A place full of smiles

My parents were the first members of our family to visit one of the Disney sites, they travelled to Disneyland, California in 1997 as part of a three centre holiday for their first visit to the States.

Twenty years later I was reminded today of my mother's description of the Disney experience when she said "I have never been anywhere else in the world when so many people were smiling for so much of the time." Mam, God rest her soul, seems to have got the spirit of Disney right as today everyone we met young and old were smiling and enjoying themselves.

Spaceship Earth Geosphere

Epcot

Given we only have a week in Disney World, and I reckon you could easily spend three or four weeks and still have more to do. We had planned our visit with some details, which parks to go to on which days, where to eat to make sure we taste a wide range of the available foods. But, given what I have said in an earlier post about jet-lag, we decided to leave Sunday as a free day and go with the flow.

At Midday we thought we were both up to our first visit to one of the parks and as it is a short monorail ride away we opted for Epcot and arrived at 12.30pm.

I noticed on return from my previous visit that Epcot is the park that most British people, except those who have been here, know little about. Unlike the Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom and Hollywood Studios which have themes people can easily understand, Epcot seems more elusive. In fact it is the second park opened here and is focused on celebrating human achievement in both technology and culture.

The defining image of Epcot is the one I used above and here. i.e. the Golf Ball or Spaceship Earth, celebrating the future vision of Walt and his colleagues when the park was developed.  

Ecology - Land and Sea

Given that we will be visiting Epcot later in the week and had booked some of the rides for then, we decided to look at the ones we hadn't planned to visit. These are all in the future world area and are part of the theme of ecology on land and at sea.

Our first visit, based on the shortest queue, was the Circle of Life this twenty minute film uses the Lion King characters Simba,Timon and Pumbaa to make clear points about humans impact on the planet and what we can do for it. A very moral tale for a Sunday afternoon, but a valid one too. The film is online.

This film along with the next ride are all in the area called 'The Land'. The ride was called Living with the Land and involved a gentle journey on water through some of the Epcot Greenhouses, which are live research labs for various agriculture and aquaculture projects.

One of the projects combines agriculture and aquaculture with plants above a fish pond with the plants cleaning the water for the fish and the fish providing fertilisation for the plants - amazing. 

The food produced in this area is used in two of the restaurants in the building into which the ride emerges. 

Channelling my inner five year old, our next ride was in the Sea area. This was called The Seas with Nemo & Friends and involved a very gentle ride, in a clam shell, through elements of the Finding Nemo story. 

Exiting from this ride leads into a real Aquarium with an amazing selection of rays, turtles, dolphins and small sharks including, of course, clown fish - otherwise knows as Nemos. More of the amazing photos Drew took is this area can be found on Flickr, start from this one and move forward.   

Imagination

From the Seas we moved into the Imagination area of Epcot and did the first three of the items mentioned above.

We began with the Disney & Pixar Short Film Festival this is used to highlight the amazing range of imagination technologies used in animation today. After a brief outline from various Disney and Pixar animators about their role and challenges we were shown three films using animation, including a 4D Mickey Mouse cartoon (the 4D being 3D images with fourth elements of physicality (like feeling wet when water comes out of the screen at you.) I am reminded there is a whole philosophy of experience in reality, hyperreality and visual intertextuality in multimodal semiotics. Indeed I used to teach and research this with my Masters students. Having reality twisted by multiple dimensions is a key part of this, but (a) I'm retired and (b) I'm on holiday, so I'm going to just join all the smiling people around me and enjoy it. And I really did.

The next ride, in the neighbouring building to the Film Festival was Journey Into Imagination With Figment which was a 4D ride with Eric Idle, disconcertingly, playing Dr. Nigel Channing with his playful, purple dragon subverting the activity, to move from a series exploration of what our senses can do into a comic sharing. The 4D was so good that the dragon fart in the smell area will linger for some time.

On completion of the ride we were brought into the ImageWorks - The "What If" Labs when we could have a hands-on imagination experience. Drew was particularly enamoured of the conducting area where waving your hands about could get Figment to dance and play music. Here he is in action:

We left the imagination area with the smiles that are so endemic in this place. Drew then said: "Look Chipmunks" and expecting Chip and Dale I started looking around. In fact there was a real live chipmunk under the bench!

This brought over lovely afternoon to an end and we got the monorail back to the Grand Floridian to shower and change before dinner - more about that in the next blog post.