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What stuck in the throat more than Ratatouille: L’Aventure Totalement Toquée de Rémy? For many fans, it was a four letter word: ride. The word that many, and most of all Disney themselves, tend to discourage when talking about an “attraction” was surprisingly plumped for in finding a suitably snappy English title for Ratatouille. Had Disney lost their morals?

But now, Disney have made a sudden rebrand, removing the offending word and renaming the attraction, for English marketing purposes, as Ratatouille: The Adventure. This change is confirmed by the new logo, above, and also a change to the name applied to the key visual and press release already published for the British market, swapping “Ratatouille: The Ride” for “Ratatouille The Adventure”.

Not only does this elevate the attraction somewhat, making it sound less like a fairground “ride” and perhaps more like a €150 million state-of-the-art dark ride, it also matches the start of the French “L’Aventure” title and perhaps helps to hint that there’s more than just a ride: a restaurant, a shop and a whole area development, too.

“The Adventure” will likely only be used in British (and perhaps other English language) publicity for the attraction, and at most inside the English guide maps, with the full Totalement Toquée French title definitely set to appear above the actual entrance.

This is now the latest in a series of names to be associated with the project, starting with the working titles “Ratatouille Kitchen Calamity!” and “Ratatouille: Désastre en Cuisine”, then the final official title, and then the first video trailers announcing “Ratatouille: The Ride” and “Ratatouille: L’Attraction”.

Well, there’s nothing Disneyland Paris loves more than a good name change, but what do you think of this latest one, an improvement?

• Read previous Ratatouille: The Adventure news here!

Michael Giacchino’s recent Instagram insights into his Ratatouille ride soundtrack scoring sessions have been joined by a tweet from Ratatouille director himself Brad Bird.

Posting a picture of the orchestra playing away behind a Chef Rémy plush toy and a Linguini PEZ dispenser, the Incredibles mastermind said:

@m_giacchino's scoring session yesterday for the new RATATOUILLE ride for the Paris park. (I like the Linguini PEZ.) pic.twitter.com/XSAlrobUdn

— Brad Bird (@BradBirdA113) March 4, 2014

Besides the PEZ, the photo also shows how the orchestra appear to be being conducted along to a plan of the ride’s layout, projected in the background, with the “Ratmobiles” shown moving through the scenes as white shapes.

Last month, the film’s original composer, Michael Giacchino, began sharing a number of video clips from a whole week of scoring sessions, featuring soundbites of the attraction’s new soundtrack which he has composed himself.

Should Bird’s tweet be “live” and the scoring sessions have resumed, it really shows how much work is going in to provide music for the ride, restaurant and La Place de Rémy exterior.

This isn’t Brad Bird’s first mention of Ratatouille: L’Aventure Totalement Toquée de Rémy on his Twitter account. In March 2012, long before Disneyland Paris officially acknowledged the attraction, he gave a short response to a fan stating he was very excited about the project and that “It’s going to be really cool.”

Desperately lacking a platform like the Disney Parks Blog, Disneyland Paris itself has yet to truly begin providing any teasers or insights into the attraction’s creation. So here, we have the odd situation where the film’s composer and director are providing some of the best promotion of the mega-budget attraction it’s inspiring. Note to Paris: anticipation sells, silence doesn’t.

Disneyland Paris continues to maintain something of a general radio silence on development of Ratatouille: The Ride, now potentially opening in just four months or less, but a few tidbits of information at least have just trickled out in two pieces of official copy.

For travel agents in the United Kingdom, and published here for the very first time, the resort has just provided a brief snippet of standard copy for the attraction. Despite the usual fluff of these texts, it does reveal and confirm a few interesting facts:

Ratatouille: The Ride

Shrinking down to the size of a rat, you’ll be immersed in a Disney experience like no other. Rémy and his friends cook up a storm when Chef Skinner sends you scurrying through the sights, smells and senses of Gusteau’s restaurant. Duck, dive and dodge your way through a Disneylicious adventure that’s sure to leave you hungry for more.

First, that the attraction will include “sights, smells and senses” — hinting that your ride through Gusteau’s restuarant will be peppered by the scents of food and cooking along the way.

This wouldn’t be the first time Disney have used scents in one of their attractions, indeed areas ranging from Pirates of the Caribbean to Cable Car Bake Shop are “odourised” to enhance the setting or tempt you in for that doughnut.

