When it comes to theme parks, Disney reigns supreme. Every one of its twelve parks immerses the visitor through carefully crafted sight lines, intricate details, audio, lighting, landscaping and more. Muffled conversations trickle down from the balconies of New Orleans Square, footprints of alien creatures dot the walkways in Star Wars Galaxy's Edge, and the scent of vanilla and popcorn wafts through vents along Main Street, U.S.A. Whether or not it's your thing, you can't deny Disney's invention, thoroughness and intricacy.
All of this artistry is thanks to the staff of Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development, a.k.a. "Imagineers." For decades, Imagineers have created Disney attractions worldwide. But how exactly does a person become an expert at world-building? For Joe Rohde, that journey begins in a big, old house in Honolulu.
Rohde, now 67, started with Disney more than forty years ago and became a spokesperson for Imagineering, featured in numerous interviews and media spots. He's charismatic and engaging, steering any topic into a fascinating conversation. His trademark is his distended left earlobe, from which hang items from his large collection of travel mementos. Rohde was lead designer on some of Disney's biggest projects: Animal Kingdom, Animal Kingdom's Pandora-the World of Avatar, and Aulani Spa & Resort on the Leeward side of Oahu. He views theme parks as cultural institutions that ideally inspire visitors and expand their worldview. While his achievements are well documented, Rohde rarely talks about his childhood in Hawai'i and how formative the Islands were to the designer he is today.
"When I introduced myself while working on Aulani, I would say, 'Hi, my name is Joe Rohde, but you're not going to know me as that, I am an Ornellas.'"
There's a reason he goes by his mother's family name while in the Islands. Rohde's maternal line in Hawaii goes back to the late nineteenth century, when his ancestors arrived with a wave of Portuguese immigrants contracted to work for plantations. Rohde's great-grandfather bought a ranch on Kauai and, "according to family legend, ended up as a ghost, riding his donkey along the ridge above the ranch." Rohde continues, familiar with the local habit of sharing your lineage with other kamaaina for connection and cred. "My grandfather lived in a big house in Kaimuki and owned real estate. He owned and ran Smith's Union Bar for a while. My Uncle George was on the police force in Kaneohe. Another cousin, George, was sheriff on Maui for a long time. I had an auntie in Nuuanu, I have cousins in Nanakuli." He gets the pass-Rohde's Island roots run deep.
As a boy Rohde often visited Hawaii artist Jean Charlot (whose work is pictured here on Rohde's bookshelf), giving Rohde an early education in art.
"My father was a Depression-era runaway guy from Nebraska who ended up in the Navy, and then had an independent film business. He ended up in the Islands just when my mother had returned from a career on Broadway." Rohde's mother Juliet Ornellas, known on stage as Julie Parish, had been raised in Kaimuki and left to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan with the likes of Marlon Brando and Grace Kelly. Following her success on Broadway, she was offered a film deal and relocated to Hollywood. But once there, the deal fell through. "She hated Hollywood," says Rohde. "I think it was just too much culture shock." Juliet decided to return to her life in Honolulu. "So she goes home and there's my dad. They meet, they fall in love and they get married. They come back to California briefly. I'm born in Sacramento. Then they're back in Hawaii and he's the assistant manager for one of the first TV stations, which was originally KONA before it became KHON."
Rohde's father Martin managed programs on KONA and even acted in one, portraying a cowboy on a children's show. His success took the family back to Sacramento for more film opportunities, but their lives were upended when Rohde's younger brother suffered a brain injury that plunged the family into debt.
"Really quickly, all the money was gone. Everything was spent to cover these mind-boggling medical bills," Rohde recalls. "So it was back to Hawaii, where there was family and some support. We lived in Lanikai for a very short time, back when Lanikai was an artsy, bohemian, hippie community. Then we moved to 1548 Wilder in Makiki, this sprawling, dilapidated, mid-nineteenth century stilt house. Very British colonial.
