Hey everyone, Disney is no stranger to making unique experiences, and one of those unique experience came to near my area, the Disney Immersive Experience in Detroit. This isn't the first time I did a special event in Detroit, but it is the first one I did with mskate. The story of how we got to doing this is kind of something. My parents were planning on doing it and bought the tickets, but my mom got sick so she and dad weren't able to do it and gave the tickets to mskate and I. Mskate heard about it but figured it would be too expensive (it was like $38 per person), but when it's free then sure. We got the offer Thursday afternoon for Friday afternoon, which might not have really worked since I work a pretty normal 9-5 type job, but my boss let me have a half day since things are pretty slow at the moment. That worked out great, and so mskate and I were able to go to this special event.
The show was at 2:00PM and we got there at about 1:10 PM, just because we wanted to make sure we had enough time to get there and find parking. That ended up being a little bit of overkill since we were there close to an hour before our show. This ended up being OK since we were able to enjoy the other exhibits before the show. The Immersive Experience is in what seems to be an old 100 or so year old theatre that probably did small shows and had been converted to do these kind of events, and the 3 levels each had a different exhibit. On the first level was a "what is Disney animation and how was it done" and the gift shop, the 2nd level was "this is how the early line animations are done and this is what the final animation is like" along with a "how to draw characters" thing, and the 3rd floor was where they had the immersive experience.
Let's start with the 1st floor. The gift shop was honestly kind of lame. It had a lot high quality Disney merch like collectible post cards, stuffed animals, loungefly backpacks, posters, and such, but it was all overpriced (like Disney World level) and nothing that said "Disney Immersive Experience." We would have bought a pin or poster or something that said "Disney Immersive Experience" if there was something like that (and add the poster to my "poster wall" if that was what we got), but alas there wasn't that. There were some left over things from the last experience they had (seemed like it was some kind of Van Gogh thing), which would have been cool if they had a Disney thing, but nothing. The "how does the animation work" was pretty cool though. I enjoyed reading about how Walt Disney did it, seeing the Beauty and the Beast reproduction cells and how they overlay on each other, the explanation of the multiplane camera (again, it's the same thing I saw in Disney World), but most impressively, the actual key frames of Cinderella's dress transformation with the one screen showing those key frames played at full speed and another screen showing the final result. To actually see the real pencil drawings that actually went into the final film with the notes added by the animators (most notably the colors to use), that was really cool. I probably could have spent the entire pre-show time just admiring these pieces of animation history and seeing all the different details, but we had to see the 2nd floor.
Before I get to the 2nd floor, I need to talk about the stairs. The stairs had line drawings of 75 different characters, and mskate and I knew maybe 73 of them. The 2nd floor was so cool. They had clips of the 2D animated films and shorts with line-drawing and final animation side by side on the wall, which was so cool. I'm sure I've seen side by side comparisons of the 2D animated films or shorts in the past, but never on a 10 foot screen I could walk right up to. They had some scenes from Bambi, Beauty and the Beast, The Sword in the Stone, Dance of the Skeletons, Micky and the Beanstalk, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, and probably some others I'm forgetting. One thing that was really cool was the parts where the character wasn't moving, like when Arthur was pulling the sword there was a part where just his head was animated and his body was still, and in the line drawing was just his head. This was super geeky of the behind the scenes and how it worked. In this room there was also some pages from the final shooting script of Frozen, and what I found quite interesting was that it was basically formatted exactly like a live action production script (at least from my limited encounters with seeing real production scripts). There were also these clay reference models that the animators would look at when drawing the characters since of course, some times we see the character's back or side and the animator needs to know what that is supposed to look like, and since it's a team of animators it needs to be consistent animator to animator. That was pretty cool. Then there was the "how to draw Disney characters" thing, and I tried to draw Goofy. The "how to draw" was not exactly "the best" since it was kind of "draw a circle, draw his mouth, draw his hat, draw his eyes," and not exactly a "how to draw those things." I still think I did pretty good for not being a drawing artist.
