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But the specific works are less important than the atmosphere Disney created. Art, or some kinds of it (visionary, surrealist, erotic), has the power to expand the limits of fantasy. Disney could not push those too far without ceasing to be Mr. Clean, the celluloid geneticist who ingeniously bred the anus and genitals out of the animal kingdom, the trusted entertainer whose mandate was to give children the dreams adults like them to have. And so his achievement became a large shift in the limits of unreality, which is not by any means the same thing as art. The shows and puppetry at Disney World, like the recent Disney films, are quite without power to stimulate the imagination. The old symbolism of Carnival is lost and buried; Disney cleaned it up, and in the process illuminated a law that might well bear his name—that when illusion becomes too perfect, one loses interest and instead focuses on the backstage machinery. The real magic of the Magic Kingdom is everything a paying visitor doesn't see: the stupendous technology behind these dinky scaled-down Main Street façades, artificial lakes and unsubmersible Jules Verne submarines on rails. In this, Disney's 50th anniversary year, it appears that the Mouse has labored and brought forth a very odd mountain indeed.
—Robert Hughes