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EFTELING
THE NETHERLANDS, NOORD-BRABANT
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PANDA VISION, THE SHOW OF THE FUTURE
Efteling celebrated its 50th anniversary this year. For its jubilee celebrations, the Dutch park concocted a particularly rich treat for its visitors (look at info & news). Panda Vision, a remarkable audiovisual spectacle that foreshadows the kind of shows we'll be seeing in the future, is without doubt the icing on this rather sumptuous birthday cake. Within a matter of years, every park will have its own Panda Vision-type show; but as that is far from being the case right now, all the more reason to check this 14.2 million dollar attraction, the most costly every created in a European park.
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EDUTAINMENT
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Panda Vision is the first attraction to have been co-financed by a park and a non-governmental organisation, as it happens the World Wildlife Fund, the organisation that fights for the protection of endangered species. For the WWF, the idea is to sensitise people to its cause. Entertainment experts would therefore dub Panda Vision "edutainment", a contraction of "education" and "entertainment". It is a new millennium example of the pedagogic precept "to learn while having fun". Along with thrill rides such as roller coasters, edutainment seems to be more than just a passing trend.
Attractions that require ever more advanced technology, also require larger sums of money; in this respect, the decision to have an outside partner seems to be an original idea that may very well take on in other parks.
Edutainment takes into consideration the wishes of "modern parents" who favour the educational aspect of their children's pastime.
For these reasons Panda Vision is well ahead of the game...but that is not all.
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BEFORE, DURING, & AFTER
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Another concern in theme parks is how to relieve the tedium of waiting in long lines. As it is near impossible to reduce the wait, the solution has been to make it as interesting as possible. Before you get to the main attraction (a 3-D film called Voyage Around the World), you are made to zigzag around a lake, different kinds of flora, and automated animals in an exotic forest. You then go through a waterfall to get to the Marvellous Grotto where three screens project sequences intended to familiarize you with various ecological problems that threaten our planet. This is an area that has been scrupulously designed, and along with the pre-show, serves to pique the curiosity of the public. Before talking about Voyage Around the World it is important to note as well that there is a post-show. When you exit the movie, you enter The Animal World, an area of some 1400 square meters where each element of the film that you have just watched has been transformed into an area for playing and learning. This large, sculpturally dazzling space that is full of educational value is also the place where the richness of the Efteling-WWF partnership can be seen. You've seen the before and after, now all that remains is the show itself which also follows a resolutely contemporary logic.
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VOYAGE AROUND THE WORLD
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The technical-minded, in a manner perhaps devoid of poetry, call it "a film with environmental effects". The more whimsical, not wont to be too semantically precise, talk of a "film in four dimensions". Whatever they call it-it's all anyhow reductive-Voyage Around the World is for all intents and purposes a film. It is a film enhanced by live interventions. An example may help clarify things: on the screen a man falls into a swimming pool, the splash he creates is amplified by drops of water that are squirted onto the spectators. Rocky Horror Picture Show aficionados have long been accustomed to this blend of film and live performance that blurs reality and fiction. Voyage Around the World popularises this phenomenon.
Except that in this case the latest technology is being used: on the one hand, the special effects in the auditorium use a complex system of machines, on the other, a computer-assisted 3-d movie with digital animation of exceptional quality.
So as not to spoil the surprise, we will only give a brief synopsis of this movie that lasts about a quarter of an hour. The idea behind the film is to present the most urgent ecological problems on the planet and their disastrous consequences on the animal kingdom. It starts with polar bears and global warming, continues with sea turtles and the ravages of wild fishing, and ends with orang-utans and the scandal of deforestation. The film is aesthetically magnificent, funny, and filled with sound, visual, mechanical, and even olfactory surprises! You laugh, you are moved, and when some bickering primates start throwing coconuts at each other you can feel the wind created by their trajectories!
It may be worth noting that the polar bears in the film have millions of hairs and that each of these hairs was regarded as a separate element by the computer so as to make the movements of the animals more realistic! 9 months hard work for the technical team and, from the pre- to the post-show, 40 minutes of wonderment for the public.
Discover EFTELING
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07/02/2002 |
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