"On the one hand, we had no money," Rohde says. "We literally sometimes were living on breadfruit and avocados from the trees in the yard and donated food. On the other hand, we lived in this amazing thing-this weird, old, giant house full of stories. I would pull my sister around in a carriage that came with the house. Who had a carriage, a surrey in their yard? A couple of years later I discovered a hidden Shakespeare Garden beside the canal that bordered the property. There was this massive tangled hedge of hibiscus, and I was chasing a lizard, and I found this stone stairway. So I start pushing away leaves, and there's another step, and another step. I go under this hedge and there is this little abandoned, overgrown garden!"
"So what does this have anything to do with a guy who turns into a Disney designer?" he asks rhetorically. "Part of it, I think, has to do with the dislocation of that way of growing up-the oddness of it. Because of my brother's injury, we grew up in relative social isolation. My parents just avoided having to explain to people why this kid behaved the way he did. We didn't have a lot of social interaction, but they were creatives. So instead it's books, it's art. All this time that other people spent playing with other people was just us in a bubble."
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(LEFT) Rohde's home studio with original work and snapshots for inspiration. (RIGHT) Rohde sports an item from his collection of earrings.
His parents did occasionally socialize, though, with some of the island's most famous artists of the time-the Charlot and Stasack families. Jean Charlot was known for his murals and paintings celebrating culture, and Edward Stasack is famed for his studies of Polynesian petroglyphs. "So that forms one of the connective tissues, because both of these houses were my exposure to art, and both of these people conflated art and culture. Charlot's son Martin was really interested in filmmaking, and my father taught him filmmaking. Martin taught me how to draw. I was like a little invisible ghost kid wandering around the Charlot house. And now, my house is one where children can come and be inspired by stuff that hints at the great wildness and expansiveness of the world." Rohde keeps a Martin Charlot painting of a kava ceremony in Fiji in his living room, painted when the artist was just 16, along with two Stasack petroglyph prints.
Eventually Rohde's father hit it big, working on larger film projects in Hawaii until an offer came to work on the original Planet of the Apes. The family relocated to Van Nuys, this time permanently. "So my whole axis shifts again. But by then, a lot of things are set, and they're set by Hawaii," says Rohde. "We grew up in a really fluid, multicultural environment, which made me more receptive, more open, more easy crossing boundaries. So when I get to this more fixed culture in California, I don't quite belong. But I can see this place objectively because I'm not in the middle of it. I can't be in the middle of it, because I'm not from there ... I'm from another kind of place. This is a huge asset in creativity-this slight displacement that allows you to see. That was a gift."
Following school at Occidental College, Rohde spent his early twenties teaching in the theater department at his high school alma mater, Chaminade College Preparatory School in the San Fernando Valley, where fortune favored the talented: One of his students was the son of a Disney engineering executive who recognized Rohde's talent for designing sets and recruited him. "I was more or less a countercultural kind of young person," Rohde chuckles. "So I wasn't a typical Disney person." He started on his first project in 1980, building models for the Mexico Pavilion at Epcot Center.
A sampling of sketches Rohde created while designing Aulani, Disney's resort on Oahu. (BELOW) Aulani's working loi kalo (taro patch) is one of many features of the resort Rohde's team designed in collaboration with Native Hawaiian cultural practitioners.
Rohde traveled extensively for research and to pursue the adventures he had dreamed about as a kid in Makiki, reading books and seeing paintings of Chichen Itza in the Charlot house. "I've traveled all over the world and I don't have culture shock. I believe this is one of these gifts that you carry from Hawai'i. I already take my shoes off, you know? I already lived in a place at a minimal level of subsistence, so going to these places felt more like going home. That facilitates not only the research, it facilitates the ease of exchange behind the research. People are more open to you because you seem more open to them. That's when everything started coming back around to art related to cultural examination, cultural expression and cultural advocacy. All these things start bubbling up at this time, and they become the thread that runs through a lot of this work. It starts out with Animal Kingdom and it eventually leads to Aulani."
