Due to some kind of weird… extended family thing, we ended up with some vouchers for Pixar World Spain Mundo Pixar, happening in IFEMA in Madrid. It would have been a pity to waste all of the tickets, so there we went, on a Wednesday morning, to at least redeem a couple of them. This immersive exhibit comprises several rooms with life-sized scenarios and characters based on Pixar films.

Pixar is an American animation studio which started off as part of the Lucasfilm computer division back in 1979. For over a decade, the group collaborated with graphic design and CGIas a third-party, until it was properly founded as an independent company in 1986. Pixar collaborated with Disney creating computer animations, and kept developing the technology, until it was finally able to pitch its first feature film to Disney – Toy Story, which was also the first-ever completely computer-animated film. Released for the 1995 Christmas season, it was a world-wide hit. Pixar became part of Disney in 2006.

The studio’s films have received 23 Academy Awards, eleven times for Best Animated Feature (a category added in 2001). One of the characteristics of Pixar films is their layering – though they are marketed as children’s entertainment, they tend to have a deeper, more adult-oriented subtext that… kids don’t even grasp. Something weird is that despite its successes, Pixar always seems on the brink of bankruptcy…

We had tickets for 11:00, and thought we had plenty of time until we got caught in a huge traffic jam due to a fair in another part of IFEMA. We had over 45 minutes of leeway, and ended up taking half an hour just to be able to get into the parking lot from the roundabout 650 metres away. That was wild.

We finally got into the queue around 10:50, and it took a while to get in. Mundo Pixar is organised in a U-shaped circuit, so that you can get round to the shop before or after seeing the exhibit. For a weekday, it was packed – not only by families, a bunch of random friend groups and tourists, too. Interesting.

We accessed through a tunnel to the first space, which is a bit of a self-promotion video mixed with the rules of the game – mostly, the one that people seemed unable to follow: do not touch. The immersive experience takes you to recreated scenarios from several films by the studio, to the slightest detail. The rooms are supposed to have different smells, but we only perceived a few. And of course, people kept touching.

Rooms 1 & 2: Up. This films tells the story of an old widower who goes on a last “adventure” to Paradise Falls, where his late wife would have loved to live. To do this he… floats his house away with thousands of balloons. He meets kid Russel and dog Dug. The rooms include a view of the whole house, and one of the interior. The living room is a perfect reconstruction of the one in the film, down to the pictures and the armchairs where Ellie and Carl sit, and the device Carl builds to steer the house while it flies.

Room 3: Monsters Inc.. This is a take on a widespread childhood obsession, the monster in the closet. In another dimension, energy is powered by the screams of frightened children from our world – thus, monsters sneak into kids’ rooms using magic doors to their wardrobes. Sully and Mike are the top-scary team until they run into a toddler who turns their lives upside down. The room has different bits from the film, including the scream factory doors and the two main characters waving awkwardly, recreating a scene where Mike and Sully are made to pose for a picture – I kinda expected them to move.

Room 4: Toy Story. A bunch of toys which / who become sentient when they are not being played with get a new companion, who does not know he’s actually a toy. Enter a house-move, a bully neighbour, and a nasty dog. Chaos (and a trio of sequels) ensues. The fun part of this room is that it’s built so you see the room from one of the toys’ perspective, everything is high up, and the toys themselves are scaled.

Room 5: Elemental. This is a coming-of-age romantic comedy which focuses on overcoming differences. You walk into a train car with the two characters – a water element and a fire element, awkwardly sitting next to each other.

Room 6: Inside Out. In this coming-of-age comedy-drama, every person (and cat) has five basic feelings: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust and Fear. They control a person’s life using a big console, and they collect “core memories” to help with their job. A young girl’s Joy and Sadness must learn to work together to overcome moving to another city. The room shows a perfect life-size reproduction of Sadness and Joy at the console and all the core memories.

Room 7: Ratatouille. This films follows the adventures and misadventures of the rat Remy, struggling to become a chef – to do this he hides in the hat of a young man and “guides” his cooking. The title is a pun between the word rat and a French recipe. The room is a huge kitchen, and you see Remy cooking inside a huge chef hat.

Room 8 & 9: Coco. Set around Mexico’s Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos), this film sees a young boy, Miguel, explore his family roots and his love of music. The first room shows Miguel and his grandmother, and the second area holds skeleton Héctor, a dead musician who accompanies Miguel in his adventures.

Room 10: Luca. This film tells the story of two sea-monster children (Luca and Alberto) and a human child (Giulia), and deals with friendship and acceptance in the Italian Riviera in 1959. The room hosts the size-appropriate children, with Giulia – and her cat – getting the most prominent set.

Room 11: Cars. The film is set in a world populated only by anthropomorphic vehicles. Arrogant young racing car Lightning McQueen learns about humility, sportsmanship and friendship. There was a nice staff member taking pictures of visitors in this room, with the film’s main character.

Room 12: Finding Nemo. Nemo is a little clownfish, the only survivor from a barracuda attack in which his overprotective father, Marlin, lost his wife and all their other fertilised eggs. When Nemo gets “fished”, Marlin embarks on a crazy journey to find him, meeting amnesic surgeon fish Dory, wannabe-vegetarian shark Bruce, and surfer turtle Crush. To be honest, finding Nemo in this room was easy. He was in the middle of it, surrounded by marine mist, with jellyfish and the rest of the characters on a screen behind him. I was severely disappointed there was no Bruce whatsoever in the room.

This was the last room; afterwards there was the shop, and a small photocall with a giant Luxo (a yellow bouncing ball with a blue band and a red star), back at the beginning. I am not sure this area actually counted as a room, because we were told there were thirteen rooms? No clue.

Fortunately, when we left, the traffic jam had dissipated. Unfortunately, I had to go work in the evening, which did not feel great. I obviously enjoyed the rooms dedicated of films I had watched (and liked) more than the others – I personally find the first ten minutes of Up heart-wrenching, but Finding Nemo was my favourite (both as a film and a room). I still uphold my protests about shark discrimination though!