Paint the Night is Disneyland’s new nighttime parade. It brings the electrical parade into the 21st century with 1.5 million LED lights, all under computer control. The parade features floats, Disney characters, imaginative costumes, animation, light and choreography, and a bouncy soundtrack that might stay in your head for a while. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

You can watch the parade in this video:

The eight parade units include nods to classic Disney animated features like Peter Pan, the princesses, and The Little Mermaid, as well as the Disney-Pixar hits Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., and Cars. There’s also a Frozen float with Anna, Elsa, and Olaf. And it pays homage to the original Main Street Electrical Parade in a couple of ways: the light on the end of Tinker Bell’s wand is a rosette from the original parade, and if you listen carefully, you’ll hear the Baroque Hoedown woven into the new soundtrack.

The main theme is “When Can I See You Again” from Wreck-it Ralph. As the various parade units pass by, there’s also musical selections from the associated movie, such as “You Can Fly”, “Life is a Highway”, “Under the Sea”, and (of course) “Let it Go”. The musical style even changes to match the floats: for example, the theme is much more subdued and melodic during the Princess segment.

Paint the Night is not just about the lights – it’s about motion, too! Some of the floats and dancers incorporate motion elements that are really visually interesting, such as the spinning jellyfish dancers and the pinwheel dancers. And the whirling intertwined mobius-strip-like thing on the back of Mickey’s float leaves me shaking my head thinking “how do they DO that?”

And then there’s the choreography – and it’s not just dance choreography, but light choreography as well, with lights that are synced to the music. The floats and dancers interact – for example, the “Cars Crew” dancers are sometimes all the same color, and sometimes different colors – and sometimes the lights go off completely which makes them seem to disappear!

We saw the Dream Lights electrical parade in Tokyo Disneyland last year, which blew me away, but Paint the Night takes it to a whole new level. The original version of Paint the Night premiered at Hong Kong Disneyland in September, 2014. The Disneyland version has a few exclusive elements: the entire Frozen unit is new, as are the drum and some of the costumes.

The opening unit with Tinker Bell and Peter Pan includes a wildly modern version of the Electrical Parade drum with lights that do all sorts of crazy things.

The doors on the Monsters, Inc. float spin around, and the doors appear to open and close as different characters and scenes appear on them. Mike and Sulley are both on the float, though Mike is a static character, which I found very odd.

In addition to the dancers I mentioned earlier, the Cars unit also includes Lightning McQueen, DJ, and Mack the truck. At 54′, Mack is the longest float in the parade – a life-size truck.

Mack’s sides are a 3-dimensional volumetric display – yeah, that sequence of words didn’t mean anything to me the first time I heard it, either. But it’s really impressive. Not so much images as very colorful 3-d patterns that appear to move across and forward and back. It’s a shame that this goes by so fast because I find it really fascinating.

The Little Mermaid float is preceded by beautiful dancing coral. The float features a 12′ King Triton, with Ariel (as a mermaid) on the front. Accompanying the unit are puppet versions of Marlin and Nemo, who “swim” in and out of the coral and the jellyfish dancers.

Slinky Dog is the main figure on the Toy Story float. His “coils” are kaleidoscopic illuminated spinning disks – more of the motion elements that I mentioned before. Woody is perched on Slinky’s neck, and Buzz sits in front of his tail.

I thought that the Princess float was the most beautiful. Belle stands at the front in a brilliant illuminated ball gown with a 17′ rose behind her. Video screens around the rose show scenes from “Beauty the the Beast” and other romantic images.

Cinderella and Rapunzel follow in gazebos illuminated by softly glowing candelabras. The feathery dove dancers alongside are very gentle and graceful and lovely.

At 30′, the Frozen float is the tallest in the parade. It’s also exclusive to Disneyland, and not a part of the Hong Kong parade. Anna and Elsa stand on the balcony of Elsa’s ice palace, while Olaf stands in an icy grove of trees on the back of the float.

There are six etched “ice” windows, depicting Anna and Elsa, the trolls, Kristoff – and Sven gets his own window, too!

The final parade unit features Mickey and the gang. The pinwheel dancers lead out (it was fascinating to watch them spin and change color), followed by Minnie, Donald, and Goofy, riding on lighted spheres with changing colors and patterns.

Sorcerer Mickey follows, atop a 12′ “kinetic sculpture”. I’ve watched the video multiple times, and I still have no idea how it works. But it’s cool!

The parade follows the usual Disneyland parade route: from “it’s a small world” to Main Street. During busy times of year it will run two times a night, and the second parade will proceed from Main Street back to “it’s a small world”. The parade is about 15 minutes long. There’s no performance stop in this one, so any place along the route should offer the same viewing experience.

While I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the original Electrical Parade, I enjoyed this parade a lot, and think it a worthy successor. There are many details that I missed when watching it, and only picked up on seeing the video. Like the Monsters, inc. characters in the doors, and the huge ice chandelier in Elsa’s palace, and the Mickey-head patterns on the character spheres, to name a few. I think it will be a highly repeatable experience that will be very popular with guests.

“When can we do this again?” 🙂

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