Real, Ancient, and Imagined: An Armchair Imagineered Blue-Sky Build-Out of Disney’s Animal Kingdom

ASIA

Background

Asia was actually not complete when Disney’s Animal Kingdom opened; most of it was sort of a “Phase 1.5” that was under active construction for the park’s first year, and debuted in spring 1999. Asia is embodied as a portion of the kingdom of Anandapur – a fictional region interpolating elements of Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Mongolia, Nepal, Thailand and Tibet.

The riverside village that served as Asia’s “Phase I” is home to several restaurants, an open air amphitheater (for bird shows), a mini splash pad, and several primate habitats on little flooded islands. As with Harambe, an immense, embedded history was developed for the kingdom, all told through environmental storytelling.

One major aspect of that storytelling occurs in the MAHARAJAH ANIMAL TREK – Asia’s counterpart to the Gorilla Falls Pangani Forest Exploration Trail Animal Trek. Designed as a weaving trail through the sprawling ruins of a centuries-old maharajah’s “royal hunting preserve,” we’re meant to sense ironic humor to the eroding palace grounds now serving as a protected nature sanctuary instead. The maharajah didn’t last and neither did his palace… but nature perseveres.

If Africa’s “big idea” is resource and value, then Asia’s – as communicated by the structures of Anandapur and the Animal Trek – might be described as “cohabitation;” how we as humans live alongside, within, and from the natural world we re-inherit generation after generation.

As I mentioned, it was initially envisioned that each of the park’s lands would have its own ride with the scope of Africa’s Safari. For Asia, that was meant to be Tiger River Rapids – a sort of “water safari” that would see guests float past Asian animals, mixing in the white water “thrills” of a flume ride. As the story goes, what ultimately ended this pursuit was that inevitable backlash of making some of the park’s animals visible only for those who met the height, health, and safety requirements of a water-based thrill ride.

Instead, we can sort of imagine that the concept was split in two, creating the Jungle Trek (for animals) and Kali River Rapids (for thrills). (Early park maps even called the yet-to-open ride “Tiger River Run,” which was obviously changed to communicate that you wouldn’t see tigers on board.) Kali River Rapids is a fairly standard water rapids ride wrapped in a beautiful forest setting. Halfway through, the rafts drift through a smoking, sparse, dying forest that’s in the midst of being cut down – a not-to-subtle commentary on that “cohabitation” theme, and how we as humans navigate our needs and responsibilities in the world we share.

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that Disney has never quite figured out how to use these free-floating rapids rides. The company has three (Kali, Grizzly River Run at California Adventure, and Roaring Rapids in Shanghai) and all three of them are criticized for being fairly barren and boring. I know, I know – no one’s riding these rapids rides for the #story, and the whole point is to just get soaked – hence the very long waits on hot days. Kali River Rapids is probably even the best of the bunch. But I don’t think it’s an all-time classic whose acreage should never be put to another use… (Hint hint!)

A second half of Asia was unveiled in 2006 with the opening of EXPEDITION EVEREST. In the land’s mythology, Serka Zong is a municipality on the outskirts of Anandapur, bordering the Himalayan Mountains and more influenced by the architecture and history of Tibet and Nepal. The opening of that half of the land also completed an “outer loop” around the lagoon portion of the Discovery River, connecting Asia to the theater in Dinoland.

That expansion also laid the groundwork for the construction of two substantial amphitheaters (holding a combined 5,000 people) in 2016. All of that effort was to finally give Animal Kingdom a true “nighttime spectacular”… but the result – RIVERS OF LIGHT – faced significant issues in development, was delayed by more than a year, debuted in 2017 to less-than-stellar reviews, was swiftly budget-cut by removing the live actors from its cast, was completely re-designed to include Disney and Pixar characters and songs (respectfully omitted from the original version), and finally paused during COVID, when Disney fessed up that it would never return.

So basically, the park’s 5,000 seat amphitheater is empty and (thanks to the Florida sun) totally unusable for anything but a nighttime show, which appears to be an unappetizing initiative for Team Disney Orlando whose short love affair with making Animal Kingdom an “after dark” park has dried up. And that, I hope, paints the picture of the Asia we have to work with. So here’s what I imagined…

Build-Out

In what’s become a recurring (and at this point, somewhat embarrassing) refrain: there’s not much to change about Animal Kingdom’s Asia. Surely we can’t adjust or remove the Jungle Trek, and Everest isn’t going anywhere. But when I (or just about any “armchair Imagineer” I’ve seen who takes on this park) looks at Animal Kingdom, the question isn’t so much what we’d add to Asia as how we can use Asia to access the substantial expansion pads north of it.

