As anyone who has been to a Disneyland park knows, the parades are of paramount importance to the kids who stake out places an hour in advance along the parade route, roosting on the curbs and any available surface: benches, garbage cans, parent’s shoulders. Eventually the crowd is 3-4 people deep, and during the parade itself, the spectators are constantly shooed back against the edges by perimeter guards, making it impossible for an adult photographer to get a shot of anything but the heads in front of him unless he wants to risk the wrath of the wee set by camping in front of their direct line of sight to Eeyore or Jasmine.
The best way to solve this problem, assuming that you WANT photos of the Disney characters on parade, is to hand over the camera to your kid, who usually, being much shorter, and therefore in the front, has the perfect vantage to capture the excitement. Anders gave his Nikon into Martin’s hands and Martin, having quite a lot of familiarity with the camera as he has made several dozen Lego short films, proceeded to shoot the parade.
I thought it was interesting that the most recent characters portrayed in the Parade were from Toy Story 2, which premiered in 1999, nearly 10 years ago. Why they can’t get costumes or floats done for more recent films escapes me; in fact, most of the characters in the parade were older than I am. Karin thought the real people dressed up as Disney characters, mostly the princes and princesses, “looked nothing like them” and were pretty stupid, but then she’s never been very partial to princesses and the princess float earned her total scorn. Still, it was fun, and VERY colorful. Martin took some fantastic shots, and here are some of the best. Since he took 127 photos just from the parade and most of them were excellent, I will spare you the majority.
I don’t know what movie these flower ladies were supposed to be from (Mary Poppins?) but they were lovely and SO colorful.
All photos by Martin Ek