Well everyone, here we are again – and this time, at Disney’s Animal Kingdom!
By nature of reading this, you’re probably not new to Park Lore. But just in case, I’ll briefly explain. Park Lore is all about seeing the theme parks we know through new and different lenses. Since I started organizing my years of piecemeal freelance work in 2020, I’ve amassed a collection of totally ad-free, in-depth histories of beloved theme park attractions, never-built lands, closed classics, and more, increasingly interspersed with niche theme park art projects, over a hundred hand-drawn ride layouts, and a real favorite of mine – “armchair Imagineered” theme park build-outs.
Hopefully you’ve already journeyed with me through my lovingly “reimagined,” multiversal variants of Disney California Adventure, Disney’s Hollywood Studios, Magic Kingdom, and Universal Islands of Adventure. But for so many reasons, each of those was really just a practice round for tackling a very, very big one – a “Blue Sky” refresh of Disney’s Animal Kingdom.
Countless hours of work have gone into this hand-drawn build-out (inspired, as always, by the work of S.W. Wilson on the Ideal Build-Out blog). But if even one person reads it cover to cover and is intrigued, entertained, or even hopeful based on the ideas I have for Disney World’s fourth gate, it’ll all have been worth it. Likewise, if you enjoy this kind of in-depth, exhaustive, ad-free theme park storytelling and art, I hope you’ll consider becoming a supporting Member of Park Lore for even $2 per month!
With that out of the way, before we get into making changes to Disney’s Animal Kingdom, I think it’s helpful to start with a zoomed out, big picture view of the park’s story so far.
Nahtazū
You have to imagine the work that went into getting Disney’s Animal Kingdom greenlit at all. The park was famously the brainchild of Disney Legend and former Imagineer Joe Rohde. Though he’d been with Disney since 1980 (part of the massive onboarding of talent during the design and fabrication of EPCOT), Rohde’s work on the Mexico pavilion, Disneyland’s New Fantasyland, and the Lost Legend: Maelstrom are only part of the story.
As just about any Disney Parks aficionado will tell you, Joe Rohde isn’t just a sculptor, painter, or model-builder; he’s a true-life adventurer. An eclectic, philosophical world traveler, Rohde’s makings and musings (at least partially expressed via Instagram) make him an obvious inspiration behind projects like the beloved Lost Legend: The Adventurers Club that once called Downtown Disney home.
Rohde’s early concepts for a park centered on the natural world were famously resisted by the “MBAs” that then-CEO Michael Eisner had spent the ’90s surrounding himself with. Says Rohde: “They went to zoos and reported back that there’s one in every city, you pay three bucks to get in, they’re subsidized, they’re dirty, they’re smelly, animals are in cages, people think they’re depressing. How in the world is this a business we want to get into?”
But Rohde argued that Disney’s “Wild Animal Kingdom” would be different because the park wouldn’t just feature live animals; it would be home to all the animals we know and love – the “real, ancient, and imagined” – meaning that this park would really be about us; people; our connection with, stories about, and continuous balance alongside the natural world and the other animals who inhabit it with us.
As the story goes, Eisner was still wary about whether the “mere sight of animals” would drive guests to visit. In response, Rohde organized for a 400-pound Bengal tiger to join him in an executive session, supposedly winning the theatrical Eisner over in an instant. Buoyed again by the success of 1994’s The Lion King and by the radical growth in attendance Disney enjoyed in the “Ride the Movies” era of the ’90s, Animal Kingdom was greenlit.
Animal Kingdom officially opened on Earth Day – April 22, 1998. By the way, that’s just nine years after the resort’s third theme park, the Disney-MGM Studios. It’s sometimes said that Animal Kingdom was something of a rebuttal to the Studio park. And maybe it was. After all, the ’90s had seen “studio-themed” theme parks proliferate across the industry. Following Disney’s own lead, theme parks now needed little more than mish-mashed IPs, beige soundstages, and interchangeable movie tie-ins, so is it any surprise that Universal, Warner Bros., Paramount, and MGM had all spent the decade opening (or purchasing) their own entries in the genre?
