EPCOT International Festival of the Arts

The Festival of the Arts falls in mid-January to February, which is the lowest-crowd stretch of the Walt Disney World year outside the week before Christmas. Schools are in session, the weather is cool, and World Showcase is walkable in a way it simply is not during Food & Wine.

For anyone who has found EPCOT overwhelming at other times, this is the festival to try.

Every EPCOT festival runs the same two activities, and knowing the pattern once saves working it out four times a year. The first is a food passport — here it is the Wonderful Walk of Colorful Cuisine.

Eight dishes are on the menu and you choose any five of them, so there is real room to skip whatever does not appeal, not working through a fixed list. You collect a stamp with each purchase and redeem the completed card for a prize.

The second is a character scavenger hunt, bought as a separate map, where you find one character hidden across the park. Neither is included: the passport costs whatever the food costs, and the hunt map is bought on its own. The Arts hunt is Figment's Brush with the Masters, finding Figment inserted into recreated classic paintings around World Showcase.

The Food Studios plate dishes to look like artworks — deconstructed, colourful, and designed to be photographed. The cooking is genuinely more inventive than at the other festivals, which is a surprise given how much less attention this one gets. Prices are the same five to ten dollars a plate.

Performers from Disney's Broadway productions singing at the America Gardens Theatre, three shows most evenings, included with park admission. It is widely considered the best of the four festival concert series, and dining packages are available for anyone who wants a guaranteed seat. The companion exhibit, Once Upon a Stage, runs at CommuniCore Hall.

More than at any other EPCOT festival, and most of it is free. Working artists sell original work along World Showcase, chalk artists draw on the pavement through the day, the Expression Section is a communal paint-by-number mural anyone can add to, Animation Academy teaches you to draw a character, and Disney Lorcana Card Quest brings card trading into the park.

The EPCOT Festival of the Arts is the most underrated event at Walt Disney World. The food is the most inventive of the four EPCOT festivals, the concerts are the best, there is more free activity than at any of the others, and the crowds are the lightest of the year.

If your dates are flexible, January at EPCOT is better than October at EPCOT in almost every respect.