#illuminations

Even though I live and work at Disney World, I’m always behind the curve on seeing new attractions and shows here. What can I say? I don’t love crowds, and new things always have crowds! At the time of writing, I still haven’t spent an evening at the Magic Kingdom since they started the new nighttime spectacular, Disney Enchantment. But the other night, I went to EPCOT to see their new spectacular – Harmonious.

I hadn’t watched any live streams on YouTube; fireworks never look the same on camera, beautiful as they are. And no one had really “spoiled” any major details for me, not that I care about spoilers. What I knew going into this show is that it had Disney songs in it, and that everyone on Facebook and Twitter seemed to HATE it. While a few of my most die-hard Disney-loving friends said they liked it, most people I knew wanted IllumiNations: Reflections of Earth to come back. An acquaintance of mine even said that Harmonious “doesn’t feel like EPCOT – it’s missing the whole idea of the world coming together as one!”

Now, IllumiNations has been my favorite Disney nighttime spectacular since the first time I saw it. It’s not that I don’tlike the other shows – IllumiNations just stole my heart first, and it kept it! The soundtrack still gives me chills; even though that show’s been gone for over two years, its inspirational message of forward progress lives on in my soul.

Nevertheless, I went to EPCOT that night with an open mind. I was in a bad mood for no particular reason, and I was actively seeking a dose of Disney magic to pick me back up. So I found a spot on World Showcase Lagoon about an hour before showtime, and I waited.

Did Harmonious pick me up? Yes, absolutely. And even better than that – it surprised me! Because while I can see why someone might THINK that this show “doesn’t feel like EPCOT,” for me, it felt more like EPCOT – more like the true potential of EPCOT – than any EPCOT experience has ever made me feel.

Harmonious begins with the opening chords of multiple Disney movies. “Circle of Life” from The Lion King is the most obvious, but I also caught threads of “Vuelie” from Frozenand “Tulou Tagaloa” from Moana. I realized that the show was making several statements right off the bat. Harmonious is about music, and what specific songs mean to us. For example, these three songs are songs that tell you, because of their placement in Disney movies, “This is the start of the show!”

These three songs also told me that Harmonious is about the world – how the whole world hears these songs and the stories they’re from, not just how English-speaking viewers in the United States hears them. I love “Tulou Tagaloa,” but I couldn’t help but think of how my ex-boyfriend always skipped that song, and every other non-English song, when we listened to the Moanasoundtrack. He thought it was “boring.”

“We find each other in song,” goes the narration. And then Harmonious weaves a world of water, light, pretty colors, music – and language.

Harmonious takes us on a journey around the world, through the Disney movies set in different parts of the world – Mulanfor China, Cocofor Mexico, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame for France, to name just a few. And every song in Harmonious is a mash-up of the English version and the language of the part of the world the story is set in. Sometimes it’s a duet of two singers using different languages, and other times the non-English lyrics preside without translation. From what I remember, the only songs which are completely in English are “Touch the Sky” from Braveand “Dig A Little Deeper” from The Princess and the Frog. This is not a show which focuses on ensuring the English-speakers in the audience understand. It trusts you to understand anyway.

Through this multilingual musical world tour, I felt that Harmonious was saying, “These songs mean something to people all across the world, and people use different languages all across the world. Listen and understand.”

Maybe that isn’t the same thing as “the world coming together as one” message some people expected from EPCOT. IllumiNations showed images from different cultures, sure, but it was all in English, and there were no clear distinctions between different groups. The message presented by IllumiNations is that all of humanity is one group making clear forward progress through time, from cave paintings to rocket ships.

Harmonious does not allow you to so simply think that we are all the same group of people. We don’t even all use the same lyrics for Disney songs! But Harmonious also presents these songs and stories as a way to connect different groups of people across the world – we love them differently, sure, but we all love them.

It’s a more complex message, a message that celebrates diversity over simple unity. And it only gets better from there, because the final song in Harmonious is “Someday.”

What is “Someday,” you ask? It’s a song from The Hunchback of Notre Dame – deleted from the film, but restored for the stage musical. It’s sung by Esmeralda and Phoebus, late in the show, as they acknowledge that their quest for love and peace might fail. And it’s a really fricking gutsy choice of a song to sing at EPCOT.

Here are the lyrics:

“Someday, when we are wiser, when the world’s older, when we have learned… I pray, someday, we may yet live to live and let live. Someday, life will be fairer, need will be rarer, and greed will not pay. God speed this bright millennium on its way, and let it come someday – one day, one day – someday soon!”

This is not a “the whole world has come together” song. This is a “the whole world has NOT YET come together” song. This is not the triumphant “We Go On” that closed out IllumiNations, that celebration of how far we’ve come. “Someday” is a song that acknowledges just how far we have to go.

Harmonious still ends with a note of hope – “Set the song inside you soaring,” says the narration, “and the whole world will hear it!” Through music, we can find that “someday” when we are wiser and can live and let live. Because the point isn’t for the whole world to “come together as one” – the point is for us to recognize that we are not one, and that that is a beautiful thing. We are many – we are both different and connected – and that that is beautiful. And isn’t that what EPCOT’s World Showcase really ought to be about?