Long story short, the big work we’ve got to do with Asia is to figure out how it can be our “gateway to expansion.” The available land adjacent to it plus Rafiki’s Planet Watch sum up to a substantial pad that rivals Kilimanjaro Safaris. Now, as always, I have to tell you that this is a Blue Sky build-out. I have obviously not done any feasibility studies, environmental impact studies, etc. Especially at Disney World, land use is an incredibly complex topic because much of the land Disney owns in Florida is simply not suitable for development. And of course, just because an area looks empty doesn’t mean it’s unused – especially at Animal Kingdom. But in a Blue Sky build-out, we can play with space without pesky issues like whether or not land is feasibly usable.

So my first quest was to figure out how to access that space. I thought about trying to work in a “spoke” from Discovery Island due north from the Tree of Life, but the natural consequence of that is that we ought to remove the Wildlife Express train. Of course, even though that train feels kind of useless now, it’s not going to be if we use the expansion pad; we’ll need transportation options to move guests to and from the now extremely-remote far end of the park other than just walking it.

Then, even if we did build a “spoke” right up between Africa and Asia, it would still need to wind around the entire Maharajah Animal Trek to access the new space, creating a fairly boring, exhausting, forested route with little visual interest while also necessitating substantial restructuring of backstage access to Asia’s restaurants. In other words, accessing the expansion pad through the space occupied by the train’s turnaround would really not be very efficient.

So I made the (not-so-challenging) decision to eliminate Kali River Rapids in favor of a new spur of the Discovery River and a new main pathway branching north. I know that in Animal Kingdom (famously the park with fewer rides than any other Disney Park), the idea of removing a ride is fairly absurd, especially because I haven’t really added many rides yet (just Firefall, Mo’ara Valley Expedition, and Lini Ikranay). It also sounds pretty dumb to remove a water ride from this infamously humid, sun-drenched park. But for the sake of what’s to come, we’ll need to sacrifice this very large ride for what I think is a long-term gain.

Granted, to do so, we create a separate navigational issue: a new “main pathway” that isn’t accessible from Discovery Island – and in fact, materializes right in the center of the sprawling Asia. That means this path needs to blend into Asia to convincingly bridge (no pun intended) the Anandapur and Serka Zong halves, but also has to clearly communicate to guests that this path that manifests right in the middle of the land is a continuation of a grand circle tour of the park – not an optional side quest like Animal Kingdom’s deep and dense lands often feature.

I think that a delta of the Discovery River helps, because certainly by way of the rest of the park, we’ve come to subconsciously understand that both crossing and following the river signify important transitions and “main” pathways. But we can maintain that “main midway” gravitas while also blending the path into the existing Asia. I tried to signify that with a network of bridges across the water, strung up with prayer flags and lined with the same kind of riverside refuse and rockwork you could previously find on Kali River Rapids (above).

In fact, the circular structure you see jutting into the river is the gazebo and circular loading platform from Kali, now turned into a sort of mid-stream observation platform to gaze up the waterway a new iconic “weenie” we’ll see soon… Likewise, across from there is a new Tibetan-stylized boathouse loading platform for the DISCOVERY RIVER FERRY, which – after stops on Discovery Island and Africa – now turns north up the new expansion of the river.

So hey, let’s follow that path and stumble across the first(!) genuinely new addition to the park!

“a bug’s land”

Build-Out

Disney Parks love to shrink people. From the size of an atom to the size of a toy, being “shrunk” is a recurring motif across the parks. But I would argue that few projects have done it as successfully as “a bug’s land.” Look, no one would suggest that California Adventure’s Bug’s Land was a magnum opus of Imagineering; it read as exactly what it was: a “cheap and cheerful” quick fix solution to the criticisms that the park lacked rides, characters, and things for families to do.

But if you follow me on Twitter, you know that I think “a bug’s land” was far more compelling as an environment than Disney’s now-eternal de facto “cheap and cheerful” “shrinking” land of quick-fix family capacity, Toy Story Land. Shaded by gigantic clovers and offering no less than four pint-sized carnival rides (very cutely grafted with seeds, leaves, and takeout containers), the land provided something spectacular for the park. I was always surprised that a version wasn’t ported to Animal Kingdom.

Sure, it’s obvious that 1998’s A Bug’s Life (Pixar’s second film after Toy Story) didn’t spur the kind of franchise that is practically required for a film to be considered even mildly successful today. But it did create a memorable cast of characters, the land at California Adventure and – lest we forget – the “It’s Tough to be a Bug” 3D show that played at Animal Kingdom for over a quarter century.

So I would argue that there is something fundamentally fitting about a land of insects serving as a “Toontown” of Animal Kingdom that keeps us on message and provides a perfect opportunity to inject more “Disney,” more characters, and more family capacity in a discrete space that still fits well under the park’s umbrella.. And what I’ve done here is, I hope, a major plus operationally too.