In that way, Animal Kingdom served as something of a return to form – a park that only Disney could ever make real. Well… kinda. As we know, Disney did struggle to communicate why Disney’s Animal Kingdom was worth a visit when nearly every guest to the resort probably lived within an hour’s drive of a zoo – sometimes even a very good zoo – that was probably also divided into “Africa” and “Asia” and “North America,” and probably also offered “naturalistic” animal enclosures and probably even a sky ride, or a simulator, or a drive-through “safari,” and probably cost a lot less than a Disney Park.
Disney’s marketing for Animal Kingdom came up with a clever solution: “Nahtazū!”, a sort of pan-African exclamation meant to suggest that the park was, of course, not a zoo, but so much more. Positioned high in the park’s appeal were its live entertainment offerings (like Festival of the Lion King and Journey into the Jungle Book), its realism (the park was, after all, built by genuine international artisans, unlike your local zoo’s “Africa” or “Asia”), and the “ancient” and “imagined” thirds of its lineup (the latter of which, of course, didn’t materialize as penciled in.)
Today, it’s easy to say that Disney’s Animal Kingdom served as a first entry in the “21st Century” generation of parks (a group soon joined by Islands of Adventure and Tokyo DisneySea). If you remove the rose-colored glasses of hindsight, though, Animal Kingdom did have some of the same kinds of issues that would plague other New Millennium Disney Parks. Namely, it had very few rides (it opened with just four: Kilimanjaro Safaris, the terrifying Countdown to Extinction, and two transportation systems), very few Disney characters, and very little for families.
Today, Animal Kingdom still has the fewest rides of any Disney Park – just eight (and in the ongoing transition of Dinoland, just six). Now, to be fair, that criticism has always rung a little flat for Animal Kingdom, because while it’s not just a zoo, it is definitely a zoo in large part. So being honest, the park’s shows and (duh) animals are invaluable components. But even twenty five years later, Animal Kingdom still earns the dreaded “half-day park” label, which is obvious a problem.
In trying to “build-out” Animal Kingdom, we inherit a park that closes earlier than any other at Disney World. The justification was always that after the animals retreat to their paddocks (around sundown or so), what’s the point? Especially because the animals preclude the park from having loud pyrotechnics, everyone seemed to have thrown their hands up and said there’s just no way to keep people at Animal Kingdom after dark anyway.
But in the 2010s, Disney did make a concerted effort to program the park for post-animal evenings, centered on Pandora’s bioluminescence, a perpetual-sunset Safari variation, projection shows on the Tree of Life, and a full-fledged nighttime spectacular – Rivers of Light. But post-COVID, we’re back to pre-sunset closings most of the year as Disney cuts back expenses and – again – waves the white flag on trying to convince people to spend a whole day at Disney’s Animal Kingdom.
It so happens that Animal Kingdom is next in the ongoing cycle of Team Disney Orlando’s capital reinvestment that continuously shuffles the attendance rankings of its non-Disney Parks. The Tropical Americas that are en route (which we’ll get to shortly…) won’t expand the park’s capacity by much. Instead, it’s hope that they’ll expand the park’s appeal. It’s a great example of the calculus that corporate Disney, Imagineering, and fans are all doing when it comes to addressing the surprising delicacy of this park… So let’s get to that.
Disney’s Animal Kingdom – Build-Out 101
One of the things you’ll hear me say a lot in this build-out (for better or worse) is “there’s not a whole lot to change in this part of the park!” Which I realize might be a disappointment for those who are hoping for some wild swings or vast new concepts. If you’re wanting to go totally “Blue Sky” and basically reimagine a park about animals from the ground up, you probably won’t be so pleased with what I’ve got to offer…
But I have to tell you, one of my guiding principles in these build-outs is to try to be “reasonable” – whatever that means. Don’t get me wrong – I only ever played Arid Heights on Roller Coaster Tycoon – the level that basically gave you a terrainless, flat desert and unlimited money. But even if these build-outs are “Blue Sky” in the sense that they envision the park decades and billions of dollars of capital expenditure from now, they’re about building out, not bulldozing and starting from scratch.
