Tokyo Disneyland's Beast's Castle Opened Inside a Shuttered, Pandemic-Era Park

Tokyo Disney Resort shut its gates on February 29, 2020, and didn’t reopen them until July 1 that year, 122 days, the longest closure in the resort’s history. Buried inside that shutdown was a ride that had been years in the making and was supposed to open that same April: Enchanted Tale of Beauty and the Beast, the centerpiece of Tokyo Disneyland’s New Fantasyland expansion. It finally soft-opened on September 21, 2020, to a park still running at reduced capacity, one of the strangest launches in the resort’s 40-plus-year history. We rode it on a regular afternoon in September 2025, with no idea how close its opening came to not happening on schedule at all.

What New Fantasyland cost to build

Oriental Land Company, the Japanese company that owns and operates Tokyo Disney Resort under license from Disney (Disney itself doesn’t run the park day to day, a detail that surprises a lot of first-time visitors), put the full New Fantasyland expansion at a little under $700 million. Of that, close to $300 million went into the Beauty and the Beast ride alone, which also came with a full theater, a restaurant, a popcorn stand, and a three-shop merchandise building wrapped around it. For comparison, that’s roughly what it costs to build a mid-size NFL stadium, spent on a single E-ticket attraction and its surrounding village.

That money bought something new for Disney’s parks worldwide, not just for Tokyo. The ride runs on a trackless vehicle system: 10-guest cars that move independently across the show floor rather than following a fixed rail, each with its own onboard motion base that tips and spins the car to mimic dancing, steering, pausing, and turning in front of 35 separate audio-animatronic figures over an 8-minute run time. Trackless systems existed elsewhere before this (Shanghai Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean got one first), but this was Tokyo’s first use of the technology, and it’s part of why the build took years rather than months.

The ride tells the film’s story in order: a stained glass pre-show explains how the Prince became the Beast, the vehicles then roll into a recreation of the “Be Our Guest” dinner number as dancing dinnerware appears around the table, pass through a courtyard scene scored to “Something There,” and finish inside a full ballroom where animatronic versions of Belle and the Beast, built with input from animators who worked on the original 1991 film, perform the film’s famous waltz while the ride vehicles themselves tip and turn along with the music. It’s less a ride past a story than a ride through one, which is the whole point of spending years on a trackless system instead of a fixed track.

A ride that waited out a park closure to open

The original plan had New Fantasyland opening April 15, 2020. Tokyo Disney Resort’s closure that February scrapped that date entirely, and for a stretch nobody knew whether the ride would open that year at all. It soft-opened quietly on September 21, with the full public debut a week later on September 28, both dates landing while the resort was still capped at reduced attendance as a pandemic safety measure. A nearly $700 million project effectively launched in slow motion, into a park that was still only half full.

None of that history was on our minds queuing up that afternoon, we just knew it was one of the newer rides and the line was long. In hindsight, the wait made more sense once we knew what had gone into building it, and how close its opening came to being pushed back even further than it already was.

Two castles, four decades apart

Tokyo Disneyland now has two castles standing a short walk apart, and they come from opposite ends of the resort’s history. The park’s original Cinderella Castle opened April 15, 1983, making Tokyo Disneyland the first Disney park built outside the United States, operated start to finish by Oriental Land Company rather than Disney itself. Beast’s Castle arrived 37 years later, built with 2020s ride technology inside a park that had spent most of that same year closed. Walking between the two in one afternoon is walking between two different eras of what “a Disney castle” is even built to do: one is a backdrop for photos and fireworks, the other is the building the ride is inside of.

With three kids under 10, the practical reality of that gap between the castles was less about history and more about legs and patience. The walk from the park’s main entrance through Cinderella Castle to New Fantasyland takes a while on its own, and by the time we reached the Beast’s Castle queue the standby wait was already long enough that the two youngest were asking to sit down well before we’d made it inside. None of the ride’s story beats are lost on a four or five year old, the ballroom finale especially lands with that age group, but budget real time for the walk and the line both before promising a same-day ride to anyone small enough to get tired of standing.

What it costs to ride today

Getting into Tokyo Disneyland at all requires a park ticket, no way around that:

Getting onto Enchanted Tale of Beauty and the Beast without a long wait is a separate cost now, and a newer one than the ride itself. Tokyo Disney Resort ran a free Priority Pass system for years, a FastPass-style queue skip booked through the app at no extra charge. That system ended August 31, 2026, a little over a month before we’re writing this. It’s been fully replaced by paid-only Disney Premier Access, booked the same way through the app but no longer free for anyone. Enchanted Tale of Beauty and the Beast is one of the attractions on that paid list, officially priced at 2,500 yen per person, on top of whatever the park ticket already cost.

	Then (pre-August 2026)	Now
Park ticket	Required	Required
Line-skip for this ride	Free Priority Pass	2,500 yen Premier Access

For our family of five, skipping the standby line on just this one ride would now run 12,500 yen, more than many of the Klook-bookable activities we’ve covered elsewhere on this site, for a single attraction’s queue. We stood in the regular line instead, the way we did in 2025, and it cost us time rather than yen.

The restaurant that opened alongside it

La Taverne de Gaston, the counter-service restaurant built into the same New Fantasyland expansion, has its own current, published menu: an Assorted Plate set runs 1,560 yen, a Croque-Monsieur set 1,200 yen, and the beef stroganoff Hunter’s Pie set 1,160 yen, each including a drink. A Sweet Gaston pastry is 480 yen, a LeFou’s Churro 500 yen. None of that is specific to the ride itself, you don’t need a ticket for Enchanted Tale of Beauty and the Beast to eat there, but it’s the same $700 million expansion and the same themed village, so a stop there is the one cost from this whole area that doesn’t require booking anything in advance.

Was it worth it

The ride itself, completely. Ten-person trackless vehicles that spin and dip along with 35 animatronic figures are a different experience from the fixed-rail dark rides most of us grew up on, and it’s easy to see why Oriental Land Company treated it as the flagship of a $700 million expansion rather than a routine update. Whether the new 2,500 yen Premier Access fee is worth paying on top of that is a separate, newer question, one that didn’t even exist as a choice during our 2025 visit, and the honest answer depends entirely on how much a shorter line is worth to you on the day. We’d pay it on a trip with a tight schedule and skip it on a slower one, same as we’d decide for any other paid skip-the-line option in Japan.