Impressions de France

Most EPCOT opening-day attractions have been replaced, rebuilt, or retired outright. Impressions de France simply endures: the travelogue film that opened with the park on October 1, 1982 is still playing in the France pavilion’s Palais du Cinéma, in its original version, more than four decades on. This post holds the complete Impressions de France soundtrack — eighteen minutes in which the photography is famous but the music does the traveling.

Photo: ckramer, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

Five Screens Wide

Director Rick Harper and writer-producer Bob Rogers declined to compete with the Circle-Vision theaters elsewhere around World Showcase. Instead, Impressions de France fills five adjacent screens, each 27 and a half feet wide, for a combined 200-degree field of view — wide enough to reach the edge of your peripheral vision while you stay, unusually for an EPCOT film of its era, seated. Crews photographed more than forty French locations over the course of a year: the cliffs of Étretat, the châteaux of the Loire, market towns, alpine skiers, a wedding in Brittany. Even the narration had a production story — Claude Gobet’s tracks had to be re-recorded before opening, because the theater’s sound system, then the finest in any Disney park, was sensitive enough to pick up the narrator’s breathing. The production is also credited as the first Disney film finished with an entirely digital soundtrack.

The film’s itinerary is itself a lesson in construction. It opens among cliffs and châteaux, drifts through farmland and provincial towns, climbs into the Alps, descends to the light of the Mediterranean coast, and returns, as every French journey should, to Paris. Baker’s score follows the same map, which is why the soundtrack survives so well on its own: even without the five screens in front of you, you can hear the geography change. Gobet’s narration is used sparingly — long stretches are pure image and orchestra — and the restraint is the point.

The Impressions de France Score

The soundtrack is this post’s real subject. Disney Legend Buddy Baker — EPCOT’s musical director — arranged and conducted a score that braids his own original cues through the French classical canon: Debussy’s “Clair de lune” and “Nuages,” the dawn music from Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, Saint-Saëns’ “Aquarium,” Satie’s Gymnopédies as orchestrated by Debussy, and excursions from Offenbach, Boieldieu, and Dukas. Baker recorded the score at Abbey Road Studios in London with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and the joins are so smooth that the seams between nineteenth-century Paris and twentieth-century Burbank simply disappear. Commercial album releases have habitually shortchanged the score, trimming Baker’s connective music to a few minutes of highlights; the full weave exists only in the theater — and here. It is Baker’s own themes, more than the borrowed classics, that guests carry out the door: his waltz-time writing for the countryside sequences may be the most quietly famous music in all of World Showcase.

Photo: HarshLight, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

Of all the films that opened with EPCOT Center in 1982, it is the sole survivor still playing in its original version. Time has made only small concessions. The theater received a digital remaster and new projectors in 2011, and since January 2020 the film has shared its room, on an alternating schedule, with the Beauty and the Beast Sing-Along. Nothing else about it has changed. Impressions de France remains what it was in 1982: the pavilion’s calm center and, in an archive of park audio, the rare recording that needs no nostalgia to justify keeping. For the sound of the pavilion outside the theater doors, try the Chefs de France exterior music from the restaurant next door, or another opening-day film in our Magic Journeys post.