In 1982 Rohde married his college sweetheart and travel partner, Mel Malmberg, who also began working at Imagineering as a writer and has since authored a number of books about Disney. When Michael Eisner became CEO at Disney, Rohde's well-traveled "countercultural" perspective was just what Eisner wanted for a new kind of park. The Rohdes welcomed two sons and moved to Florida in the mid 1990s to work on Animal Kingdom.
"They said they wanted to do a park about animals. 'Animals' is a subject. It's not a theme. So what is the park actually about? In 1989, the Disney product was defined by this extremely high level of delicate, polished artifice, idealism, perfectionism, a kind of stylistic reductionism that makes things seem like they're in a storybook. Animals are none of that. They live, they die, they poop. They have flies. They have sex. They have babies. They're going to do all of this in front of you. They're filled with political and socioeconomic ideas. And the very premise that you're seeing them in this park is implicit with socioeconomic and political ideas. None of those lead to a design that is perfected, idealized, polished or reductive. They lead to a design that is verite, emphatically realistic. So I needed an environment that appears to be documentary, not fantasy, or the animals will not match. You can't make animals comply with a design philosophy. You have to make a design philosophy that complies with the animals."
Animal Kingdom opened in 1998 as part theme park, part conservation organization. Rohde was adamant that to be successful, it had to be cutting-edge in its treatment of the animals and its advocacy for animal welfare, both in captivity and the wild. The design was realistic, full of socioeconomic and political ideas and a sense of the unpredictable. Electrical wires appear to hang haphazardly, the walls look like crumbling plaster, messages are scrawled in unexpected places and tattered peace flags sway in the wind. Animal Kingdom was a success, and Rohde became one of the preeminent leaders in the creative division at Walt Disney Imagineering.
In 2007, Disney presented Rohde with a new challenge, this one close to home. "They said, 'We want to make an authentic Hawaiian resort,'" Rohde scoffs. "I was like, 'Okay, what does that even mean?' ... If you grow up in the Islands, you know that people who merely visit are not seeing what they truly are. They see a kind of performance. There's so much more here than they know. The question is, how can you let them know there is more? Otherwise, they're going to come and go thinking they've been to Hawaii, when really they've been to a kind of capsule that's placed there.
"So, I knew that. And I knew more than the next guy in line would know, from books, from family traditions, from living there. I did not know enough to pose as the cultural expert; I'm not Hawaiian. If this thing is going to be authentically Hawaiian, which is something Disney had already started saying, it could only be that by being effectively done and controlled by Hawaiians, because they're not going to say it's authentically Hawaiian unless it is. You have to make a place that complies with what it means to be Hawaiian, not make Hawaiians do something that complies with you."
Disney CEO Bob Iger supported Rohde's intention. "I said, 'Look, we're just going to take every single element in the hotel and use it to express Hawaiian ideas and Hawaiian values.' And Bob goes, 'Well, has anyone ever done that before?' And I said, 'No, they have not.' He goes, 'Great, this meeting's over. Let's do it.' It was like a thirty-second meeting."
Rohde designed Aulani to impart information about Hawaiian culture. From the kapa (bark cloth) patterns in the carpets to the kii on the grounds, “You can’t not encounter something,” he says. Above, Rohde’s sketches for the Olelo Room, a bar filled with Hawaiian-language motifs and where the bartenders speak olelo Hawaii—the Hawaiian language.
Rohde initiated talks with Hawaiian cultural advisers who were understandably skeptical. But Rohde insisted that his team arrive at the meetings informed about Hawaiian history and culture. "We came to these talks with a core idea: That what makes Hawaii, Hawaii, instead of some other tropical beach destination ... is Hawaiians. A visit to Hawaii is therefore a visit to Hawaiians." Rohde knew that his team of Imagineers could inspire interest in Hawaiian culture. "But the content-what everything would say about Hawaiian culture-that's not for us to say. That's for us to facilitate. So, when we dealt with our Hawaiian artists and advisers, we were trying to find out what could be shared that's relevant to the place and meaningful to people who are probably new to Hawaii-family, hospitality, story, the importance of community, interrelationship and land."
