They’re Rubber, We’re Glue:
Why We Listen to Disney’s Clockwork Birds
©1999 by Craig Conley

One of them has a wooden leg. Another smokes a cigar. Yet another wears a Polynesian-style feathered headdress. They’re Disney’s robotic birds, some of the most bizarre contraptions you’ll find anywhere. The fact that most people accept them as “normal” says a lot about the way we think of real birds.

Recently, a little boy at Epcot Center was enthralled by dozens of pink flamingos. “Mommie! Look at the birds!” he called. “Come on,” his mother said as she shooed him along. “Those are just real ones.” At Disney World, the real thing pales in comparison to the man-made. As a rule, we don’t go to Disney World to see natural birds. (But in case we do, there are plenty to be found on Discovery Island, a zoological park.) Rather, we go there to marvel at the artificial. The Disney birds are rubber, and we’re glue. We project ourselves onto them, and our own words and ideals bounce off and stick to us.

With the opening of Disneyland in 1955, Walt Disney sought to bring his cartoon characters into three dimensions. Early attempts were crude and jerky. But by the 1960’s, advances in hydraulics and computer technology allowed a robot figure to be smoothly synchronized with sound. The guinea pigs happened to be birds.

Birds seemed the natural choice: their small size makes animating them simple, and their ability to whistle or talk ideally suits them to be rigged for sound. Dubbed “AudioAnimatronics,” these birds made their debut at Disneyland’s Enchanted Tiki Room in 1963.

And what an ambitious debut it was. The Tiki Room presents a musical Polynesian revue in which 200 life-size toucans, cockatoos, macaws, and other tropical birds sing, hum, and joke with the audience. Talking parrots even teach people how to whistle. The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World calls this show “unusual” and “bizarre.” But the original Tiki Room has proven popular enough to be replicated at Walt Disney World and Tokyo Disneyland. Interestingly, though robotics technology has improved over the years, the Tiki presentation itself has not been altered since its premiere.

Stationed outside the Tiki Room, above the entrance, is a “barker bird” who extolls the delights of the show inside. And people listen. In fact, a crowd frequently gathers just to watch this talkative, wise-cracking bird. It deserves full credit for drawing people away from more “exciting” attractions nearby, such as the Jungle Cruise and Pirates of the Caribbean. Why anyone would pause in front of a simple robot bird when there are high-tech thrills all around is a phenomenon worth examining. But some other Disney birds need mentioning first.

The Pirates of the Caribbean ride has its own barker bird -- a pirate parrot with a peg leg, an eye patch, an anchor tattooed on its breast, and a hat emblazoned with a skull and crossbones. This parrot perches above the entrance to the ride and says things such as “Yo ho, a pirate’s life for me.” Indeed, the parrot is a pirate. As at the Tiki Room, crowds gather around this bird to listen to its banter. People take pictures of it. And they’re eventually drawn into the ride itself.

At Epcot Center’s World of Motion pavilion, a cigar-puffing, mustachioed Groucho Marx toucan stars in a show called “The Bird and the Robot.” The toucan explains how an assembly-line robot arm has the dexterity and flexibility to build a new car. Significantly, the bird here is contrasted with the robot, as if there were a difference!

Splash Mountain is a new thrill ride at all the Disney parks. It is based upon the film Song of the South and is full of birds who help to sing the songs from the movie. Additionally, the birds observe and comment on the storyline as it progresses. Most notable are the vultures, who menacingly say “You’re looking for the laughing place? We’ll show a laughing place!” just before the ride takes a 5-story plunge into a briar patch.

One may well ask what’s the purpose of all these unusual talking birds, and what compels us to listen to them?

First, consider the phenomenon of suspended disbelief. In the scheme of Disney’s creations, robot birds are fairly low-tech. But that doesn’t detract from their interest. Quite the contrary, it makes them more believable. Parrots and other such birds are believable to begin with since we know they can talk in real life. So in a theme park where we must suspend our disbelief right and left (as when a group of bears sings country-western songs and plays the guitar), a talking parrot doesn’t demand much from us. In fact, it’s something of a relief. That’s why nobody notices the irony of the title “The Bird and the Robot.” Though both bird and robot are electronic, people generally consider the bird to be more “real.”

Second is something called personification. A bird with a peg leg or a cigar may seem like a stretch of the imagination, but it actually isn’t. These are classic examples of personification. People personify pets all the time. For example, we project our own human qualities onto our birds when we interpret what they’re thinking or feeling. When Disney’s robot birds talk, it’s easy to forget that the words are from a script. Anyone who has attempted to train a bird to talk knows how tough it can be. Birds naturally watch and respond to the world around them, but though they use our terms, they do so on their terms. This fact makes the Disney birds seem all the more credible: they seem to have a will of their own.

A fascinating example of such “credibility” involves the parrots inside the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Throughout the ride, parrots mock their pirate masters as they pillage a Spanish town. The birds mimic phrases they’ve heard the pirates say. In one scene, a number of pirates are too drunk to stand up and recklessly shoot at one another. A parrot surveys the situation and repeats the phrase, “Drink up, me ’arties, yo ho!” This lends realism to the pirates themselves -- they look drunk to the bird, too. It’s as if what the pirates do and say is “real” enough to warrant comment. The parrot is an outside observer. Its eye is, in essence, our eye. And through the parrot’s eye, the scenes we view in the ride take on verisimilitude.

In the face of more impressive AudioAnimatronic figures -- such as the roaring dinosaurs at Epcot Center and the singing Munchkins at the Disney-MGM Studios -- shouldn’t talking birds take second stage? Yet they do not. We invest those lifeless little birds with big doses of humanity. We trust what they say, or at least play along with their obvious but endearing subjectivity (as when the Tiki barker raves about his own show).

And when we go home, we can’t think of our own little birds in quite the same way. We identify with them closely because, unlike the Disney birds, ours speak in their master’s voice. Their statements often seem to be directly responsive to us. It’s easy to ascribe more consciousness to the bird than it may actually possess. That’s because the bird doesn’t merely echo: it mimics selectively. Therefore, it makes us notice how we sound. When a bird repeats a phrase out of context, we are forced to hear our own words objectively. One could go so far as to say that our birds can reduce us to a word or phrase, the way the pirate’s parrot reduces him. We commonly accuse a bird of “mocking” us, but it is we who project the mocking tone onto its speech. The personified Disney birds are there for our entertainment but also for our instruction. And our own little birds entertain and instruct us as well, as our words bounce back and stick to us.