Greg Maletic
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More than any other park it has built, Disney's Animal Kingdom has trouble making a clear distinction between fantasy and reality. Back in the Magic Kingdom, when the Jungle Cruise boat captain takes you through the ancient Cambodian temple and tells you that it's hundreds of years old, you know it's not true--just like nothing else in the ride is--but it's fun to pretend and play along. When the tour guide for Animal Kingdom's "authentic" safari tells you that the decrepit bridge you're crossing was built in the late nineteenth century, it not only feels dishonest, it feels like an attempt to upstage the stars of the show: the living animals that populate the safari grounds. Do I really need to be given the ridiculous premise that we're chasing poachers off of the land? Aren't the animals exciting enough on their own? If not, Disney shouldn't have gone to the trouble of uprooting these animals from their native lands to make them sit in the middle of Florida dodging buses. (Okay, I know they're from other zoos, and I'm sure they're well taken care of. Regardless...)

Key mistakes are made elsewhere in Animal Kingdom. The park gets off on the wrong foot by placing yet another one of Walt Disney World's Rainforest Cafes at the entrance gate. It's not that I have a problem with overt commercialization in Disney's parks: that's been going on for quite some time without damaging the experience in any significant way. But this park is supposed to be different--it's supposed to be "real"--and the faux-environmental attitude found at a Rainforest Cafe rings false in a way that the park's designers should have avoided.

So can Animal Kingdom be fixed? Possibly. If Disney toned down its green rhetoric and upped its real commitment to the environment by 1) doing something itself, and 2) telling its visitors how they could actually help, that would be a big step in the right direction. The problems to solve would then be: 1) to decide which parts of the park should be fun and which parts of the park should be educational. Having them co-exist in a single attraction, as I've felt since I first visited Epcot, is a nearly impossible burden. 2) per decision 1, make the attractions themselves either more fun or more educational, and 3) assuming there's going to be a combination of both types of attractions, create an atmosphere where a roller coaster sitting next to a wild animal preserve doesn't seem like a contradiction.

Combining education and fun isn't easy, and in fact, Disney has only pulled it off successfully in one instance I can think of: its animation tour in Disney-MGM studios. Animation is a subject that Disney knows more about than anyone else, and because of that familiarity, the attraction has an authoritativeness that Animal Kingdom simply doesn't. Moreover, despite the fact that animation is big business, it's not really a "serious" business: accordingly, no one faults Disney for having a good time with the subject matter. The same isn't true for the environment, or with real animals, either. Not taking its animals seriously, as it does in the safari show by upstaging them with fake poachers, is irresponsible, and showcases Disney at its worst: when it tackles complex subjects and handles them in a ham-handed way, confirming its critics' worst fears.

Coming Up:

• Next Week: Fixing Future World: General Motor’s TestTrack attraction points the way towards making Epcot a substantially better park
• Two Weeks:  Disney Returns to its Roots: Yes, Disney's California Adventure could be better. But Disneyland's newest park and Tokyo DisneySea illustrate that Walt Disney Imagineering has finally remembered what an amusement park is supposed to be like.

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-- Greg Maletic

-- Posted January 10, 2002