Optimistic future lives in ‘Tomorrowland’
Nothing screams bright, shiny future quite like a jetpack. In “Tomorrowland,” when Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) enters the gleaming utopia of the film’s title, it’s one of the first things she sees. If you exit a time machine and spot a jetpack, you know you haven’t landed in some postapocalyptic dump. No, you’ve probably arrived in a hope-filled future like the ones promised us in the 1950s, when space colonies were just around the corner and the atom was our friend.
Much like its theme-park namesake, “Tomorrowland,” which opens Friday, is a vision of the future brimming with the optimism and aesthetics of the past. There are robots and space blasters that wouldn’t have looked out of place when Tomorrowland opened at Disneyland in 1955, and a rocket ship whose rich leather seats and brass accents evoke a late 19th-century Victorian parlor. In the city skyline, there are glimpses of Space Mountain (the Disneyland ride was first conceived in 1964) and echoes of the modernist Trylon and Perisphere structures from the 1939 New York World’s Fair. All those retrofuturistic touches raise the question: What happened to that future, and when did our current idea of it get so glum?
“Somewhere along the way, in the past 30 years or so, this optimistic belief that the future was going to be better slowly gave way to the idea that the future was going to be lousy,” said “Tomorrowland” director Brad Bird.
“And we just wondered, why did that change? And in discussing that, we noticed that the world’s fairs kind of went away around the time that that idea of the future went away.”
As “Tomorrowland” opens, a young Frank Walker (Thomas Robinson) arrives at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, where Walt Disney debuted the “It’s a Small World” and “Carousel of Progress” attractions before taking them west to his Anaheim, Calif., park. Later in the film, we’re told that Thomas Edison, Gustave Eiffel, Jules Verne and Nikola Tesla had gathered at the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris to form Plus Ultra, a secret society dedicated to the betterment of mankind. These two fairs and times shape the look of both “Tomorrowland” the movie and Tomorrowland the setting, a futuristic world one travels to, not by jetpack or time machine but by magical pin.
The film’s optimistic look and feel stand in stark contrast to many movies about the future, which have, over the years, tended toward the dystopic. One can trace the gloom from “Metropolis” (1927) to “Blade Runner” (1982) to “The Hunger Games” (2012). Cheery or sour, these visions rarely age well, and the theme-park Tomorrowland was no exception; in the late ’90s, Disney opted to embrace the past by refashioning the site in a retro style reminiscent of the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.
“There is a form of nostalgia for the future,” said Gregory Benford, author of “The Wonderful Future That Never Was.” “You ache for the world you thought would be. But that nostalgia for the future is also nostalgia for that past that imagined that future. That’s the essential emotion.”
When looking for material for the 1964 World’s Fair sequences, Ramsey Avery, the film’s supervising art director, was surprised to discover just how much had been discarded. Many of the fair’s official records had been left in boxes, largely uncataloged and unloved, at the New York Public Library. “They wouldn’t let us take them out of the building to copy them, so we had to take all these blurry pictures in a dark room with a cellphone,” Avery said.
Many of the reference images came from a small online group of collectors of World’s Fair memorabilia. These fans had amassed thousands of family photos, and the filmmakers used their images to re-create everything from the original attractions to the period fashions.
Later in the film, Casey and the adult Frank (George Clooney) blast off in a rocket ship ensconced beneath the Eiffel Tower. To create the space capsule’s interior, filmmakers traveled to Paris to view the cozy apartment Eiffel had created for himself atop the tower. For other features, like the ship’s brass portholes and rich, red décor, they consulted the squid-battling submarine from the 1954 Disney classic “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”
“Brad told us to look at the Nautilus and imagine it built as a spaceship,” Avery said.
Much of the filming of the Tomorrowland setting was shot at the City of Arts and Sciences complex in Valencia, Spain, a gleaming mini-city in white designed by architect Santiago Calatrava. The filmmakers also looked at the work of midcentury modernists like John Lautner (that’s his 1960 Los Angeles sky-home Chemosphere in the end credits) and Eero Saarinen (there are echoes of his Gateway Arch in St. Louis in Tomorrowland’s curvy skyline).
“We had this idea of a city as a collection of buildings from different ages that play well with each other,” Bird said.
The makers of “Tomorrowland” also watched Disney shorts like “Man in Space” (1955) and “Mars and Beyond” (1957), TV episodes created to excite young viewers about the wonders of space travel. They looked at Walt Disney’s concept drawings for his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, aka Epcot — not the theme park it eventually became, but the planned city he envisioned before his passing in 1966.
Like Tomorrowland, a place dedicated to what-ifs, “Tomorrowland” the film has its fair share of what-might-have-beens. Among the features planned for the movie that were later scrapped were three gigantic experiments that Casey was supposed to run through, and an indoor lab that simulated immense weather patterns above the heads of onlookers.
And then there’s the animated short that reveals the origin story of Plus Ultra. With its atomic age graphics and sonorous voiceover, the segment is a dead ringer for a Disney educational cartoon from the 1960s. The short pulls together many of the film’s retrofuturistic elements and visual reference points: airships and rockets, Edison’s phonograph, the Eiffel Tower, Jules Verne’s Nautilus.You can view the short online, but don’t look for it when you go to theaters. “It’s a great cartoon, and we all loved doing it,” Chambliss said. “But it stopped the movie dead, according to Brad.”