Rohde and the Imagineers teamed up with kahu (caretaker) Lynette Tiffany, lovingly known as Auntie Nettie. "Everything got at least shown to Nettie," Rohde recalls. "One day early on she came to me and said, 'Before you guys build, I need to walk this site. I need to find the piko [navel].' So she walks and says, 'Here.' We marked that spot and redrew the landscaping to avoid it. Towards the end of the project Nettie said, 'You need to find a stone to mark the piko.' I thought, how the hell am I supposed to do that? By law the property had to be twenty feet above sea level, and the piko was twenty feet below the ground. But then I remembered that we had saved a bunch of this beautiful fossilized coral that emerged during deep utility construction years earlier. At the time I asked that they not throw the stones away, not knowing what we might do with them. Just didn't seem right, knowing what I know about Hawaii. One of them contained fossilized sea life and chunks of lava from the land, a microcosm of Hawaii itself." Nettie agreed: This would be the piko stone.
The resort itself features more than twenty-thousand paint colors, all matching those of the landscape along Oahu's Leeward coast. The entrance isn't landscaped with imported plumeria and heliconia, but rather with a kalo (taro) patch, where visitors can pound poi. The resort's two towers allude to Hawaiian deities Hina and Ku, with one tower favoring feminine art and details and the other masculine. Lamps resemble umeke (calabashes) and kukui nuts, which Hawaiians used for torch oil and candles. Rohde and the advisory committee included modern Hawaii, commissioning hundreds of pieces from contemporary Native Hawaiian artists: paintings by adviser Doug Tolentino, Meala Bishop and Brook Kapukuniahi Parker; sculptures by Mark Chai; kii (images) created and consecrated by Rocky Jensen; murals by Harinani Orme; kapa (bark cloth) by Dalani Tanahy; music in the lobby composed by Kealii Reichel. The lobby also features a large wraparound mural by Rohde's old friend Martin Charlot.
Did Aulani accomplish what Rohde set out to do? "For a design like this, 'success' is an ongoing issue," he says. "Do Hawaiians feel represented? Then yes. Do guests come away with a better understanding of these Islands? Then yes. But it's a question that has to be asked again and again, because it is a living thing with its own destiny. It's not about the building itself-it's about the conversations it engenders and the relationships it can build."
One of the many menehune statues hidden throughout Aulani's grounds, Rohde's playful nod to Disneyland's hidden Mickeys.
Following Aulani, Rohde embarked on a massive project to create a new section of Animal Kingdom dedicated to Pandora, the fictional moon featured in James Cameron's Avatar. For the previous forty years, every existing project with Disney had been shingled with the start of a new one, leading Rohde down a never-ending path of creation until the end of 2020. As the Pandora project wrapped up, though, nothing else was in development. Rohde could have pitched new ideas, but those would have him working with Imagineering into his late seventies, and there were many adventures he hoped to have before then. So at 64, he retired from Disney in January of 2021 after forty years.
Today Rohde dedicates his time to travel with his family, to work as an "experience architect" for Virgin Galactic imagining what space travel might be like for the tourists of the future, and to co-chairing the Explorers Club 50 program, which highlights the stories of fifty extraordinary new members of the society each year. He also runs an active and interesting Instagram account (@joerohde) where he regularly posts about history, art and culture.
In the center of Aulani's Waikolohe Valley, filled with water slides and snack bars, the path circles into a quiet glade of trees. There's not much there but a large, intriguing stone. There's no label or sign, but you wonder why it's there. The only thing to do is ask someone. If you do, you'll learn about the piko and what that means about the land beneath your feet. That is the legacy of Joe Rohde. "I know that we specialize in fantasy, in escapism," Rohde writes on Instagram. "But sometimes the most magical things that can happen are not a fantasy at all, but the unexpected cultural horizons we can cross together if we are just open to the possibility."
