When Disney sends out invitations to meet the makers of Meet the Robinsons, its new animated film, it's a chance for Liam Stebbingto hop on the roller coaster with his daughters
Most schooldays we have porridge sprinkled with sunflower seeds or berries for breakfast. It can get kind of ascetic, so on Fridays we have boiled eggs and toast, as a stepping stone to the luxuries of the weekend, when a van will turn up with a crate of organic groceries, including eggs and flour for Saturday-morning pancakes (and a bag of oats for next week's porridge).
In other words we're not the kind of people who dream of going to Disneyland in Paris, never mind its sister in Florida. Our children may have different ideas, but we know it's only until they develop a proper middle-class taste for, say, trekking through the Rockies rather than queuing in a theme park for Big Thunder Mountain.
Which is why it's a surprise to find ourselves flying, one Friday morning, to Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport - and, more to the point, heading from there not for the Marais, Bastille or the Left Bank but for the evil empire. Or the Magic Kingdom, depending on how you look at it.
"Come to France to meet the makers of Meet the Robinsons, our new animated film," the people at Disney had said. "And why not bring your children and visit the theme park while you're here, to get the full Disney experience?" As one well-known music journalist put it when he was asked if he'd like to fly to New York to see an underperforming Irish band showcase their new album: "Jeez, I wouldn't cross the street to see them. But I'd cross the Atlantic."
So yes, please, Disney: count us in - even if it does mean leaving my wife at home. Not only will we miss her company, and she a once-in-a-lifetime trip, but I'll be a single parent for the weekend. I'm a new man and everything, but however am I going to plait the girls' hair each morning without bringing trichological shame on our family? I may be a magic washer-upper, and an expert at following Jamie Oliver's recipes, but the finer points of French braids, buns, top knots and even plain old pigtails continue to elude me.
Not that I - or, I should say, my daughters - need worry about that for a while. It's Friday afternoon, we're in the gargantuan lobby of the Disneyland Hotel and the makers of Meet the Robinsons won't be available for almost 48 hours. Who cares that it's starting to rain and that hundreds of people are streaming out of the park? They're clearly not Irish: a soft day never hurt anybody. And don't they know that, at Disneyland, everyone always smiles, the fun never ends and the sun always shines?
Well, perhaps not always. There's no way we can avoid the showers, but they sure shorten the queues, giving us a few hours of almost free rein over whizz-bang roller coasters, ghost trains, pirate ships and space rides. We walk down Main Street, USA - an eye-catching string of clapboard houses that turns out also to be a wallet-stinging string of shops and restaurants - pass through Sleeping Beauty's Castle and climb into one of the giant spinning cups at the Mad Hatter's Tea Cups, a ride that is a perfect first, gentle test of our stomachs' reaction to being churned. And, just as importantly, it doesn't unfurl the girls' hair too much.
Emboldened, we move on to Dumbo the Flying Elephant and - hold on to your plaits - Peter Pan's Flight, an indoor ski lift that lurches you over London to Neverland, accompanied by You Can Fly! You Can Fly! You Can Fly!
And that's one of the weird things about Disneyland: go wherever you like - even into the restrooms - but you won't escape the music. Look around and you'll see speakers hanging from lamp posts, poking through trees and hiding under eaves. And, this being an ultraprofessional set-up, the sound doesn't bounce down towards you, then ricochet away before you have a chance to hear it, as if you were waiting at Connolly Station. Here the music envelops you, wrapping you in sound as it keeps you in the Disney mood. Even at our top-end hotel, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, The Bare Necessities and a dozen more songs we grew up with drift through every corridor, around every bar and restaurant, and up and down every lift.
The music blurs the distinctions between where you are and what you're doing. You can be on a ride, in a shop or sitting on the toilet - spending a euro or a penny, in other words - and the songs stay with you. It weakens your resistance when the children decide they'd like to go into first one store and then another on the way back to the hotel, as the music sweeps you from Main Street, USA into Casey's Corner or Disney Clothiers. As the tune in the shop reminds you of the cool ride you've just been on, why wouldn't you want to buy a souvenir?
It's as well the rides keep us so busy. We've grown sure enough of our thrill-handling ability, and are so enjoying ourselves, that, the next day, we decide to try Big Thunder Mountain. (The Rockies can wait.) For the next four hours - it says four minutes on a ride website, but that must be a typo - we are hurled down, round and through the mountain. Each train has a name, such as UR Daring or IM Fearless. I don't notice what ours is. UR Chicken, perhaps, or IM Scared.
It's a baby of a roller coaster, apparently, meant to slake the thirst for thrills of merely the most inexperienced theme-park visitor. As a new man I don't mind admitting that Big Thunder Mountain has slaked, perhaps for good, whatever thirst I had built up over 35 years. But grab my attention on the way out of the ride, ask me to buy a photograph of us plunging down the track at 40km/h - must be another typo; I think they mean 140km/h - and I'll say yes. I have, after all, just spent a good deal of time bonding with (some might even say fearfully gripping) my children. And I'd like a souvenir of this special moment, even if it is proof for their mother that I let their hair reach bedragglement.
