CinéMagique was a theatre show at Walt Disney Studios Park in Disneyland Paris mixing the live performance of an actor with synchronized movie scenes on a big screen. The attraction opened with the park on March 16, 2002 and stars Martin Short and Julie Delpy. The last show was on March 29, 2017.
Plot
The show begins with a castmember reciting an opening spiel regarding the nature of the show : “Today, you are going to see a movie on the history of cinema spanning from silent films to today's modern films.” The movie starts playing a montage of early black-and-white films. After a few moments, a cell phone ring is heard, and a man in the front rows answers it. He eludes the castmember and walks on the stage while talking.
Meanwhile, the love scene on screen between a Prince and a Princess is interrupted by this man's noisy conversation. The angered Prince attempts to stop him, but is unable to reach him due to the movie screen. He then enlists the help of a nearby Magician to silence him. This Magician executes a magic trick which makes the man disappear from the stage in a plume of smoke, and reappear inside the movie (here portrayed by Martin Short). Short's character (known as "George") seems unable to recover from his surprise, and the Prince corrects him by punching him in the face. As the Prince and the Magician leave, the Princess (called "Marguerite"), portrayed by Julie Delpy, comforts poor George. Yet, the Prince, seeing this, starts chasing after him with a sword.
George escapes via a window to suddenly find out he's on the ledge of a high building with Harold Lloyd, in the scene of the clock tower from the Safety Last!. George finds a fire escape and eventually makes it to the ground. Just as he thinks he is safe, a pie is thrown at his face. He can see that many others in the street, including Charlie Chaplin and Laurel & Hardy, are engaged in throwing pies at one another. George gets into the action, and discover he can talk, meaning he has left silent movies.
Then, after angering an armed man by throwing a pie at him, George is backed down against a wall by a group of gangsters, in the scene from Angels with Dirty Faces. Before he is shot, two men appear behind the gangsters, distracting them and allowing him to escape. However, George's escape is too noisy, and alerts the gangsters, who start shooting at him. Clips here include scenes from Some Like It Hot. George then crashes through a window. At this point, he has left the realm of black-and-white films.
As George stands up, he realizes he is part of scenes from the movies Once Upon a Time in the West and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, with bandits standing before him. As George's phone rings, the scene uses Sergio Leone's method of extreme close-ups to build up a shootout. George reaches for the phone and the shootout starts using footage from multiple westerns, including The Magnificent Seven. In his attempt to escape the gunfire, George drops his phone, and then seeks refuge in a nearby shed filled with TNT and other explosives. A cowboy then shoots a crate of TNT, and sends George flying into the air.
George comes blasting out of a chimney on the rooftops of London, thrust into the universe of Mary Poppins. He is then immediately sucked into the song "Step In Time". Meanwhile, Maguerite has been following George, whom she fell in love with, and arrives in the scene of the shootout. She can only find George's phone on the ground. The film cuts back to George walking down a street during pouring rain (from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). There, he meets Marguerite, who hands his phone back. Then, they call a taxi, but George is sucked down a puddle he jumps into. Marguerite attempts to follow him, but is unable to.
George has now dived underwater, coming across the Red October submarine from The Hunt for Red October (Marko Ramius is startled to see George through the periscope). George also meet the divers from The Big Blue. Then, as he swims away, he encounters Pinocchio, who attempts to warn him about a large whale. Suddenly, Monstro awakens and chases both George and Pinocchio.
Upon reaching the surface, George sees the Titanic approaching him. He gets helped out onto the bow by a lookout, only to see the ship hitting the iceberg. As passengers start running to the escape boats, George hears Jack Dawson calling for his life, and reaches the corridor of doors to find him. He opens random doors, each one revealing someone else behind. The scenes include John Cleese from A Fish Called Wanda, Inspector Clouseau from The Pink Panther, Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs, Sully from Monsters, Inc., and Linda Blair from The Exorcist. Then, as the water is flooding the corridor, and right before George meets his demise, the wall he stands against opens up and he is grabbed.
George is now aboard the Death Star. He is quickly grabbed by a stormtrooper, who takes him to a hidden corner, just in time to elude Darth Vader walking down the corridor. This helpful stormtrooper is then revealed to be Marguerite. Yet, real stormtroopers start chasing them through the space station, and to escape, they re-enact the scene where Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker use the wire to traverse the chasm.
As they land on the other side, they are in a medieval setting. A nearby Knight notices George and Marguerite, and walks over to them. George begs for his help to get back to the other side of the screen in the real world. However, havoc breaks loose. Armies descend and a battle ensues between knights. Kevin Costner as Robin Hood shoots an arrow toward Marguerite, but she saved by George jumping on its way to stop it. The arrow has clearly punctured his heart, and the fighting stops. As the Knight removes it, he finds out that it had actually stabbed George's cell phone. Scared by its ringtone, the Knight crushes it. Then, he walks to the top of the hill and lightning strikes his sword. He throws it toward the screen, breaking it open and creating a portal allowing George to travel back to the Theater. He does so, but the portal closes before Marguerite crosses it. Finally, the Magician returns and creates a door for George to walk through. George then decides to go back into screen, and the movie ends with a loving embrace between them, complemented by a montage of famous on-screen kisses. The show closes with George and Marguerite skipping toward the Emerald City from The Wizard of Oz
Halfway through 2013, some scenes (when George opens doors in the Titanic, and during the 'kissing' scene at the end) have been replaced by scenes from newer movies such as: Ratatouille, The Incredibles and Narnia.
