Lifestyle
Everything you need to know about Disneyland’s Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, opening this week
Splash Mountain’s eviction is complete.
With the opening Friday of Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, Disneyland has formally rid itself of an attraction that came to be seen as problematic. In its place is a ride that serves as a celebration, boasting a statement about the communal power of music and a narrative that serves as an American success story.
Centered on characters from the 2009 animated film “The Princess and the Frog,” Tiana’s Bayou Adventure makes the argument that thrill rides can enchant rather than frighten us. The ride still features its steep 50-foot drop begging us to hold on tight, but it reframes it. Princess Tiana, now a restaurateur, is throwing a Mardi Gras party, and we need to get there at once. That’s a stark shift from Splash Mountain, with its villainous fox and bear-hunting Br’er Rabbit.
Tiana’s, opening such as it is just about a week after one of our nation’s most divisive presidential elections, is not only a story about people coming together, but also a tale dedicated to those who may be overlooked, says Walt Disney Imagineering’s Josef Lemoine, who helped craft the ride’s narrative. He says such themes could be found in unexpected places, including the background of Louis the alligator.
“He felt like he had to be human to have his voice and abilities recognized,” Lemoine says. “Tiana goes, ‘No. We found you in the bayou. I think we’ll go look where everyone else is probably not looking.’ We want everybody to feel like they have something to contribute.”
It helps give the ride a lighthearted, upbeat feel, making it an attraction that’s based almost fully on the joy of community. And it’s one of a host of reasons we not only think the ride is a blast, but also why it’s an important addition to Disneyland. Here are six things you should know about the new attraction.
1. Goodbye, Critter Country. Hello, Bayou Country.
The opening of Tiana’s gives the newly christened Bayou Country its centerpiece attraction. The land, most recently known as Critter Country, now serves as a sort of extension of the nearby New Orleans Square, home to the quick service dining location Tiana’s Palace and “The Princess and the Frog”-themed shop Eudora’s Chic Boutique. The latter, named after Tiana’s dressmaker mother, features housewares and New Orleans-themed decor. Over in Bayou Country are two additional Tiana-related shops, Louis’ Critter Club and Ray’s Berets. The stores are your go-to for Tiana-themed plushies, headgear and toys, including an interactive and wearable light-up firefly.
Bayou Country also houses the family ride the Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, the too-often overlooked Davy Crockett’s Explorer Canoes and the just-opened Hungry Bear Barbecue Jamboree, nostalgically themed to the late Country Bear Jamboree. But Tiana, with its looming, green-draped mountain, is the star. Including the ride, the west side of Disneyland is home to five “The Princess and the Frog”-themed locales, giving the chef-turned-entrepreneur one of the larger footprints at the Disneyland Resort.
Murals from artist Malaika Favorite grace the walls of Tiana’s Bayou Adventure.
(Christian Thompson / Disneyland Resort)
2. The details entice you even before you enter the ride
One of the most striking sights at Tiana‘s occurs outside the ride, where the murals of Louisiana artist Malaika Favorite don the show building. Look for a series of large-scale paintings — Imagineering’s Ted Robledo, who along with Charita Carter and Carmen Smith oversaw the development of the attraction, notes these are the original hand-painted works. A few feature the alligator Louis and at various points show the interests of Tiana and her growing restaurant empire. They’re colorful, ever-so-slightly abstracted works, all connected via a rainbow tapestry.
At various points they detail group outings, such as playing music, working a garden or collaborating in a kitchen. All told, they help bring to life the Southern region Tiana’s aims to honor, and do so not with fantasy artwork but talent born of the area. They’re fluid and lively, a mix of people and colors that brim with brightness. It’s the rare ride that avoids conflict, and instead acts as a tribute to a city and a culture.
“We want to make sure that people recognize that we’re thinking about New Orleans as an incredible place of so many cultures,” Smith says. “We think about Choctaw Indians, and if you go through the queue you’ll see one of their stickball [artifacts]. It’s a sport that the Choctaw Nation played. There’s all these cultures and stories hidden throughout the queue.”
