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Most of the park's attractions will be familiar to veterans of the California and Florida venues, though some have been retooled and upgraded. La Cabane des Robinson (Swiss Family Robinson Tree House) includes cunning new cave trails of "rock" artfully sculpted by the Disney team. Pirates of the Caribbean is a spookier and more elaborate cruise among brigand lowlifes. Big Thunder Mountain has been refined into one of the great coaster rides, with new ascents and dips and two hurtling trips in the dark.
Three attractions -- one flop, two smashes -- are new to the world. The Visionarium film, shown on nine curved screens that wreathe the audience, is the least of the lot: a wan drama, with few aerial thrills, that puts Jules Verne (Michel Piccoli) into the time machine of his friend H.G. Wells (Jeremy Irons), with help from a friendly baggage handler (Gerard Depardieu). In the dungeon of Sleeping Beauty's Castle, a powder-puff piece of surreal estate inspired by Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, reposes a fabulous Audio- Animatronics dragon that snorts steam, flashes its stoplight eyes and bares claws nearly as long as Barbra Streisand's in The Prince of Tides. Kids love teasing the reptile; take them to see it. And lose them, if you care to, in Alice's Curious Labyrinth, a 400-yd. maze dominated by a tennis court-size Cheshire cat painted in flowers. You can get lost -- really lost -- among the high hedges and the pop-up Carroll characters.
Walt Disney World in Orlando is a theme park with hotels attached. Euro Disney is the reverse: a spectacular sprawl that confirms the company as a premier force in modern architecture. A decade ago, as architects began to shrug off their Modernist doldrums, they saw in Disney's park designs an attractive blend of wit, glamour and function. Suddenly there was nothing wrong with places that were fun to look at and to live in. Eisner took advantage of the new spirit and hired such Postmodernist master builders as Michael Graves (for the whimsical but still somehow leaden Swan and Dolphin hotels in Florida) and Robert A.M. Stern (for the deliriously Disneyesque Casting Center).
Now when Eisner calls, architects listen. They know they will be encouraged to create show-bizzy, show-stopping showplaces that millions of people each year will see and enjoy. At Euro Disney, the Pritzker-prizewinning Frank Gehry designed the nightclub center called Festival Disney, whose plaza is guarded by giant towers of oxidized silver and bronze-colored stainless steel under a star-studded canopy of lights. It's as if the monoliths from 2001: A Space Odyssey had dressed up and gone out to strut.
Euro Disney got mixed results from two architects named Antoine. Grumbach's Sequoia Lodge is a nontoxic Rocky Mountain high -- restful, woodsy, organic. Predock's Hotel Santa Fe, once you get past its drive-in-theater billboard of Clint Eastwood, looks as bleak as a Southwestern insane asylum. For anyone who wants to get suicidally depressed at Euro Disney, this cinder-block shantytown is the place to bunk.