Cast
- Martin Short: George
- Julie Delpy: Marguerite
- Alan Cumming: The Magician
- Tcheky Karyo: The Knight
List of featured films
| Title | Year | Director | Main actors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory | 1894 | Louis Lumière | |
| The Kiss | 1896 | Edison Manufacturing Company | John C. Rice, May Irwin |
| L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat | 1894 | Louis Lumière | |
| The Great Train Robbery | 1903 | Edwin S. Porter | |
| A Trip to the Moon | 1902 | Georges Méliès | Georges Méliès, Bleuette Bernon |
| Birth of a Nation | 1915 | David Wark Griffith | |
| Cops | 1922 | Buster Keaton | Buster Keaton |
| Plane Crazy | 1928 | Walt Disney | Mickey Mouse |
| Napoléon | 1927 | Abel Gance | Albert Dieudonné |
| The Battleship Potemkin | 1925 | Sergei Eisenstein | Alexander Antonov |
| Nosferatu | 1922 | Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau | Max Schreck |
| The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari | 1919 | Robert Wiene | |
| Metropolis | 1927 | Fritz Lang | Brigitte Helm |
| The Sheik | 1921 | George Melford | Rudolph Valentino |
| Safety Last! | 1923 | Fred C. Newmeyer | Harold Lloyd |
| The Battle of the Century | 1927 | Clyde Bruckman | Laurel and Hardy |
| Behind The Screen | 1916 | Charlie Chaplin | Charlie Chaplin |
| Angels with Dirty Faces | 1938 | Michael Curtiz | James Cagney |
| Some Like It Hot | 1959 | Billy Wilder | Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon |
| Once Upon a Time in the West | 1967 | Sergio Leone | Charles Bronson, Henry Fonda |
| The Good, the Bad and the Ugly | 1968 | Sergio Leone | Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach |
| Tombstone | 1993 | George Pan Cosmatos | Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer |
| The Wild Bunch | 1969 | Sam Peckinpah | William Holden |
| The Magnificent Seven | 1960 | John Sturges | Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen |
| Mary Poppins | 1965 | Robert Stevenson | Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke |
| The Umbrellas of Cherbourg | 1964 | Jacques Demy | Catherine Deneuve |
| The Hunt for Red October | 1990 | John McTiernan | Sean Connery |
| The Big Blue | 1987 | Luc Besson | Jean-Marc Barr, Jean Reno |
| Pinocchio | 1940 | Walt Disney | |
| Titanic | 1997 | James Cameron | Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet |
| A Fish Called Wanda | 1988 | Charles Crichton | John Cleese |
| Trois hommes et un couffin | 1985 | Coline Serreau | Roland Giraud, André Dussollier |
| The Pink Panther | 1963 | Blake Edwards | Peter Sellers |
| Silence of the Lambs | 1991 | Jonathan Demme | Anthony Hopkins |
| Monsters, Inc. | 2001 | Disney-Pixar | |
| The Exorcist | 1973 | William Friedkin | Linda Blair |
| Star Wars: A New Hope | 1977 | George Lucas | Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford |
| The Three Musketeers | 1993 | Stephen Herek | Kiefer Sutherland, Julie Delpy |
| Highlander | 1986 | Russell Mulcahy | Christophe Lambert |
| Ran | 1985 | Akira Kurosawa | Tatsuya Nakadai |
| El Cid | 1961 | Anthony Mann | Charlton Heston, Sophia Loren |
| Henri V | 1989 | Kenneth Branagh | Kenneth Branagh, James Larkin |
| Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 1975 | Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam | Monty Pythons |
| Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves | 1991 | Kevin Reynolds | Kevin Costner, Morgan Freeman |
| Summertime | 1955 | David Lean | Katharine Hepburn |
| Doctor Zhivago | 1965 | David Lean | Omar Sharif, Julie Christie |
| Casablanca | 1942 | Michael Curtiz | Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman |
| Gone with the Wind | 1939 | Victor Fleming | Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable |
| A Man and a Woman | 1966 | Claude Lelouch | Jean-Louis Trintignant, Anouk Aimée |
| Wuthering Heights | 1939 | William Wyler | Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon |
| Ridicule | 1996 | Patrice Leconte | Fanny Ardant, Jean Rochefort |
| The Horseman on the Roof | 1995 | Jean-Paul Rappeneau | Olivier Martinez, Juliette Binoche |
| The Rules of the Game | 1939 | Jean Renoir | Marcel Dalio, Paulette Dubost |
| The Black Orchid | 1959 | Martin Ritt | Anthony Quinn, Sophia Loren |
| A Place in the Sun | 1951 | George Stevens | Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor |
| Carmen Jones | 1954 | Otto Preminger | Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge |
| Cyrano de Bergerac | 1990 | Jean-Paul Rappeneau | Gérard Depardieu, Vincent Perez, Anne Brochet |
| Who Framed Roger Rabbit | 1988 | Robert Zemeckis | Bob Hoskins, Christopher Lloyd |
| Brave Little Tailor | 1938 | Walt Disney | Mickey Mouse |
| To Catch a Thief | 1955 | Alfred Hitchcock | Cary Grant, Grace Kelly |
| The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc | 1999 | Luc Besson | Milla Jovovich |
| The Wizard of Oz | 1939 | Victor Fleming | Judy Garland, Jack Haley |
External links
References
