Beauty and the Beast Sing-Along
| Beauty and the Beast Sing-Along | |
|---|---|
| Park | EPCOT |
| Land / area | World Showcase |
| Type | Sing-along film |
| Opened | January 17, 2020 |
| Designer | Walt Disney Imagineering
|
| Status | Operating |
Beauty and the Beast Sing-Along is a musical film attraction in the France Pavilion in World Showcase at EPCOT in Walt Disney World, Florida. Staged in the pavilion's Palais du Cinéma, it retells Disney's 1991 animated film Beauty and the Beast as a short sequence of its best-known songs, with the audience invited — and lyric-prompted — to sing along. It shares its theatre with Impressions de France, the opening-day film it was widely expected to replace and instead joined.
History
When Disney announced a Beauty and the Beast sing-along for the France pavilion at the D23 Expo in 2019, many EPCOT followers assumed the pavilion's 1982 film was finished: pavilion films had historically been replaced, not supplemented. Disney instead confirmed that the new show would run in rotation with Impressions de France, and that the older film would be upgraded to a 4K presentation so the two could share the theatre on equal technical footing.[1]
The production was in experienced hands. It was directed and produced by Don Hahn, who had produced both the 1991 animated film and its 2017 live-action remake, and narration was recorded by Angela Lansbury, returning to the role of Mrs Potts, the character she voiced in the original film.[2]
The sing-along opened on January 17, 2020, the first day of that year's EPCOT International Festival of the Arts, as one of three new films debuting at the park that day, alongside Awesome Planet in The Land and Canada Far and Wide in Circle-Vision 360 in the Canada pavilion. The sharing arrangement has operated ever since in broadly the same pattern: the sing-along takes the daytime hours, when its family audience is in the park, and Impressions de France screens in the evening. Exact times vary by date and are posted at the theatre, whose digital marquee switches between the two titles.
In the pavilion's wider story, the sing-along was the first piece of a considerable expansion: the France pavilion later grew to add Remy's Ratatouille Adventure and its surrounding streets, making the sing-along part of a three-attraction pavilion where for nearly four decades the film alone had carried the offering.
Experience
The show runs about fifteen minutes and consists of five musical numbers drawn from the 1991 film, presented with on-screen lyrics so that the audience can join in. The songs include "Belle", "Gaston", "Be Our Guest", "Something There" and the title song, "Beauty and the Beast". Guests remain seated throughout, in the same theatre seating used for Impressions de France.
What stops the show being a simple clips package is its framing story. Mrs Potts narrates a retelling with a twist: in this version, LeFou — Gaston's sidekick, normally a minor comic figure — is revealed as the story's quiet matchmaker, the character who set events in motion behind the scenes so that Belle and the Beast would meet.[3] Scenes are reordered and rejoined around that idea, so familiar sequences play with a new meaning, and songs that were Gaston's or the ensemble's become part of LeFou's plan. The retelling is played for warmth rather than parody, and it gives Hahn's production a reason to exist alongside the film itself rather than merely abridging it.
Reception has generally divided along the line the sharing arrangement created. As a light, air-conditioned quarter-hour built around some of Disney's most singable songs, the show is an easy success with its target audience of families. The persistent criticism, from EPCOT traditionalists, is not really aimed at the sing-along itself but at its cost: every daytime hour it occupies is an hour in which Impressions de France, long regarded as one of the finest films Disney has made for a theme park, is not showing. Both positions can be true at once, and the theatre's split schedule is Disney's standing compromise between them.
See also
- EPCOT
- France Pavilion
- Impressions de France
- World Showcase
- Remy's Ratatouille Adventure
- Walt Disney World