If Steve Anderson, the good-natured director of Meet the Robinsons, could design a ride to go with his film, he'd make it a "roller-coaster-meets-a-star-tour-flight-simulator kind of thing". That's because the star of his film is a spiky-haired brainbox of an orphan, named Lewis, who ends up using a nifty star-tour-time-machine kind of thing to travel to the future, where he meets the eccentric Robinson family, in his quest to find out who his birth mother was and why she gave him up. "The questions he was asking about his past were the exact same questions I've asked since I was a kid," says Anderson, whose experience of being adopted as a child made him keen to make the film.
Anderson would also want a ride that was "surprising you at every turn" - like his film, which stuffs Lewis's twisting path with obstacles, particularly in the form of Bowler Hat Guy, Meet the Robinsons' principal baddy. He's creepy enough to give our younger daughter, aged six, a mild dose of the heebie-jeebies - although, with family-friendliness in mind, Anderson has made him bunglingly devious rather than plain nasty. He and Dick Zondag, Bowler Hat Guy's main animator (who lived in Dublin in the 1980s, when he worked for the Sullivan Bluth animation studio), kept Basil Fawlty and Mr Bean in mind when they were creating him.
Worried six-year-olds aside, Bowler Hat Guy is appealingly unappealing, with plenty of theme-park-ride potential. Whether he makes it to Disneyland depends on how well Meet the Robinsons does at cinemas. In so far as it's the story of an orphan who's looking for a brighter future, the film is a traditionally heart-warming Disney production - and, with its glowing colours, retro feel and sassy music, it looks and sounds as good as you'd expect a film from this studio to be. Children will enjoy Meet the Robinsons, even if it doesn't reach the heights of Shrek or Monsters, Inc.
Adults, on the other hand, might feel that, when Lewis zooms back and forth in his spaceship, the film's version of time travel is enough to give Doctor Who a headache. (Alternatively, they may just tire of the new characters - mainly the extended Robinson family - who keep popping up in the film's busy middle section. And that's without mentioning the singing frogs.)
Some of this over-enthusiasm may stem from changes that John Lasseter, the Oscar-winning film-maker who became the creative head of Disney's animation division last year, suggested that an anguished Anderson make to more than half of the scenes in his almost-complete film. From talking to Anderson and his producer, Dorothy McKim, it's clear that Lasseter, who directed Toy Story and produced Monsters, Inc, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles, inspires dedication and awe among the people who work for him at Disney and Pixar, its sister company. "I love John," says McKim. "He views things through a child's eyes. Walt Disney did that, as a visionary."
You might say that Lasseter has become a father figure for his staff, who are clearly thrilled to be working for such an inspiring animator. "There was a short period of time," says Zondag, "when story executives were choosing the type of pictures we were making, and that was somewhat troublesome. John wanted to go back into the legacy of how Disney used to do it, which is that the stories should be developed and chosen by the directors." In other words they seem to see Disney as having become part of a bigger, happier family, with a clearer sense of where it's heading, particularly in terms of animation, than it has had in recent years.
After I say goodbye to the film-makers we have just enough time to nip into Walt Disney Studios Park, Disneyland's quieter neighbour, which showcases the way films are made. We learn how to draw Mushu, the dragon from Mulan, then become some of the voices in The Lion King. I'm Scar, they're Simba. It's a world away from the rides next door, and Anderson's idea for a roller-coaster-meets-a-star-tour-flight-simulator kind of thing, but we begin to see why he became captivated by animation as he was growing up.
We treat ourselves to one last ride, then head back to reality: school, porridge and, thank goodness, properly plaited hair.
Meet the Robinsons opens at cinemas countrywide on Friday
GETTING THERE
Aer Lingus and Air France fly to Paris-Charles de Gaulle up to seven times a day, with return prices from about €100, including taxes and charges. Ryanair flies to Paris-Beauvais three times a day, with return prices from about €65, including taxes and charges. Shuttle services from both airports to Disneyland Resort Paris cost about €25 per person each way.
A combined adult ticket for Disneyland Park and the neighbouring Walt Disney Studios Park costs €54 for one day, €95 for two days and €119 for three days. Child tickets cost €46, €78 and €98. Disneyland Resort Paris is 40 minutes from the city centre by RER, making it accessible for a day trip if you are staying in Paris.
Two-night packages for a family of four, including park tickets, start at about €650 on www.disneylandparis.com. These do not include transport.
Flight-inclusive packages are available from www.magicalbreaks.ie, www.abbeytravel.ie and other travel agents.