Mayra the frog in Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, a ride that celebrates music and community.
(Christian Thompson / Disneyland Resort)
3. It’s a thrill ride that’s an anti-thrill ride
The skeleton of Splash Mountain and Tiana’s Bayou Adventure is the same, that is the ride still features its cleverly designed track layout, one that manages to disguise twists, turns and drops. Yet the story on Tiana’s has been simplified. There’s a heavily detailed queue that features newspaper clippings and knick-knacks that give us insight into Tiana’s business and life — we learn, for instance, her last name is Rogers — but ultimately this is a journey about finding musicians in the bayou for a giant Mardi Gras bash.
The ride features multiple songs from “The Princess and the Frog,” opening with “Down in New Orleans” and transitioning to “Almost There,” but once we drop into the bayou the soundtrack shifts to the jubilant and bouncy “Gonna Take You There.” The ride turns into a giant jam session. The score subtly shifts from zydeco to rara — the tones transitioning from that of a backwoods party to a street parade — before leading to an Afro-Cuban finale that builds to the sing-along “Dig a Little Deeper.”
But whereas Splash Mountain was about ramping up the tension — turning fear into fun — Tiana’s wants to use its hair-raising drops for something that feels more festive. Walt Disney Imagineering has in recent years been trying to upend the expectations that come with certain ride systems. See the transition of the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror to Guardians of the Galaxy: Mission Breakout!, which took an elevator drop ride from spooky to comedic.
The multicolored lift of Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, which sets up the 50-foot drop.
(Todd Martens / Los Angeles Times)
Likewise, Tiana’s wants to turn its centerpiece 50-foot drop into a thing to be welcomed. As we ascend up the lift hill, we do so with twirling, bright lights, which feature just a dash of twilight hues. My ride companion, The Times’ senior editor for video Mark Potts, remarked that it felt like going up to heaven. I can’t vouch for the factuality of that, but it resonates, as the emotion here is triumph.
“Life should be about enjoyment and having fun and having that sense of wonder. We want people to walk away feeling, ‘wow’ — drenched, yes — but that they have been on a magical journey where you’re getting a chance to feel a city, and hear the music of the city,” says Smith.
The critter musicians of Tiana’s Bayou Adventure play instruments constructed out of found objects.
(Christian Thompson / Disneyland Resort)
4. You’ll see some of Disneyland’s most advanced animatronics
But not all is so culturally realistic. This is still a Disney ride, after all, and one based on a fairy tale. That means cute critters.
There are three core bands of animals throughout the attraction — Disney has previously said Tiana’s features 19 original characters. Some are instantly charming, such as a rabbit playing a license plate as a washboard (that’s Gritty). Others, such as a big-cheeked frog named Mayra, will recall Dizzy Gillespie.
The frogs appear larger than life, as Tiana’s does utilize a popular theme park cliche of shrinking the audience at one point, but the scene also allows us to better see how all the animals are playing instruments made out of either found objects or forest materials. Check Felipe the frog, whose piano is constructed in part out of a chocolate box. Those who pay close attention to the queue may spot that Tiana is a fan of the very same candy brand. And then there are the bobcats playing single note trumpets (made out of bark and leaves).
Disneyland regulars who go on the ride multiple times will also become familiar with Lari the armadillo, a good-natured thief who appears multiple times throughout the ride. If you see an instrument made out of keyboard keys, the story goes that Lari is likely the one who swiped them from Tiana’s computer.
Fireflies are seen throughout Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, often lighting up the forest.
