Drawn to Life, the current Cirque du Soleil show at Disney Springs, pays tribute to Disney Animation. Here’s why it’s worth the drive to see. Cirque du Soleil
The popcorn is green, but tastes exactly like its yellow counterparts. The concession serves wine in branded stemless cups, complete with a sippy cup-style lid. A pillow takes the stage, and gets the audience to clap in rhythm.
There’s a lot about a Cirque du Soleil show that differs dramatically from, well, pretty much everything else at Disney Springs. This iteration of Cirque caught my eye because one of its performers has a Tampa Bay connection. And so I packed a lunch and drove to Disney Springs.
Drawn to Life not only differs from everything else at Disney Springs, it’s also a departure from most other Cirque shows. While every Cirque show has astounding aerialists and amazing costumes showcasing the artistic part of circus, Drawn to Life has, perhaps, the clearest and most compelling narrative to date.
Disney fans will love the show because it is, as the marketing promises, a love letter to Disney animation.
Non-Disney fans who appreciate Cirque will love it, too, because Drawn to Life offers the traditional Cirque du Soleil performances.
But what about non-Cirque du Soleil fans?
If you’ve been to Cirque du Soleil before and walked out appreciating the show but wondering what, exactly, you just saw, Drawn to Life is the Cirque for you. At the top of the show, a young woman walks onstage and curls into a chair, awash in grief. We see her pull out a letter, and we hear the words of her recently deceased father, asking her to finish his animation.
Those simple spoken sentences take up not a minute in the show, but they allow audiences to understand everything that happens as the young woman struggles to finish the animation — and process her grief.
The animations come to life, the sound and acrobatics swirl around you, and, all of a sudden, you’re in a Cirque du Soleil as you’ve never seen.
Drawn to Life partnered with Walt Disney Imagineering and Walt Disney Animation Studios to bring the 50th Cirque du Soleil to the stage, and this created a striking demarcation between Drawn and all other Cirque shows. While the performers bring their a-game Cirque, the scenery contains scenes from animated Disney shorts and films. Eagle-eyed fans will see images of Walt’s Nine Old Men and other nods to the history of animation. Rather than a tribute to the films themselves, though, Drawn to Life pays homage to the artistic process and the talent that made the studio a giant in the animation world.
If readers can bear a shout-out to the woke aspect of the show, one standout scene includes the Ink and Paint girls, working around an animator’s desk — a reminder that in less-enlightened (and not so long ago) times, women couldn’t work as animators, only as ink and paint girls, tasked with coloring a man’s art. The homage to these women is clear, and it’s not lost on audiences that Cirque du Soleil created a daughter, not a son, to carry out the father’s legacy.
While the tribute to Disney’s animation legacy makes this show a standout for reasons the typical Cirque fan might not expect, any artist will appreciate the throughline tying the show together: the artist’s struggle.
Drawn to Life presents this so beautifully it indeed makes the show worth the drive.
See Drawn to Life
Disney Springs, 1486 Buena Vista Dr, Lake Buena Vista. Tues.-Sat., 5:30 p.m. & 8 p.m.; Sun., 1:30 p.m. & 4 p.m. $59, seat categories 1-4, through Sept. 23; $85, all seat categories, ongoing cirquedusoleil.com, 877-773-6470.