Especially when it comes to Animal Kingdom, there are a number of factors that inherently reign in my thinking and have shaped the final product. If you care, here they are:
1. It’s wild
First let me say that Animal Kingdom is not a park that I know like the back of my hand, which makes mapping the finer points of its nooks and crannies an exciting challenge. You may very well be like, “Wow, my favorite drink stand is gone! He replaced it with a tree.” I promise I didn’t mean to, and it doesn’t mean anything. I just have only been to this gigantic and intricate park a handful of times, so I don’t feel like I “know” it the way I know other parks I’ve “armchair Imagineered,” leading to some unavoidable oversight.
(By the way – that’s something I bet the Imagineers would be quite proud of. Lest we forget, Animal Kingdom philosophically resisted having park maps printed at all, preferring that guests genuinely embrace the spirit of exploration, “stumbling upon” things organically and even discovering “off-roading” paths tucked into underbrush. It’s still true that in a break from every other Disney Park on Earth, you actually have to break off from the park’s main pathways to find most of its E-Tickets – a very interesting baked-in spirit! I actually feel like I learned as much about the park from this project as I would being “on the ground” inside it.)
2. It’s big
Second, this is a park that (as we know) is massive. Even though Disney vastly overestimates its size (somewhat nonsensically including its parking lot, undeveloped land, and the 100-acre Kilimanjaro Safaris into the 580 acres the company claims), the park’s “walking space” and “ride space” (minus Kilimanjaro Safaris) is still an impressive 150 acres, which is enough to crown it the largest Disney theme park on Earth by practical, pedestrian acreage.
For me, that’s a real mindset shift. My Build-Outs of Islands of Adventure, California Adventure, and even Disney’s Hollywood Studios were exercises in efficiency; trying to maximize the impact of highly compact parks, maximize attraction counts, replace existing attractions, and eke out mini “expansion pads.”
Animal Kingdom is vastly different in that it’s a park with tremendous green space; literal hikes between lands; sprawling lands; immense vistas… I mean, one far-flung part of the park is only accessible by train! This isn’t a park that’s meant to be approached through a lens of efficiency, or where the preciousness of any given square foot’s use is measured in monetization. Of course, every square foot is used – same as it would be at Disneyland – but at Animal Kingdom, the park “practices what it preaches” by allowing that space to be filled with life, demonstrating the very relationship with nature it waxes poetic upon.
Which, for a wannabe designer like me, actually makes decisions about how to use the space harder, not easier. Making changes to Animal Kingdom requires a different kind of “cleverness” than the sort of “Aha! I can wedge a showbuilding here!” that drives a build-out of California Adventure or even the concentrated core of Magic Kingdom. I’m not sure I have that kind of cleverness yet! I’ll let you be the judge.
3. It’s alive
Third, another major consideration in “reimagining” Disney’s Animal Kingdom (which really should probably be first) is… well… the animals. They say if you’re at Animal Kingdom late at night, you just may hear the wailing cries of the ghost of Michael Eisner (who’s still very much alive, mind you) weeping over the massive cost overruns that allegedly went into the park’s animal care facilities. Eisner was said to be beside himself as he considered how much cash went toward infrastructure that guests never even see.
Which brings me to my dilemma. We talked about how I try to keep these build-outs “reasonable” if not realistic. In any park, that means accounting for cast areas, backstage facilities, loading and unloading zones for retail and restaurants, etc. But obviously, having real, living animals vastly changes the calculation of what “reasonable” entails, and I’m less equipped than ever to have the answers!