Basically, I took the concept of “a bug’s land” and remixed it with Tokyo DisneySea’s Mermaid Lagoon – a land that includes both typical outdoor components and a massive 100,000 square foot indoor complex that serves a little self-contained “indoor amusement park.” Whereas Mermaid Lagoon disguises its indoor facility behind a pastel seashell interpretation of King Triton’s castle, I envisioned my Bug’s Land centered on a towering colorful anthill spilling across a space filled with giant clovers, firefly lamps, and puddles.

Swirling, sparkling sand pathways would direct guests off of our new Asia path extension into this beautifully shaded outdoor space, with towering clovers, giant blades of grass, and more. Outside, the space would offer DOT’S PUDDLE PARK – a splash pad of dancing fountains, a “giant” leaky hose, dripping straws, and other water play components, served by a giant tissue box that acts as the land’s outdoor restroom.

On the other side of the anthill, I placed FLIK’S CLOVER COASTER. Since it’s been a while since A Bug’s Life was a hot property, the winding queue through the shadow of clovers would remind us that Flik is an inventor ant, and his latest invention – the Clover Coaster – is meant to speed up the process of pollination by sending us swirling through the field. Magic Kingdom already has a Vekoma 207m Junior Coaster (the Barnstormer), so in “a bug’s land,” we’d instead use a sized-up 335m model – the same as Universal’s Flight of the Hippogriff – to create a family-sized thrill ride as opposed to a kiddie one. (I thought about going with a Vekoma suspended coaster instead, but I already used that in my build-out of Hollywood Studios so it doesn’t make sense to double up here.)

And yes, we would also bring to Animal Kingdom the cult classic, fan favorite HEIMLICH’S CHEW CHEW TRAIN – famously a “so bad it’s good” train ride where guests load into the very hungry German caterpillar’s body segments to “chew” through giant watermelon rinds, animal crackers, oranges, and candy corn – all with scents!

For those of us lucky enough to have visited Tokyo DisneySea, the interior of the ant hill would – like Triton’s Kingdom – be a spectacular, cavernous, colorful complex inviting us into the glowing, darkened interior of the ant kingdom. Among giant bioluminescent mushrooms, sandslides, and root systems, we’d find three family-sized flat rides:

• BUG BALLOONS – a Zamperla Balloon Race like California Adventure’s Inside Out Emotional Whirlwind
• ATTA’S ANT DANCE – a Zamperla Demotion Derby, like a mini-sized, two-table version of Mater’s Junkyard Jamboree or Alien Swirling Saucers
• TUCK N’ ROLL’S TRAPEZE TUMBLE – a mini, family-sized drop tower

A whole section of this complex would also be THE ANT HILL – a totally explorable, soft-floored play zone to climb, jump, crawl, slide, and more (with a Larvae Lounge just for kids under four), as well as an ANT ARMORY retail space and COLONY KITCHEN quick service restaurant (serving – of course, a delectable pu pu platter). And like Mermaid Lagoon, the space would also include a theater space. For the sake of familiarity, I put IT’S TOUGH TO BE A BUG there, but I think there’s capacity to imagine a show that’s bigger and grander! Maybe a “Circus Insectus” of stylized acrobats and songs about the role of bugs in our world.

In one fell swoop, I hope that this version of “a bug’s land” deepens the park’s focus on insects as an under-appreciated-but-essential component of our natural world while also bringing more character and play-based experiences to an often-very-serious park. Even better, I think the idea of the indoor complex is such a home run. Animal Kingdom is a grueling park in its size and heat, so with this “a bug’s land,” we end up with a mercifully shaded outdoor section centered on a splash pad and an enormous, air-conditioned indoor facility that I think would be incredibly popular during mid-day heat and afternoon thunderstorms. A real win-win for a park with few things to do when it’s pouring rain.

The only issue I can see you justifiably raising is exactly what I opened with – that A Bug’s Life didn’t become a franchise, and because it’s so old at this point (26 years! Ah!), it would be the rare child who could identify Flik, much less care to meet-and-greet him. But I’ll tell you something – I don’t mind that at all. As a matter of fact, I sort of like the rare Disney film that manages to make it to that point, because I think it actually makes their park presence all the more powerful. Here’s a cast of characters developed by Pixar that we could, in some ways, pass off as park originals! California Adventure’s Bug’s Land only closed in 2018 (and only to make way for Avengers Campus), so for at least a generation or two, that was probably already the case!

That brings us here – to a park that feel quite complete, actually! Holistically, we’ve done a lot – revived the River Ferry, added a musical dark ride and a thrilling flat ride to Tropical America, inserted both a flat ride and off-roading safari into Pandora, and now added “a bug’s land” with four flat rides, a coaster, a splash pad, and a theater. We could probably stop here and feel pretty good about this as a “build-out” of Animal Kingdom, effectively taking up no more space than the current park’s footprint!

But of course, in the spirit of thinking “Blue Sky,” we can’t leave the rest of the park’s expansion pad empty… so let’s continue back up that new branch of the Discovery River from Asia… Ready?