they invented the term. They’re never going to stop using them alongside their armies of human actors.
This CNN article has a video with a little more footage and seems more in close-up-- and yes, there’s an uncanny valley element that’s a little easier to see here. But still, I think it’s a pretty good animation; at least, compared with, say, Aria here.
I’ll grant that I haven’t seen Walt since I was a small child but it’s pinging my Fidel Castro neuron more than the Disney one.
I think they made the face a little too wide and round near the ears. The underlying structure is too spherical.
I regularly watched Walt introduce his “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color”
TV program as a kid and have strong memories of what he looked like.
Looking at this Animatronic figure I am impressed by how well
it moves but think that the face doesn’t look quite right. I can’t figure out what it
is exactly - maybe the forhead looks a bit to wide?
Walt’s face was longer, his widow’s peak more pronounced, and the voice is completely wrong. It’s a good piece of animatronics, but a poor Walt Disney impersonator.
Here’s a video of the actual Walt Disney that I looked up for my own comparison purposes.
It also turned out to be a pretty interesting primer on how they created the early animatronics back in the day. Apparently, if this old newsreel can be believed and is not another ‘lemmings’ style fiction, they used a Rube Goldbergian device to capture gestures, kinda paleo motion sensor capture tech.
It’s almost like an early version tech of the more modern computer animation that created, for instance, Golum.
Heh, I first read that as Golem, an animated anthropomorphic being in Jewish folklore, which is created entirely from inanimate matter, usually clay or mud. Then I realized you meant Gollum, the character from The Lord of the Rings who was turned into a pathetic creature from his lust for the Ring, motion-controlled by Andy Serkis in the movies.
Either one is kind of funny, in its own way…? 
Ooops, I’ve read the books more times than I can count, and can’t spell that name worth a damn.
They have a bajillion amateur actors wandering the park dressed like various princesses and cartoon animals already. For this display, the animatronic is pretty much the point – to marvel at how neat this quasi-robot is.
They used recordings of him speaking. Multiple different ones that they had to normalize to go together, but it’s not an AI voice.
For the looks, I think the neck is too thick and the nose is too small.