But for Ratatouille, scents would likely be a much more overt part of the scene rather than subconscious. Indeed, if Walt Disney Imagineering are going to do a fully immersive Ratatouille ride, they really have to do cooking aromas.

There’s also now an amended French press release, which describes the scenes and storyline of the ride in a little more detail:

La 60ème attraction de Disneyland Paris se nommera donc Ratatouille: L’Aventure Totalement Toquée de Rémy. Elle embarquera les visiteurs dans une expérience immersive… à la hauteur d’un rat ! Ils seront propulsés dans l’aventure périlleuse de Rémy, au cœur du grand restaurant parisien « Chez Gusteau », imaginé par le réalisateur Brad Bird. Des toits de Paris aux cuisines en pleine effervescence, en passant par la chambre froide et bien sûr la salle de restaurant surveillée par le redoutable Chef Skinner… L’aventure s’annonce mouvementée et pleine de saveurs.

“Pleine de saveurs” (full of flavour) says this release, which could be another hint to those aromas of the kitchens being dispersed through the ride (or a marketing pun, or both).

Skinner as the villain of the story is confirmed again, the bad-tempered chef likely the reason why our Ratmobiles will be so desperate to scurry from location to location.

And finally, “la chambre froide” — the kitchen cold store, an interesting scene to mention in an official press release. Combined with the “senses” of the English release, perhaps this cold store will be truly cold to riders of the attraction… and the following oven scene truly HOT?

Separately, the release also confirms Le Bistrot Chez Rémy restaurant will include ratatouille itself on its menu (hold the front page!). Obvious of course, but there’s the confirmation.

The official publicity image (above) has also been released in higher quality.

Labelled “Ratatouille – Family”, this version shows only four riders despite the Ratmobiles having a capacity of six — presumably, the other 0.4 children can’t be seen. A previous version pictured six riders of an older age group, so hopefully the €150 million state-of-the-art dark ride won’t just be marketed as something exclusively for six year olds.

Update

Here’s one of the likely scents to be smelled inside Ratatouille: L’Aventure Totalement Toquée de Rémy: oranges! This was confirmed to us by Jay Espindola, who’s involved with ITV’s This Morning programme on British TV, which often runs competitions promoting Disneyland Paris.

VIA Disneyland Paris Press

It’s not quite a 3D trackless dark ride, but it’s still impressive: the famous Belgian Sand Sculpture Festival, which it has been announced will return to a Disneyland Paris theme again this year with an event titled “Disneyland Paris Sand Magic”.

Due to be held in Ostend (Oostende) from 28th June to 31st August 2014, the exhibition’s new flyer even hints at a well-timed Ratatouille theme.

Touting 30 artists of 12 nationalities, creating 150 statues between 2 and 12 metres high, the official website also reveals 3,000 tons of sand will be used to recreate the Disney scenes.

Part of a joint promotional commitment between Disney in Benelux and the organisers of the event, it’s also been confirmed already that next year’s festival will see the theme of Pixar’s upcoming The Good Dinosaur, while 2016 will feature Finding Dory.

Disney provided the theme for the show in 2011 and 2012, with countless landmarks from both parks painstakingly recreated in nothing more than golden sand — from Sleeping Beauty Castle to Main Street Motors, The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror and much more.

• Read our report on the first Disneyland Paris sand sculpture festival here

• See Photos Magiques’ pictures of the 2011 festival here

Disneyland Paris went big on the sculptures in 2011: a huge Sleeping Beauty “sand” castle was crafted on the banks of Seine in August, while November saw the resort become the theme of the Bruges Snow and Ice Sculpture Festival.

Which landmarks would you like to see recreated this time around?

VIA Sand Sculpture Festival Belgium, Mickeyland.be

Soundbites about “challenging tourism climates” and “investing in growth strategies” aren’t all you’ll find the Euro Disney S.C.A. Annual Review. Published by the Disneyland Paris operating group each year, the splashy document is also filled with a host of fascinating and intriguing facts and figures about the resort, its parks, its Cast Members and its visitors.