(Sean Teegarden / Disneyland Resort)
5. Disneyland has the definitive (and I’d say the better) Tiana’s
Tiana’s opened earlier this year at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, and the rides are virtually identical, save for some differences in track layout. The Florida version is also a tad longer, which results in some lengthier interstitial scenes without critters. But Imagineers noted that the ride was plotted using Disneyland’s version of Splash Mountain as the template. That’s because work properly got underway on the attraction during pandemic shutdowns of 2020 when parks were closed, meaning travel was at a minimum and the show building that was studied most closely was the one in Anaheim, as it’s clearly closer to Imagineering’s Glendale headquarters than Orlando, Fla.
The bulk of the decisions related to the ride, such as “where critters went, where characters went, where Tiana is,” were cemented in Anaheim, Robledo said. Robledo pointed out that he’s especially proud of the way in which the Disneyland version transitions into the bayou, as after a short drop we’re greeted by a burst of fireflies that gradually light up the forest that engulfs us and in moments explodes with music. I rode Tiana’s at both parks and while they are extremely closely related, the edge goes to Disneyland. It’s swifter, the animatronics are generally closer to us, and the slightly shorter ride time ensures there’s no elongated scenes without some critter action.
Princess Tiana and her alligator pal Louis in Tiana’s Bayou Adventure at Disneyland.
(Christian Thompson / Disneyland Resort)
6. The change is part of a necessary push for a more inclusive Disneyland
If we can agree that Disneyland is, unlike a film or a television series, a living environment — a place born of one era but striving to be welcoming to subsequent generations — then it stands to reason that its attractions must change with the times.
In 2017, Disneyland at last gave women agency in its Pirates of the Caribbean attraction by removing a bridal auction scene and reimagining a female “wench” as a pirate. Amid the protests and cultural reckoning of 2020 that followed the murder of George Floyd, Disney announced it would strike “Song of the South” references from Splash Mountain and instead feature “The Princess and the Frog,” starring the company’s first Black princess. And in 2021 Disney remade parts of the Jungle Cruise to remove, in Disney’s words, “negative depictions of native people.”
These changes are necessary.
Though Splash Mountain aimed to skirt any controversy associated with “Song of the South,” a work long decried as racist for its idyllic view of slavery and the Reconstruction era, it could never divorce itself from the film. The goal of the original attraction was to be something of a cartoon sprung to life, and it did so by focusing only on “Song of the South’s” animated characters. Yet it was a tricky line to walk, and, in hindsight, perhaps even naive to believe the attraction could stand apart from a film that has long been out of circulation.
Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, then, is a course correction, and one that provides more opportunities for Disneyland’s wildly diverse fan base to see itself reflected in its rides.
Imagineering’s Carter recalled during a media presentation the release of the film about 15 years ago.
“For the first time,” Carter said, “I had a princess that looked like me.”
When Marian Sherry Lurio and Jonathan Buffington Nguyen met at a mutual friend’s wedding at Higgins Lake, Mich., in July 2022, both felt an immediate chemistry. As the evening progressed, they sat on the shore of the lake in Adirondack chairs under the stars, where they had their first kiss before joining others for a midnight plunge.
The two learned that the following weekend Ms. Lurio planned to attend a wedding in Philadelphia, where Mr. Nguyen lives, and before they had even exchanged numbers, they already had a first date on the books.
“I have a vivid memory of after we first met,” Mr. Nguyen said, “just feeling like I really better not screw this up.”
Before long, they were commuting between Philadelphia and New York City, where Ms. Lurio lives, spending weekends and the odd remote work days in one another’s apartments in Philadelphia and Manhattan. Within the first six months of dating, Mr. Nguyen joined Ms. Lurio’s family for Thanksgiving in Villanova, Pa., and, the following month, she met his family in Beavercreek, Ohio, at a surprise birthday party for Mr. Nguyen’s mother.
Ms. Lurio, 32, who grew up in Merion Station outside Philadelphia, works in investor relations administration at Flexpoint Ford, a private equity firm. She graduated from Dartmouth College with a bachelor’s degree in history and psychology.
Mr. Nguyen, also 32, was born in Knoxville, Tenn., and raised in Beavercreek, Ohio, from the age of 7. He graduated from Haverford College with a bachelor’s degree in political science and is now a director at Doyle Real Estate Advisors in Philadelphia.
