grumpy's gauntlet

Research and development is not just about making amazing robotic characters. We're also doing things like advanced fabrication research to figure out how to make the parts of the future using the technologies that are just now coming online. And this is one of those projects.

My name is Xavier Malina and I'm a Lead Imagineer here at Research and Development. I've been working on a project to create a large Grumpy out of marble for the Magnolia Golf Course. Instead of making him out of one of the materials we normally go to — which might be something like fiberglass reinforced plastic or bronze — we're actually making him out of natural marble stone.

The process starts where we have our artists digitally sculpt the Grumpy, and they pay really close attention to the details — like the golf clubs in the '20s, what the golf balls were like. You take that digital file, you give it to the robot, it carves it away on a machine for several days, and then it can be handed off to expert stone artisans who are there for carving it, giving it all these details and really bringing it to life.

We're so excited that in essentially a year, we were able to test something out, produce it out of marble, and then actually get it in front of guests.

This technology is one that really got us excited here at Disney. It's something that we'd never seen before, and it's something that, excitingly, is actually creating new interest in stone carving. Using these machines — which is just one more tool for expert stone carvers — is creating more demand for stone and stone sculptures than ever before. It actually means that more people have been going into stone carving as an art form than would have before, if this wasn't there.

And so this is really, for us, a story of not just technology, but also artistry — and how they can go together to make something that we've never seen before.