Now for the main event on the 3rd floor. We had to walk through a curtain thing and find a place to sit in this big white room with a "Beauty and the Beast" type library with all sorts of Disney icons on pedestals and paintings with different scenes from Disney works (with some occasionally were line test animations). What makes me think this was a repurposed theatre is there was a very clear stage and mezzanine at some point with arches that look "artsy," but it was all painted white so the images could be projected. The floor was also part of the display, actually interactive. At the start there were stars projected onto the floor, and if you walked around the stars would be pushed out of the way. It worked best closer along the wall because that's where the sensors were, but it was pretty cool. There weren't a lot of seats (the few benches near the wall were labeled "handicap accessible"), which basically says the experience was meant to be seen by sitting on the floor. Had we had VIP tickets we would have gotten cushions to sit on, but we just had basic tickets, but we're young so it wasn't that big a deal. The interesting thing was we were the only people without kids, and we weren't quite sure if this was going to be "for kids/everyone" or "for older audiences." The first 2 floors definitely were for older people (pre-teen at the youngest), but maybe this show would have worked for kids.
Now for the main event. This was truly an interesting event, one that can only be experienced. It was basically song clips of animated Disney movies done in a full 360 perspective. Like, the most memorable one for me was the Lion King one with Circle of Life where we were in the Serengeti and instead of cutting to different animals at dawn like in the movie they just had all the different animals everywhere. There was also one with A Whole New World where we're in Jasmine's room with the scene playing out on one wall and the other 3 are just her room, and when we leave the room changes to the sky to give the feeling of flying on the magic carpet, and then it shows us the worlds of different movies. There were also 3 different musical numbers where bubbles were blown into the audience, 1 time with fog in the bubbles (that got the kids running around as they wanted to pop the bubbles). One of the bubble songs was Show Yourself from Frozen 2, another was probably a Little Mermaid song, and I don't remember what the fog one was but it definitely matched. Throughout all of this, I'm pretty sure we either saw some deleted animation or new animation just for this experience. I'm not just talking about "the 3D renders that were used to make rooms since the movies weren't animated in 360," I mean like when Tiana was singing "almost there" there were some wide shots that I don't think were present in the actual movie (one wall showed like "all wide shots" and the other wall showed "mix of shots" which I think came directly from the movie, so we saw things that were originally out of frame). It was really cool. The last song was Show Yourself from Frozen 2, and I have a strong feeling that was "very conscious," because while the Frozen franchise is easily Disney's most profitable IP at the moment (because it's the only Disney Princess franchise at the moment, girls like princess movies), I have a feeling there would have been problems if it was Let it Go, with half the audience belting "LET IT GO! LET IT GO!" and the other half groaning hard. The show lasted about 45 minutes, which is probably about as long as they could have made it work.
So, was this worth the $38? It really depends on the person. I know I got $38 worth out of it, but I'm a pretty big Disney movie and animation fan (seeing actual pencil drawings from Cinderella was probably worth $10 alone, seeing the actual Frozen shooting script probably $5, and then the side by side comparisons was worth $10-15, and I don't even know what I would pay for what I think was deleted animation from the movies). Mskate also probably got $38 worth since she really enjoys Disney, but I don't know if she had the same kind of reverence for the behind the scenes stuff I do and probably didn't get the same kind of fulfillment out of it I did. The kids in the audience, the ones running around were probably bored so they likely didn't really get it, and the parents watching them probably didn't get the full immersion that is required because "where did Steven go?" Since it was a "sit on the floor" experience, I don't know if my parents would have gotten enough out of it either (but they might have gotten to the benches which would have given a good enough experience). I say if you're a big Disney or animation fan it's worth it, and maybe even if you're just a fan that isn't necessarily big, but other than that it might not be worth it. Also with the VIP ticket you got a cell print or some sort of art piece from the movies along with a wrist band that changed color with the show (similar to magic band plus), which were really cool but I don't know if those would have been worth the ticket price (though we were like the only people without VIP tickets based on all the wrist bands we saw). I'm glad I did it though, and I might go so far as to say "I would do it again" because with my 135 degree field of view I know I missed things. This has been Pokematic, signing off, and bu-bye.
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