Their long-distance relationship continued for the next few years. There were dates in Manhattan, vacations and beach trips to the Jersey Shore. They attended sporting events and discovered their shared appreciation of the 2003 film, “Love Actually.”
One evening, Mr. Nguyen recalled looking around Ms. Lurio’s small New York studio — strewed with clothes and the takeout meal they had ordered — and feeling “so comfortable and safe.” “I knew that this was something different than just sort of a fling,” he said.
It was an open question when they would move in together. In 2024, Ms. Lurio began the process of moving into Mr. Nguyen’s home in Philadelphia — even bringing her cat, Scott — but her plans changed midway when an opportunity arose to expand her role with her current employer.
Mr. Nguyen was on board with her decision. “It almost feels like stolen valor to call it ‘long distance,’ because it’s so easy from Philadelphia to New York,” Mr. Nguyen said. “The joke is, it’s easier to get to Philly from New York than to get to some parts of Brooklyn from Manhattan, right?”
In January 2025, Mr. Nguyen visited Ms. Lurio in New York with more up his sleeve than spending the weekend. Together they had discussed marriage and bespoke rings, but when Mr. Nguyen left Ms. Lurio and an unfinished cheese plate at the bar of the Chelsea Hotel that Friday evening, she had no idea what was coming next.
“I remember texting Jonathan,” Ms. Lurio said, bewildered: “‘You didn’t go toward the bathroom!’” When a Lobby Bar server came and asked her to come outside, Ms. Lurio still didn’t realize what was happening until she was standing in the hallway, where Mr. Nguyen stood recreating a key moment from the film “Love Actually,” in which one character silently professes his love for another in writing by flashing a series of cue cards. There, in the storied Chelsea Hotel hallway still festooned with Christmas decorations, Mr. Nguyen shared his last card that said, “Will you marry me?”
They wed on April 11 in front of 200 guests at the Pump House, a covered space on the banks of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River. Mr. Nguyen’s sister, the Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen, who is ordained through the Unitarian Universalist Association, officiated.
Although formal attire was suggested, Ms. Lurio said that the ceremony was “pretty casual.” She and Jonathan got ready together, and their families served as their wedding parties.
“I said I wanted a five-minute wedding,” Ms. Lurio recalled, though the ceremony ended up lasting a little longer than that. During the ceremony, Ms. Nguyen read a homily and jokingly added that guests should not ask the bride and groom about their living arrangements, which will remain separate for the foreseeable future.
While watching Ms. Lurio walk down the aisle, flanked by her parents, Mr. Nguyen said he remembered feeling at once grounded in the moment and also a sense of dazed joy: “Like, is this real? I felt very lucky in that moment — and also just excited for the party to start!”
He always texted when he was outside. No call, no knock. It was just a message and then the soft sound of my door opening. He moved like someone practiced in disappearing.
His name meant “complete” in Arabic, which is what I felt when we were together.
I met him the way you meet most things that matter in Los Angeles — without intending to. In our senior year at a college in eastern L.A. County, we were introduced through mutual friends, then thrown together by the particular gravity of people who recognized something in each other. He was a Muslim medical student, conservative and careful and funny in the dry, precise way of someone who has always had to choose his words. I was loud where he was quiet, messy where he was disciplined. I was out. He was not.
I understood, or thought I did. I thought that I couldn’t get hurt if I was completely conscious throughout the endeavor. Los Angeles has a way of making you feel like the whole world shares your freedoms — until you realize the city is enormous, and not all of it belongs to you in the same way.
For months, our world was confined to my apartment. He would slip in after dark, and we’d stay up late talking about his family in Iran, classical music and the particular pressure of being the son someone sacrificed everything to bring here. He told me things he said he’d never told anyone, and I believed him.
The orange glow from my Nesso lamp lit his face while the indigo sky pressed against the window behind him. In our small little world, we were safe. Outside was another matter.
