Disney's Encanto Ride Vehicles Are Casita's Own Furniture, and D23 Put a Furred Chispi on a Plinth

There is a capybara sitting on a white plinth in Anaheim this weekend, and it is not a drawing or a plush. It is a fully furred animated figure with fine individual whiskers and big amber eyes, set above a small green placard headed ENCANTO ATTRACTION. This is Chispi, the capybara who tags along after Antonio Madrigal, and this is the first time Walt Disney Imagineering has shown him as a finished animated figure.

He was part of the Encanto display at D23: The Ultimate Disney Fan Event, and this time the reveal was not concept art. Imagineering showed the ride vehicle maquettes, a physical model of an actual ride scene, and a set of animal figures. It is the first look at physical models of the vehicles and a scene rather than concept art of what they will look like.

Quick facts: The Encanto attraction is one of two headline rides in Tropical Americas, the land replacing DinoLand U.S.A. at Disney's Animal Kingdom. The land is set to open in 2027. The ride still has no announced name.

The ride vehicles are Casita's furniture, literally

The detail that jumps out is that the vehicles are pieces of the house. Two maquettes sat side by side on a plinth labeled RIDE VEHICLE MAQUETTES. One has an upright wooden piano as its front face, keys and pedals and all, with a green padded bench rising behind it. The other has a blue painted dresser with brass knobs up front and a golden woven bench behind, framed in red and green.

WDW News Today, which photographed the display, reports that guests will sit on benches "designed to look like couches or chairs," arranged in two rows of four seats. That is eight guests per vehicle, a figure WDWMagic also reported from the same reveal.

The in-story logic is tidy. In the film, Casita animates its own furniture, sliding tiles and swinging shutters to move the Madrigals around. So the house builds your ride vehicle out of the furniture it already has.

A birthday party, cut in half

Next to the vehicles sat a scale model of one ride scene, built like a dollhouse with the front wall removed. On the left is a dining room with yellow wooden chairs pulled up to a table stacked with wrapped presents, triangles of pink, orange, green and yellow bunting strung overhead, and a small chandelier. Through a teal arched doorway in the middle, a grey donkey stands on red tiled steps with a pig on the step below it. On the right is a kitchen with a blue prep table, a figure working behind it, and a second chandelier under a patterned arch.

WDWNT identifies the scene as Casita's kitchen dressed for Antonio's birthday. Look above the set and you can see the model's steel roof trusses and a catwalk, which is the show building poking through the fantasy. Below it, a curved wooden path sweeps across the front of the whole thing, which is presumably where you will be sitting on the piano.

The animal figures fit that party. Alongside Chispi, Imagineering displayed a donkey carrying party supplies with a toucan perched on top of it. WDWNT places the ride inside the timeline of the movie but expects it to lean on Antonio and his animals rather than on the plot. WDWNT also notes that concept art released earlier showed a scene in Antonio's jungle bedroom.

The ride system question, and why the answer is still a guess

Here is where it gets speculative, so read the label carefully. WDWMagic reported on Friday that shipping records show repeated large deliveries from the German ride manufacturer Zierer Karussell landing at Walt Disney Imagineering sites near Davenport and Kissimmee, Florida, all tagged with descriptions referencing a "Darkride Pico Project." Per WDWMagic, deliveries were logged on July 20, July 26 across multiple containers, August 3 and August 10, with combined weights in the tens of thousands of kilograms.

Their read is that the Encanto attraction is a tracked dark ride running on Zierer's Advanced Dark Ride system, which WDWMagic describes as a vehicle that runs on a guide rail and moves with five degrees of freedom, or five separate ways to move at once. The capabilities it lists include a full 360 degrees of yaw, up to 7 degrees of pitch and up to 7 degrees of roll, plus a way to make the vehicle feel like it is moving forward or backward by shifting it relative to the track chassis. WDWMagic lists the system's maximum vehicle speed as 9 kph.

The caveat that matters: Disney has not announced a ride system vendor for this attraction, and WDWMagic presents this as its own analysis of shipping data rather than a confirmed fact. Treat the spinning-and-tilting part as a well-reasoned guess until Disney says otherwise.

What else was in the case

The Encanto material is one corner of a pavilion Disney is calling "Imagineering: Horizons." On the official Disney Parks Blog preview, Disney said the Tropical Americas display would include a new look inside the Encanto attraction "including Audio-Animatronics figures that will appear in one of the scenes," a model of the temple facade for the land's Indiana Jones attraction, and four character sculpts previewing the friends who will appear on its carousel.

Chispi is doing double duty there. WDWNT reports the capybara will also serve as a ride seat on the carousel in Tropical Americas, which means the same character gets to be both an animated figure inside the dark ride and something you can climb onto outside it.

DinoLand U.S.A. closed for good in February 2026, rockwork and the Casa Madrigal structure have been rising at Animal Kingdom through the summer, and now we know that the ride at the center of it seats eight people on the family's own furniture. There is still no name, no opening date beyond 2027, and no official word on what makes the vehicles move. But the furniture is real, and so is the capybara.

Sources

• Disney Parks Blog, FIRST LOOK Inside the "Imagineering: Horizons" Pavilion at D23 Event 2026
• WDW News Today, Models of 'Encanto' Ride Scene, Vehicles, & Animatronics Revealed for Tropical Americas at Disney's Animal Kingdom
• WDWMagic, Encanto Ride Vehicle Revealed at D23, Analysis Suggests It Spins, Pitches, and Rolls on a Tracked System

Image credits: Chispi figure, ride vehicle maquettes and scene model photos by WDW News Today. Casa Madrigal concept art by Disney.