Animal Kingdom is littered with facilities where animals sleep, eat, and are cared for. Build-outs of, say, Hollywood Studios, allow us to play a little fast and loose, presuming that we can simply erase a pesky backstage building and tell ourselves that ~whatever happens in there~ can simply be done elsewhere. Poof! But at Animal Kingdom, I wouldn’t dare envision that any bland little shed you can see in an aerial view is expendable. Those of you who know the park’s backstage facilities well will doubtlessly zoom in and say, “Wow, I can’t believe he bent over backwards to salvage that shed that just has lawn mowers in it.” But I’d rather err on the side of caution when it comes to this park.
Likewise, just because an area looks like a big forested expansion pad on the map doesn’t mean it’s empty. I’m not an engineer, architect, or storywriter, I’m definitely not a zoologist. So it’s fairly silly for me to be mapping out zoological enclosures and support facilities like this is Zoo Tycoon… but here and there, you’ll see me try!
4. It’s actually about something…
Finally, there’s the lingering issue that Animal Kingdom is not a park that can or should be continuously responding to pop culture. That’s a major bummer for us, because that’s basically been Disney’s only M.O. for its parks since about 2007. I wrote pretty extensively on what I call the “Disney+ Parks” era – when Imagineers seem to have been recast from content creators to content curators. Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, Hollywood Studios, California Adventure, et al are certainly decorated differently, but are they really about anything distinctly their own? Given that Zootopia or Avatar or Moana feels equally as like to come to any of them, it’s hard to argue that any of those parks has a true “theme” in terms of a bar to entry and a centering message…
But Animal Kingdom is different. Thanks to the park’s patron saint (Joe Rohde) and the innumerable Imagineers in his wake who give a hoot, Animal Kingdom is indeed about something: “The intrinsic, supreme, and untradeable value of nature” and the story of humanity’s inseparable, two-way relationship with it. Actual places, people, and cultures are depicted here; genuine nods to history, colonialism, religion, and reverence; and of course, real animals who are really cared for – living, reproducing, eating, dying… In my opinion, this is a park that demands a level of thematic purity, reverence, and accuracy that should forever preclude a neon cartoon animal city from even being whispered as a concept under consideration.
5. … but there’s still work to do!
But at the same time, Animal Kingdom was (perhaps rightly) criticized in its early days for being too thematically pure – even preachy. While the rest of Disney World’s theme parks (even EPCOT’s World Showcase!) tend toward broad strokes fantasy and idealism, Animal Kingdom’s environments offer grounded realism and reminders of humanity’s often antagonistic role in nature’s story. It’s no wonder the park was quickly identified as needing more character, more for families, and more “Disney.”
And you know what? There are moments when we – the hyper-involved Imagineering aficionados – probably should relent and say, “Listen, if the people overwhelmingly want Zootopia, fine. Who exactly am I to tell an engaged public asking for Judy Hopps that, well, actually, that’s short-term thinking, it’s dumb, and so are they for not knowing that they deserve better.” To some extent, these places do belong to the people who visit them, and the vast majority of those people increasingly buy into Disney’s perspective that the parks are “the global hub where Disney stories, characters and franchises come to life,” full stop.
The point is, Animal Kingdom has to walk that fine line. This is a park that must reflect reality. Here, careful consideration has to be made toward clearing a bar to entry that demands reverence, humility, and artistry over animation and flavor-of-the-week films. Animal Kingdom can’t never change; but right now, the only change even fundamentally conceivable is to pluck something out of the Disney+ data’s top 10 IPs, which I can guarantee offers little in the way of “the intrinsic, supreme, and untradeable value of nature.” So… stalemate, right?
No one has all the answers, but the version of Animal Kingdom we’re about to walk through together at least tries to reconcile those extremes. Just as we fought to find the right balance of “Disney” and “California,” we’ll now tackle the difficult and maybe-impossible task of making this park distinctly 21st century Disney, but authentically itself. Ready?
