Disney’s Magic in the Air show partners with Ashikaga summer fireworks festival.

Every year the town of Ashikaga in Tochigi Prefecture holds a fireworks festival. It’s one of the biggest events of the summer in the region, with total crowds estimated at roughly 500,000 people, but it just so happens that our Japanese-language reporter Masanuki Sunakoma has a buddy who lives in Ashikaga and has a view of the fireworks from his apartment balcony.

Accepting his friend’s invitation, Masanuki made his way up to Ashikaga on August 2. He wasn’t the only houseguest that day, as his friend also had friends visiting from the U.S., a married couple and their son. As the adults sat around the dinner table chatting while the sun went down and they waited for the fireworks to start, the kid stepped out onto the balcony, and after a while Masanuki heard him shout, “Wow, it’s Mickey Mouse!”

Japanese fireworks festivals do sometimes have fireworks shaped like popular children’s characters, but this wasn’t any momentary Mickey-shaped flash of light. Stepping out onto the balcony to see for himself, Masanuki was greeted by…

…an absolutely gigantic Mickey Mouse, floating in the night sky!

That’s because this year’s Ashikaga Fireworks Festival festivities included Magic in the Air, a Disney-themed drone show. This wasn’t a little fan art sideshow either, as it was organized and implemented by Oriental Land, the company that operates Tokyo Disneyland and Disney Sea.

Oriental Land doesn’t do anything by halves when it comes to spectacle and pageantry, and for Magic in the Air their digital artists have a fleet of 15,000 drones to work with. Mickey, obviously, was the first character for them to form, but before long the drones reconfigured themselves into The Little Mermaid’s Ariel and Flounder…

…Toy Story’s Little Green Men aliens…

…and a number of other Disney characters from works such as Frozen, Tangled, and Peter Pan.

Masanuki had heard ahead of time that there was going to be some sort of Disney drone display as part of the festival, but he’d assumed it was going to be some tiny-scale thing that you’d have to be sitting near where the fireworks were being launched from in order to see. He hadn’t expected the characters to be so huge and easily visible from this far away. Because of that, he didn’t have his camera ready to go when the Disney stars started to shine in the night sky, and he only managed to snap off a few good photos.

However, that doesn’t mean he, or you, missed the last chance to capture some great shots of Magic in the Air, thuogh, because the Disney drone show has two more performances planned this summer, with the next one scheduled for the Kumagaya Fireworks Festival in Saitama Prefecture on August 9, and the final one at the Akagawa Fireworks Festival in Shizuoka City on August 16.

Just make sure you’ve got your camera ready, since Japan’s drone shows really can be amazing.

Related: Magic in the Air schedule
Photos ©SoraNews24
● Want to hear about SoraNews24’s latest articles as soon as they’re published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter!
[ Read in Japanese ]