Of all the wonders held within the Disney California Adventure theme park, few dazzle with the kind of fanciful delight of “World of Color,” a spectacular nighttime water show that combines special effects, mist, fire, projections, and colored lights (it took 15 months to design and build at a cost of $75 million). It’s like the dancing fountains outside the Bellagio in Las Vegas but turned up to the nth degree and sprinkled with that singular Disney magic. In a few weeks, the complex show will be completely transformed as “World of Color: Winter Dreams,” an all-new holiday variation, and it will feature brand new animation from the wizards at Pixar.
In a new video posted to the Disney Parks YouTube page (which you can watch below), Liz Gazzano, executive producer of the Pixar Theme Parks Group, and Roger Gould, creative director of the Pixar Theme Parks Group (wait that’s a thing?), explain that a new piece of animation has been created for the nighttime experience, the “Toy Story Nutcracker.” Gould explains that the World of Color Lagoon is “three times the size of a movie screen,” and that Pixar fully intends on utilizing that extra space, “creating animation that fills that entire lagoon.” It looks like all of the characters from the movies (and the recent, totally brilliant “Toy Story Of Terror” Halloween special) are back to put on their interpretation of the classic Christmastime ballet, with bumbling dinosaur Rex (Wallace Shawn) ending up in a tutu (of course).
While the ‘World of Color’ show has had variations (early in the show’s run, two segments from the original show were swapped out for a section dedicated to the lead up to “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides“—the missing segments have yet to return), Winter Dreams represents a whole new experience, with new animation also being created utilizing the Olaf character from Disney’s upcoming animated feature “Frozen” (voiced by Josh Gad). The show is also supposed to include sequences from “Bambi” and, of course, “Fantasia.”
“World of Color: Winter Dreams” kicks off on November 15th at the Disney California Adventure theme park, right next door to Disneyland.
