"You have to make dreams come true"

Disneyland Paris has several official Disney hotels. You have the ultra-luxury Disneyland Hotel, which is the entrance to the park, but there’s also a lake with a few hotels around: the New York Hotel, Newport Bay Club, and Sequoia Lodge, with Cheyenne, Santa Fe and beyond at Davy Crockett Ranch.

Hotel New York has been called New York Hotel – The Art of Marvel since it reopened in June. And this innovation wasn’t just a matter of hanging paintings. We spoke to Sylvie Massara, lead art designer for Walt Disney Imagineering Paris, who oversaw the entire design portion of the project.

Selfie track

Sylvie Massara has been with Disney since 1988. “I worked at Fantasyland in Disneyland, California, including the castle. Very important. I love that at Disney there is plenty of room for detail and that guests can fully immerse themselves in a topic. I ended up working in hotels Disney in 1996.”

“I am proud to call myself a visualizer. After all, this revolves around two words: imagine (imagine something) and engineer (engineer). So you shouldn’t only dream – although it is very important that you dream -, you should also To make the dreams of the guests come true.

Visualizers do this using new technologies, among other things. One of the most famous inventions of the Animation Visualizers are the animated robots that sometimes look real and are used in attractions such as the Pirates of the Caribbean. Sylvie: “That’s what I value at Walt Disney, driving new technology to make dreams come true.”

“It’s important that everything be built into a theme. Not only does it have to be beautiful and tell a fun story, it has to make the guests and the staff (Disney employees) proud of the space. It’s the Imagineer’s role in making people dream and make those dreams come true.”

Renovati Hotel New York – The Art of Marvel

Although Sylvie is leading a major project such as the renovation of the New York Hotel – The Art of Marvel, she doesn’t just move from one meeting to the next. “I design a lot and do almost all of it by hand. I love to draw, so I do it all the time. Also for the new project I’m working on, the renovation of the Disneyland Hotel. This renovation is a lot less bulk than the one that happened at the New York Hotel.”

“Here we reconstructed the entire hotel, stripped everything down to the concrete walls. Then we have to look at what’s related: Marvel and New York were quickly brought together, heroes of comics, films, series and art, an art gallery in New York, and I also wanted to Make it classy, because it’s a four-star hotel.”

When you walk into the hotel lobby now, you will immediately notice that it is very loud. You almost automatically throw your head back to get a good look at what you’re actually seeing. That’s exactly what Sylvie and her team have been after.

“New York is a very vertical city: you’re looking up. I tried to translate this vertical situation here inside the hotel with the high square windows, with the comics on it and the light coming from behind at the same time: it’s all from Marvel and all over New York.” The use of many typical New York materials, such as certain types of stone and wood.

spirit of artwork

Sylvie herself isn’t necessarily an avid comic reader. “I have a lot of information to work with and work with the team in the US, including Scott Drake and Caroline May (both imaginative). My role was to honor the artists and we had so much exclusive art that we are happy to combine such diversity in this hotel. So I worked about Closely with the team in America to make sure the art and architecture go together well: right down to the colors.”

Sylvie thinks it’s all right. “It’s great to see the diversity in the art. For example, look at the story in the lobby: we used art from comic books with a design from the movies. It’s important to always find the spirit of the artwork and what the artwork conveys, in order to make them fit together well.”

Not that everything in the process went smoothly, because Sylvie faced major challenges. “It seems easier to build something in an existing building, but you can’t do everything you want. I can’t push the walls aside. At Skyline Bar, for example, it was so narrow in the back at first that someone from the cast would have trouble working. correctly. Then we found a solution to ensure everything could run smoothly, from back to front.”

There are also elements that Sylvie is proud of, in part because she was accompanied by the necessary challenges. “I love the lighting in a Manhattan restaurant, the building of that big statue was great. It wasn’t easy getting 1100K on the ceiling, but the atmosphere it creates is great.”