After nearly two months behind refurbishment walls, Pirates of the Caribbean reopened at Disneyland today, Friday, June 26, 2026 — and tucked into one of its most familiar scenes is one of the most significant pieces of animatronic technology Walt Disney Imagineering has ever placed in an attraction.

The headline change lives in the Pirates Grotto, the treasure-filled room guests drift through just before the cannon battle at Tortuga. The ride's long-iconic skeleton perched atop a mountain of cursed gold has been reimagined as a brand-new transforming figure. Watch from the left side of your boat and you'll see a flesh-and-blood pirate decay into a skeleton in real time — no lighting trick, no scene swap, no cut. It's a direct nod to the curse that turns Barbossa's crew to bone in the 2003 film.

How the effect actually works

What sets this figure apart from the dozens of animatronic pirates and villagers around it is the face. Instead of the dense mechanical linkages that drive expression on a traditional Audio-Animatronic, this character begins with a 3D-printed shell and almost no visible moving parts. The expression is essentially painted on — a high-fidelity image projected directly onto the contours of the face and mapped precisely to its surface, so a human face can dissolve into bare bone with no edit or blackout.

The effect was developed by Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development, the same team that pioneered Audio-Animatronics in the first place. For this project they partnered with Epic Games, using Unreal Engine 5 — the real-time engine behind many modern video games — to drive the projection so the rendered face tracks the figure as it moves.

Executive R&D Imagineer Leslie Evans framed the goal as building “more tools to just tell stories,” emphasizing that the team builds technology in service of guest emotion rather than spectacle for its own sake.

What else changed in the refurbishment

Beyond the new figure, this was a relatively light touch on the ride itself. The exterior queue received a fresh coat of paint, and new flowers were planted around the attraction plaque on the lower level of the queue. Otherwise, the attraction plays much as it did before the closure.

Here was the permit filed late last year for this refurbishment:

BLD2026-00811 - DLR - Pirates of the Caribbean - Tenant Improvement: Install (3) service ladders at scene #7. Rockwork, projectors and speakers at scene #11. Replace cabinet and related panels adjacent to scene #17. Install raised grated platform and steps over conduit. With electrical and mechanical.

— City of Anaheim

The adjacent Blue Bayou restaurant, which shut down alongside the ride in early May, has already reopened.

Why this one matters

It's tempting to file this under “single scene upgrade,” but the bigger story is the platform underneath it. A 3D-printed shell driven by real-time projection is dramatically more flexible — and more scalable — than a face full of servos and linkages. The same approach could let Imagineers give future figures far more nuanced, human expression: crying, laughing, aging, transforming. Pirates is simply where guests get to see it first.

For context on the stakes: Pirates of the Caribbean opened on March 18, 1967, as the last attraction Walt Disney personally supervised. Nearly six decades later, it's the ride Imagineering chose to debut its next chapter of figure technology — which tells you how much confidence they have in it.

If you ride it this weekend, grab the left side of the boat and keep your eyes on the treasure pile in the grotto. You won't want to blink.