As a huge theme park fan and a massive Gravity Falls fan, I adore the Gravity Falls land you made for the park! However, there are a few lore notes that I have to give about Strange Dimensions ride. Firstly, the strange creatures didn’t come from the portal. They were always in Gravity Falls, even before the portal was built, and were all at Gravity Falls because of the Law Of Weirdness Magnetism. Secondly, the portal was first built in order to get Bill Cipher and his pals to our dimension so he can start Weirdmageddon. So basically, if we reopen the portal in this ride, if this ride follows canon we should be starting the apocalypse!
THANK YOU! Like I said, this is not an IP I’m super familiar with! I have changed around the description into something more generic… but please feel free to let me know what the ride’s story should be and I’ll update it! Hahaha!
I asked the Gravity Falls subreddit on what a potential story for a Gravity Falls ride could be and they mainly said either a tour of the shack or a ride based on Weirdmageddon. Honestly, I don’t love either of those ideas. A simple tour of the shack is too quaint and small scaled for the type of E-Ticket you’re proposing here. I have always thought that a tour of the shack could be the queue of the ride, as you see the fake creatures made as the shack’s attractions while on the line, with an animatronic Stan or Soos (similar to the animatronic Mr. Potato Head from Toy Story Mania) presenting the the shack’s “wonders.” As for the idea for a ride that takes place during Weirdmageddon, I find it hard to make it work as part of the land’s timeline. There was no fair at all when Weirdmageddon started and Dipper and Mabel canonically don’t return to the shack until three days after Weirdmageddon started. Plus, we have to spoil the ending of the Weirdmageddon arc in order for the ride to have a satisfying ending. (To be fair, we pretty much have to spoil the existence of a certain character that the show keeps as a mystery for most of the show anyways, since I kinda feel like the land should take place in the summer after Dipper and Mabel’s original summer, and you can’t really do that without having that character appear.) However, I have come up with an idea that I think can work. In the Gravity Falls graphic novel Lost Legends, it is revealed that there are rifts that have opened in Gravity Falls after Weirdmageddon ended, rifts that can travel to other dimensions when someone goes inside of it. While we see the Pines fix and close one of these rifts in the graphic novel, it has not been confirmed that they closed all of the rifts, or that rifts have stopped appearing, so we can work with that. The Pines family can introduce themselves to the guests in the pre-show, and then in that pre-show we can have a character (probably Soos or Waddles) get sucked into a rift. Now we have to join the Pines and go into the rift and through the multiverse in order to save them. When it comes to what universes we go to however, I’m kinda stumped. I feel like the universes they go to have to be both relevant to the show and relevant to the themes of Animal Kingdom. I assume that most of these universes will be made just for the attraction, as the actual show never really goes dimension hopping itself, instead bringing characters from other dimensions such as Bill into our world. And even dimensions mentioned in supplemental material like the books are more sci-fi like worlds that don’t fit in Animal Kingdom at all. I had the idea of maybe crossing over with the shows Amphibia and The Owl House, shows that have basically acted as Gravity Falls’ spiritual successors, traveling to their dimensions Jimmy Neutron: Nicktoon Blast style, since I feel like those worlds fit Animal Kingdom quite well, but those shows are even more niche than Gravity Falls, making it kind of a hard sell. However, I do know that I want the last dimension they enter to be a parallel universe where the Pines family lost against Bill into Weirdmageddon. The new Gravity Falls book called The Book Of Bill confirmed that there are parallel universes that exist where the Pines family lost, so it’s a way we can have the incredibly popular and iconic Bill Cipher in the ride and go through Weirdmageddon without breaking canon! Of course, we end the ride with them barely escaping Bill, returning to their home dimension, closing the rift, and congratulating us on a job well done! My ride idea isn’t perfect, and we still need to figure out what will be the other dimensions that the characters will go through, but I feel like I have found a way to preserve your idea of traveling the multiverse with the Gravity Falls cast, without breaking the lore and canon this time!