On our first real date, I took him to the L.A. Phil’s “An Evening of Film & Music: From Mexico to Hollywood” program. I told him they were cheap seats even though they were the first row on the terrace. He was thrilled in the way only someone who doesn’t expect to be delighted actually gets delighted — fully, without guarding it. I put my arm around his shoulders. At some point, I shifted and moved it, and he nudged it back. He was OK with PDA here.
I remember thinking that wealth is a great barrier to harm and then feeling silly for extrapolating my own experience once again. Inside Walt Disney Concert Hall, we were just two people in love with the same music.
Outside was still another matter.
In February, on Valentine’s Day, he took me to a Yemeni restaurant in Anaheim. We hovered over saffron tea surrounded by other young Southern Californians, and we looked like friends. Before we went in, we sat in the parking lot of the strip mall — signs in Arabic advertising bread, coffee, halal meats, the Little Arabia District — hand in hand. I leaned over to kiss him.
“Not here,” he said. His eyes shifted furtively. “Someone might see.”
I understood, or told myself I did, but I was saddened. Later, after the kind of reflection that only arrives in the wreckage, I would understand something harder: I had been unconsciously asking him to choose, over and over, between the people he loved and the person he loved. I had a long pattern of choosing unavailable men, telling myself it was because I could handle the complexity. The truth was more embarrassing. I thought that if someone like him chose me anyway — chose me over the weight of societal expectations — it would mean I was worth choosing. It took me a long time to see how unfair that was to him and to me.
We went to the Norton Simon Museum together in November, on the kind of gray Pasadena day when the 210 Freeway roars in the background like white noise. He studied for the MCAT while I wrote a paper on Persian rugs. In between practice problems, he translated ancient Arabic scripts for me. I thought, “We make a good team.” Afterward, we walked through the galleries and he didn’t let go of my arm.
That was the version of us I kept returning to — when the ending came during Ramadan. It arrived as a spiritual reflection of my own. I texted: “Does this end at graduation — whatever we are doing?”
He thought I meant Ramadan. I did not mean Ramadan.
“I care about you,” he wrote, “but I don’t want you to think this could work out to anything more than just dating. I mean, of course, I’ve fantasized about marrying you. If I could live my life the way I wanted, of course I would continue. I’m just sad it’s not in this lifetime.”
I was in Mexico City when these texts were exchanged. That night I flew to Oaxaca to clear my head and then, after less than 24 hours, flew back to L.A. No amount of vacation would allow me to process what had just happened, so I threw myself back into work.
My therapist told me to use the conjunction “and” instead of “but.” It happened, and I am changed. The harm I caused and the love I felt. The beauty of what we made and the impossibility of where it could go. She gave me a knowing smile when I asked if it would stay with me forever. She didn’t answer, which was the answer.
I think about the freeways now, the way Joan Didion called them our only secular communion. When you’re on the ground in Los Angeles, the world narrows to the few blocks around you. Get on the freeway and you understand the whole body of the city at once: the arteries, the pulse, the scale of the thing.
You understand that you are a single cell in something enormous and moving. It is all out of your control. I am in a lane. The lane shaped how I drive. He was simply in a different lane, and his lane shaped him, and those two facts can coexist without either of us being the villain of the sad story.
He came like a secret in the night, and he left the same way. What we made in between was real and complicated and mine to hold forever, hoping we find each other in the next life.
The author lives in Los Angeles.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
The art industry is increasingly shaped by artists’ and art businesses’ shared realization that they are locked in a fierce struggle for sustained attention — against each other, and against the rest of the overstimulated, always-online world. A major New York art fair aims to win this competition next month by knocking down the increasingly shaky walls between contemporary art and fashion.
When visitors enter the Independent art fair on May 14, they will almost immediately encounter its open-plan centerpiece: an installation of recent couture looks from Comme des Garçons. It will be the first New York solo presentation of works by Rei Kawakubo, the brand’s founder and mastermind, since a lauded 2017 survey exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.
