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A Friday Visit with Jim Korkis: Reflections of China



By Dave Shute

Welcome back to Fridays with Jim Korkis! Jim, the dean of Disney historians and author of Jim’s Gems in The easy Guide, writes about Walt Disney World history every Friday on yourfirstvisit.net.

REFLECTIONS OF CHINA

By Jim Korkis

When Epcot’s China Pavilion opened in 1982, it featured a Circle-Vision 360 degree movie called Wonders of China that gave foreigners a glimpse of areas of China that had rarely seen before by outsiders. This film closed in March 2002 and was replaced in May 2003 with a new movie called Reflections of China.

jim-korkis-on-reflections-of-china-from-yourfirstvisit-net

Jun Tang, Vice president of China Affairs for the Walt Disney Company, worked with government officials to implement Disney’s strategy in Chinese relations and maintain a consistent presence in that country. His challenge was to manage the contract negotiations and to seek support from China’s film communities to produce a new film.

In the twenty years since the first film, Hong Kong and Macau were returned to the borders of China and Shanghai became a thriving international metropolis.

“A project like this always has its ups and down,” said Tang in 2002. “China is so big and there were so many things we needed to take into consideration. But the filming was much smoother than the original twenty years earlier. With the advent of reform in China, working with foreign companies is more commonplace. This made our job much easier. All you need is communication.”

David Katzman was the director for Theme Park Productions, and in January 2002 took a team of Imagineers to China. They screened the original film Wonders of China to representatives from the China Research Institute of Film Science and Technology. Then they went over the film scene by scene, shot by shot.

Despite language difficulties, the group mapped out a plan to update the film.

“Some of our technical and production terms don’t translate perfectly,” explained Katzman. “We’d get these puzzled looks from the Chinese about things we take for granted. We had to constantly try to explain ourselves.”

Because of these difficulties, it took several months for both Disney and China to negotiate and approve everything.

Senior Imagineering Show Writer Steve Spiegel took the outline and created the final script.

In the original film, the character of Li Bai, a Tang Dynasty poet known in the West as Li Po, was the narrator and Spiegel felt it was so effective that he wanted to duplicate that same element in the new film. Unfortunately, the original actor who played the part of Li Bai was not available so another actor was cast and made up to look like not only Li Bai but the first actor as well.

Another challenge arose because the narration had to be in English, but the new actor cast in the role spoke no English at all.

“We had him pronounce everything phonetically,” recalled Spiegel. “Then we went back and re-recorded the dialogue with another Chinese actor who spoke English.”

Twenty-five percent of the original film was able to be kept because it primarily featured scenes of China’s natural beauty that had not changed in any significant way. However, the other seventy-five percent was new footage or footage that was originally shot for Wonders of China but not used.

“When you look at the landscape, the beauties of China have not changed,” said Tang. “The changes in China are not in the construction of the buildings. It’s in the people. They’re more open, more engaging and more sophisticated.”

Nine cameras on a specially made platform were used to photograph the new images over a two month period that included filming in seven Chinese cities. When filming the Huangshan Mountain sequence, over three dozen locals were hired to lift a 300-pound camera unit up 16,700 stone steps. Senior Imagineering Creative Executive Paula Kessler oversaw the entire project.

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Thanks, Jim! Come back next Friday for even more from Jim Korkis!

In the meantime, check out his books, including Secret Stories of Walt Disney World: Things You Never You Never Knew, which reprints much material first written for this site, and The Vault of Walt: Volume 4, and his contributions to The easy Guide to Your Walt Disney World Visit, all published by Theme Park Press.
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