You can browse the 2013 Annual Review now online. Surprisingly, this year breaks with tradition and abandons the usual overblown website dedicated to the report (last year complete with Philippe Gas video intro) and presents it just as a standard e-brochure. We’d love to know the figure for how much cash that decision wisely saved. But instead, here’s our quick pick of the key figures and fun facts of 2013 at Disneyland Paris…

• Disneyland Paris has now been visited more than 275 million times
• Between 2009 and 2013, around €510 million has been invested in the maintenance and development of the destination
• There are over 14,000 Cast Members working over 500 different professions; 6,454 employees were hired in 2013
• Inclusivity: Over 581 workers are disabled, an increase of over 50% since 2007, whilst 53 “seniors” aged over 50 were hired in 2013
• Climbing the ladder: 80% of Managers and Senior Managers present in 2013 had been promoted internally, while the group hired 458 local residents who had experienced long-term unemployment
• Val d’Europe now has 30,000 residents and provides 28,000 jobs
• Hotel refurbishment programme is on-going, covering all 5,800 rooms, with all 1,100 rooms of Disney’s Newport Bay Club to be completed in 2014
• 14.9 million visitors in 2013 (down from 16 million in 2012 and 15.6 in 2011)
• Hotel occupancy down to 79.3% in 2013, from 84% in 2012 and 87.1% in 2011
• Guest spending continues to grow: the average guest spends €48.14 in the parks and €235.01 per room in the Disney Hotels
• Interest charges on the group’s debt were reduced by €20.4 million in 2013 thanks to the €1.3 billion refinancing by The Walt Disney Company in 2012
• According to questionnaires, 63% of guests were “extremely” and “very” satisfied with their visits; 89% of guests would “definitely” and “probably” come back
• Disney Dreams! scored a 92% guest satisfaction rating for fiscal year 2013
• 4 million items have been sold at World of Disney since its opening in 2012
• Staffed 24 hours a day by 200 Cast Members, the “Hercules” warehouse complex is more than 15 times the size of an Olympic swimming pool; in 2013 it was refitted with dimming, sensing, low-energy lighting by partner Osram
• Scheduled for completion in late 2015, the fifth Val de France hotel, to be operated by B&B Hotels, will add 400 rooms to the resort
• 90% of the land at Villages Nature will not be built on; the Center Parcs joint project will be developed in several phases over the next 20 years
• 87 milion gallons of drinking water are expected to be saved each year once the new backstage water treatment and recycling plant becomes fully operational
• Ratatouille: l’Aventure Totalement Toquée de Rémy will be “by far the most advanced and sophisticated thing we’ve ever done from a ride integration standpoint. It will offer guests a totally immersive experience into a Disney•Pixar adventure” — Joe Schott, Senior Vice President & Chief Operating Officer
• “This never-before-seen family attraction will magically shrink guests to the size of the movie’s adorable star, Rémy. They will then be whisked off for a multi-sensory spin around the kitchens of Chef Gusteau”

Last, but not least, the geographical split of theme park visits, where France has broken 51% leaving all other feeder nations languishing. It’s fascinating to look back ten years to the results from the 2003 Annual Review and see how dramatically the breakdown has shifted.

Where once 22% of visitors were from the United Kingdom, now that percentage is a tiny 14%. Worse for Germany; its percentage share has halved from 6% to 3% in 2013. Italy and Spain meanwhile used to make up 9% together and have now increased to 11%, mainly thanks to a boom in visitors from Spain begun a few years ago, but which now appears to have ebbed away, in line with the country’s economy, to 8%.

Attendance figures in 2003 were 12.4 million, so 22% would give an estimated 2,728,000 British guests for the year. The same calculation for 14% of the 14.9 million guests in 2013 gives 2,086,000 guests crossing the channel. Far from a scientific, watertight calculation, obviously, but you could see it suggesting that roughly 654,720 fewer visitors from the UK went to Disneyland Paris in 2013 compared to ten years ago, a 24% drop.

Overall, with 49% of visitors now coming from outside France in 2013 versus 61% in 2003, you could estimate the resort’s entire non-domestic park attendance has actually fallen by over a quarter of a million guests in the past ten years, from 7.6 million in 2003 to 7.3 million in 2013. In the same period, meanwhile, you could estimate attendance from within France has grown by a huge 2.8 million guests, from 4.8 million to a strong 7.6 million visitors.

Clearly it is time Disneyland Paris took a few of its œufs out of its panier and worked on growing visitor numbers from other countries too, if only back to the levels they were ten years ago.

That’s not something even Rémy can do alone, or is it?