Art fairs have often been front and center in the industry’s 21st-century quest to capture mindshare. But too many displays have pierced the zeitgeist with six-figure spectacles, like Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana and Beeple’s robot dogs. Curating Independent around Comme des Garçons comes from the conviction that a different kind of iconoclasm can rise to the top of New York’s spring art scrum.
Elizabeth Dee, the founder and creative director of Independent, said that making Kawakubo’s work the “nerve center” of this year’s edition was a “statement of purpose” for the fair’s evolution. After several years at the compact Spring Studios in TriBeCa, Independent will more than double its square footage by moving to Pier 36 at South Street, on the East River. Dee has narrowed the fair’s exhibitor list, to 76, from 83 dealers in 2025, and reduced booth fees to encourage a focus on single artists making bold propositions.
“Rei’s work has been pivotal to thinking about how my work as a curator, gallerist and art fair can push boundaries, especially during this extraordinary move toward corporatization and monoculture in the art world in the last 20 years,” Dee said.
Kawakubo’s designs have been challenging norms since her brand’s first Paris runway show in 1981, but her work over the last 13 years on what she calls “objects for the body” has blurred borders between high fashion and wearable sculpture.
The Comme des Garçons presentation at Independent will feature 20 looks from autumn-winter 2020 to spring-summer 2025. Forgoing the runway, Kawakubo is installing her non-clothing inside structures made from rebar and colored plastic joinery.
Adrian Joffe, the president of both Comme des Garçons International and the curated retailer Dover Street Market International (and who is also Kawakubo’s husband), said in an interview that Kawakubo’s intention was to create a sculptural installation divorced from chronology and fashion — “a thing made new again.”
Every look at Independent was made in an edition of three or fewer, but only one of each will be for sale on-site. Prices will be about $9,000 to $30,000. Comme des Garçons will retain 100 percent of the sales.
Asked why she was interested in exhibiting at Independent, the famously elusive Kawakubo said via email, “The body of work has never been shown together, and this is the first presentation in New York in almost 10 years.” Joffe added a broader philosophical motivation. “We’ve never done it before; it was new,” he said. Also essential was the fair’s willingness to embrace Kawakubo’s vision for the installation rather than a standard fair booth.
Kawakubo began consistently engaging with fine art decades before such crossovers became commonplace. Since 1989, she has invited a steady stream of contemporary artists to create installations in Comme des Garçons’s Tokyo flagship store. The ’90s brought collaborations with the artist Cindy Sherman and performance pioneer Merce Cunningham, among others.
More cross-disciplinary projects followed, including limited-release direct mailers for Comme des Garçons. Kawakubo designs each from documentation of works provided by an artist or art collective.
The display at Independent reopens the debate about Kawakubo’s proper place on the continuum between artist and designer. But the issue is already settled for celebrated artists who have collaborated with her.
“I totally think of Rei as an artist in the truest sense,” Sherman said by email. “Her work questions what everyone else takes for granted as being flattering to a body, questions what female bodies are expected to look like and who they’re catering to.”
Ai Weiwei, the subject of a 2010 Comme des Garçons direct mailer, agreed that Kawakubo “is, in essence, an artist.” Unlike designers who “pursue a sense of form,” he added, “her design and creation are oriented toward attitude” — specifically, an attitude of “rebellion.”
Also taking this position is “Costume Art,” the spring exhibition at the Costume Institute. Opening May 10, the show pairs individual works from multiple designers — including Comme des Garçons — with artworks from the Met’s holdings to advance the argument made by the dress code for this year’s Met gala: “Fashion is art.”
True to form, Kawakubo sometimes opts for a third way.
“Rei has often said she’s not a designer, she’s not an artist,” Joffe said. “She is a storyteller.”
Now to find out whether an art fair sparks the drama, dialogue and attention its authors want.
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