Awesome Planet

Awesome Planet
Park	EPCOT
Land / area	World Nature
Type	Film
Opened	January 17, 2020
Designer	Walt Disney Imagineering
Status	Operating

Awesome Planet is a short nature film in the Harvest Theater in The Land pavilion at EPCOT in Walt Disney World, Florida. Made in collaboration with the Disney Conservation Fund, it presents Earth itself as the subject — its landscapes, weather systems and variety of life — and frames the case for looking after it as a matter of self-interest as much as principle. It is one of three films that opened across EPCOT on the same day in January 2020, during the park's multi-year transformation.

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History

The Harvest Theater has carried an environmental message for as long as The Land has existed, but the messenger has changed with the decades. The theatre opened in 1982 with Symbiosis, a serious documentary about humanity's relationship with the land and water. In 1995 that gave way to Circle of Life: An Environmental Fable, which retold the same themes through Simba, Timon and Pumbaa from The Lion King. The latter ran until early 2018, leaving the theatre without a film for an extended period while its successor was produced.

Awesome Planet was announced on March 19, 2019, as that long-awaited replacement. It opened on January 17, 2020, the opening day of the EPCOT International Festival of the Arts, together with Canada Far and Wide in Circle-Vision 360 in the Canada pavilion and the Beauty and the Beast Sing-Along in the France pavilion. Its arrival also fitted the wider reorganisation then under way at the park, in which The Land became part of the World Nature neighbourhood.

Experience

The film runs about ten minutes. Its framing device is a sales pitch: narrator Ty Burrell — cast, the attraction's creators have noted, partly in the spirit of the cheerful estate-agent character he played in the television comedy Modern Family — presents Earth as the ultimate property listing, a home whose location, climate and fittings happen to be exactly right for the life living in it. The joke structures the whole film. Distance from the sun, the tilt of the axis, the presence of liquid water and a breathable atmosphere are introduced as features of the listing, before the film tours what those conditions make possible.

The photography moves through biomes on every continent: rainforest, desert, grassland, polar ice and ocean, with weather treated as a character in its own right — storms, seasons and ocean currents shown as the machinery that keeps the property running. In-theatre effects reinforce the pictures at intervals, including wind, scents and light water effects, so that a change of climate on screen is something the audience briefly feels as well as sees.

The closing section turns from celebration to warning, setting out how quickly the conditions the film has been praising can be destabilised, and ends on the pitch's logical conclusion: there is no comparable property to move to. The music throughout is an original score by Steven Price, the Academy Award-winning composer of Gravity.

Compared with its predecessors, Awesome Planet is the middle course. It drops the fictional characters and fable structure of Circle of Life and returns to the documentary approach of Symbiosis, but it keeps the earlier film's lightness of touch by filtering the science through Burrell's comic delivery rather than through a lecture. It also sits naturally alongside the pavilion's other attractions — the gentle boat ride Living with the Land below it makes essentially the same argument at crop level, and Soarin' Around the World next door covers some of the same landscapes from the air.

See also

• EPCOT
• Living with the Land
• Soarin' Around the World
• Canada Far and Wide in Circle-Vision 360
• Walt Disney World