BEFORE THE BIRDS SANG WORDS

Bruce offers a detailed history of the development of Disneyland’s influential Enchanted Tiki Room attraction.

In his jovial introduction, writer/director Brad Bird says that the author’s investigation into Disney’s Tiki Room is “about all the blood, sweat, tears, innovation and will that go into spell-weaving.” For Bruce, the Tiki Room, which debuted its singing mechanical birds and on-trend Polynesian design to the public in 1963, represented midcentury America’s “ultimate expression of all things exotic.” The author has gone to great lengths to back that claim up, delving deep into the history of Walt Disney himself and the myriad influences that converged for the creation of the Tiki Room to explore Disney’s idiosyncrasies, the creation of Disneyland itself, and the cultural and technological explosions of the time. Bruce begins with a much younger Disney as he first discovers mechanical toys in Europe, leading to an obsession with miniatures and dioramas that set the foundation for what would become Disneyland. The fascinating story of the struggling post-war Disney studios, desperate for a hit, plays out in the background as Disney animation fuels Walt’s vision of opening his park. The author consistently expands his point of view, zooming out from Disney to explore the style and atmosphere of the 1960s in general. The text includes a stunning amount of detail; Bruce writes with the confidence of an expert. In his exuberance, however, it does sometimes feel that he leaves his main subject behind, getting lost in specific details about Walt Disney the man, but he eventually ties his various threads together into one engrossing narrative of the Tiki Room’s artistic evolution and opening. The author covers a lot of ground and does so with consistent good-natured humor: “One hundred and sixty acres of orange groves in Anaheim, California, never knew what hit them,” he writes about the opening of Disneyland; readers discovering these stories for the first time will likely feel the same.

A sprawling, charming look at Disney, amusement parks, and mid-20th-century Americana.