SOURCE Euro Disney S.C.A. Annual Review 2013, Full PDF (7.9MB download)

The first surprise of this morning’s Annual General Meeting for Euro Disney shareholders came online, as the official Disneyland Paris Twitter account shared a brand new visual for the exterior of Ratatouille’s ride and restaurant, a mini-land within Toon Studio to known as La Place de Rémy.

Taking its inspiration from the very first piece of concept art we saw way back in May 2011, this new, slicker visual seems to solve the problem that the more artistic concept just wasn’t considered “Ratatouille” enough. Right up front we see Linguini holding Rémy. In the background you can spot Colette, there’s the trademark Gusteau’s sign up on the rooftop, a mini Chef Rémy carved into the top of the gushing fountain and twinkling lights in the Parisian trees.

For a marketing visual it’s actually a remarkably realistic representation of everything we’ll see this summer — dazzling purple sky perhaps not included. It also reveals for the first time that a giant copper cooking pot and ladle — just like the one Rémy first meddles with — with be used for the entrance marquee, a whimsical crossover of the oversized rat-scale world encountered once you step inside the showbuilding.

Below, we’ve annotated a few of the nice details to be found:

This image was swiftly followed by new English and French versions of the “Ratatouille: The Ride” trailer first spotted in the wild last week, each with its own new take on a promotional logo for the long-winded Adventure Totalement Toquée de Rémy.

For the UK, the logo drops the three horizontal lines compared to the earlier version, while for France there’s a surprise as we get “Ratatouille: L’Attraction”, seemingly giving in to the fact that no-one, not even the French themselves, will use the full francophone title.

Each trailer ends with “Summer 2014” and, in case you were wondering, the shareholder’s meeting itself came and went without any further precision as to an official opening date.

Watch the two new English and French trailers embedded below… Read More…

Philippe Gas had better be careful he doesn’t stumble after George inside that infamous silver screen. The CEO of Euro Disney SCA will be hosting the group’s Annual General Meeting for shareholders tomorrow, 12th February 2014, at 9am inside CinéMagique in Walt Disney Studios Park.

As usual, it remains a closely guarded secret what exactly will be revealed at the event, beyond the usual questions and numbers. There’s a new attraction waiting just across the park, of course, and most are hoping the meeting will reveal a little more of Ratatouille: The Ride, perhaps a glimpse inside or even, the strongest rumour… an opening date.

For regular paying guests the meeting means the closure of one of the park’s star attractions, with no shows inside Studio 2 on the 9th, 10th, 11th or 12th February. These dates weren’t even included in advance on the standard attraction closures calendar, only appearing on this week’s park programme. Is it time to revisit the Convention Centre plans for Disney Village yet, Mr Gas?

In traditional “quick, the shareholders are coming!” fashion, InsideDLParis spotted railings around Studio Tram Tour: Behind the Magic being given a fresh coat of paint yesterday. And even better: despite being slated for closure until the 14th of this month, the ride will now miraculously reopen tomorrow, a few days early, before closing again for Thursday and Friday.

You can download a whole load of documents relating to the meeting here.

Follow us on Twitter tomorrow as we share the best live tweets and breaking news from the meeting.

PHOTOS @InsideDLParis (Twitter)

Wait, did they finally retire the Roger Rabbit float?! The latest Disneyland Paris TV commercial to hit the internet, via a Danish travel agency, features a brief glimpse of the all-new Disney Magic on Parade aerial “flyover” footage, painstakingly shot over a whole day last summer.

This scene will at last replace the over two decades-old footage of Walt Disney World‘s 20th Anniversary Surprise Celebration Parade that Disneyland Paris has been using in countless trailers and promotional films since before the park’s 1992 opening.

Besides that well-choreographed shot, this TV spot just happens to be an all-round solid production. There’s footage of actual rides (!), real hotels (!) and of course a Disneyland Paris parade genuinely travelling down the true Parisian Main Street.

It uses a familiar concept of transporting people from the “real world” into a more magical Disney setting, but those clips last mere milliseconds. The recent “30 Yes Days” commercials for example, like far too many of the resort’s TV ads, dawdle endlessly on setting up a “concept”, when Disneyland Paris should probably just be using their precious airtime to show footage of the parks, like this.

We can even let the family off for apparently sneaking into the Newport Bay Club pool.

Watch the new Disneyland Paris commercial embedded below…

VIA @PlazaGardens (Twitter)