After-Action Report: Pixar Fest

It's very rare that I manage to see new developments at the Disneyland Resort within the first week or two of launch. The San Fernando Valley isn't quite close enough to Anaheim for a casual hop over, and I don't actually own a car. So my trips need a bit of advance planning, and the timing doesn't often seem to work out for experiencing something while it's brand-new. This was an exception—I had some time off of work, and my sister had a day off, and so we managed to hit the place up on a Wednesday.

The weather was perfect, the crowds were as light as they are ever likely to be anymore, and...Pixar Fest had just started up the previous weekend.

Man, they don't make summer events like they used to, do they?

Like I've said before, I've got nothing against Pixar. They produce quality movies.* Coco was one of the best things I've seen in years. But as I've also said before, Pixar is not a theme. There is not much uniting the Pixar movies apart from them all being made by the same studio; objectively speaking, a summer celebration dedicated to Pixar is no more coherent than if they tossed all of the films in the Disney Animated Canon into a hat and drew fifteen at random.

But it is what it is. So what is it? How is it? Is it tolerable?

Eh, I guess.

Pixar Fest is mostly being expressed through special food and merchandise items, and through the live entertainment. Existing attractions based on the Pixar filmography are being heavily promoted, but there are no obnoxious overlays to other attractions—the closest equivalent is a “film festival” of the Pixar short subjects in the old MuppetVision 3-D theater, which is actually pretty cute. Apparently they rotate which ones are being shown; the ones we saw were “For the Birds,” “Lava,” and “Piper.”

This isn't to say that there's nothing obnoxious about Pixar Fest, because there is. Specifically, the decorations. The signature colors of the event are this hyper-saturated red-yellow-blue combination, representing the Luxo Ball. There may be a place for that sort of thing...but Main Street, USA sure ain't it.

This is a really cool shot, though.

This is also fairly obnoxious:

Look: when New Tomorrowland '98 opened, I was as baffled as anyone as to why they would put a pizza restaurant in Tomorrowland and not call it Pizza Planet,** but I have long since gotten over it. I quite like the menu in Redd Rockett's, especially their range of salads, and am rather disappointed that it has been pre-empted for the summer in favor of a stripped-down version and a slushie fridge. And this is nigh-unforgivable:

Not “TP on Cinderella's Castle” levels of tackiness, but still pretty tasteless and disrespectful of Disneyland's iconography.

So yeah. Not really loving this concept.

As for live entertainment, we've got two parades and a new fireworks show to consider. The Pixar Play Parade and Paint the Night have both been updated for the occasion, and their locations have been swapped. We didn't see either one—we had other scheduled obligations—but we did stick around for the fireworks, an all-Pixar show called “Together Forever.”***

Credit where it is due: the showrunners did successfully identify a common element in many Pixar movies. Most of them get a major emotional arc out of either the beginning of an unusual friendship, or an existing one being tested and coming out stronger. Unfortunately, the show doesn't quite bring that across—you'd never be able to identify this theme just from watching it, without knowledge of the title. It's very much a show of the current school of “here's a movie, with its music and images (check out our projection mapping!), and now here's another movie, same deal, and did you ask for a third movie, well here it is!”

I honestly think the projection mapping is overused in nighttime shows at this point. Sleeping Beauty Castle and the Main Street storefronts were not designed to act as film canvases in that manner, so the images come out garbled, and furthermore it's distracting. This is something I noticed with the new Fantasmic! also—there is so much going on, visually, at any one time, that you can't possibly watch it all. I don't think I'm off-base in considering that a detriment in a primarily visual medium.

This is not to say that “Together Forever” is a complete wash. There are a few really strong moments, such as when a rocket projected onto the front of the Castle “continues” as a firework launching from behind it, or when the projections transform the Castle into the house from Up...and then a model of the house, balloons and all, is sent along Tinker Bell's wire. If the whole show displayed that level of creativity in the use of its technology—and if, say, it had a unique theme song interspersed among all the score pieces by Randy Newman and Michael Giacchino—then I think it could be really good.

There was one other Pixar Fest attraction we made a point of seeing: the Pixar Pier exhibit in Blue Sky Cellar. Mostly, we were just glad to see Blue Sky Cellar open for business again, even if the actual exhibit was pretty par for the course. Some of the plans for things like snack stands are pretty cute, and I might even applaud them if Pixar were a theme.****

I found a new Hidden Mickey, so there's that:

No, not the clock. Not the mug either. Give up?

So...yeah. Pixar Fest is not great. But we're stuck with it for the summer, might as well make the best of it. Paint the Night will be updated again in June with a new Incredibles float; that should be pretty cool, as well might the new version of the Pixar Play Parade. Some of the food options seem more promising than Pizza Planet, while others seem absolutely ridiculous but so impossibly decadent that I would be a fool not to try one.

So we'll see how it goes.

* When they're not running low on ideas and resorting to sequels.

** My understanding is that there was a legal conflict with a long-established area business by that name and it just wasn't worth the court fight and potential bad press.

*** Nothing to do with Rick Astley.

**** But Pixar is not a theme.