Disney and Cervantes: Soarin and Clavileño

Abstract

In this essay, the Mexican writer Eloy Urroz pays tribute to the 400th anniversary of the publication of El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha, part 2, by Cervantes. It is a very personal interpretation in which the author establishes a parallelism between Sancho and Don Quixote´s adventure and the flight they make, instigated by the dukes, towards the kingdom of Candaya and Clavileño the horse, and what is that fantastic journey´s experience experience by people when they get on the Soarin mechanical simulator located at the Epcot Center theme park in Orlando, Florida; experience that is revealed as a sort of antecedent or anticipation of what centuries later, in modernity and with the consolidation of cinema, would make reality, within that game of displacement or detachments of fiction, Disney. Tribute and exaltation of a ground breaking novel whose powers of seduction, recreation and inventiveness, the works of Disney on screen became real.