There’s an obvious equation here we have to acknowledge.
A billion-dollar-earning film filled with animals, plus a “half-day” theme park called Animal Kingdom, minus the costs saved by piggybacking on Shanghai’s research and development of a land that can be copied-and-pasted… Let’s not play coy here. The question of the century is, does Zootopia (the land or even the broader IP) fit at Disney’s Animal Kingdom? Obviously, there’s a whole lot to consider before you cast your vote… So let’s get to considering.
Arguments for Zootopia at Animal Kingdom
1. ANIMAL KINGDOM NEEDS MORE TO DO.
Hopefully it’s not breaking news to anyone that Disney’s Animal Kingdom desperately needs attractions. Actually, all three of Disney World’s non-Castle parks need more to do, but Animal Kingdom is in particularly dire straits. The park famously had the fewest rides of any Disney Park on Earth.
Even just getting a trackless dark ride would be a sizable plus for the park’s incredibly small ride count, but pairing it with one or two family flat rides (a la Cars Land) would be a huge pick-me-up. Especially in a park notorious for occasionally taking itself too seriously, a land based on a Disney Animation Studios film could be a wonderful relief for families, adding much-needed character and color to the park… as long as it’s done right.
Plus, Disney rotates through a cycle of development for its underbuilt second, third, and fourth gate, pulsing big budget expansions into them… and hey, Animal Kingdom’s “turn” came around right as Shanghai’s Zootopia opened, making it a sort of easy solution to say, “Hey, let’s just break ground on another one of those in Florida!” Voila!
2. A SUITABLE PHYSICAL LOCATION EXISTS.
Zootopia famously begins with Judy riding a sleek monorail into the city to the tune of Shakira’s – er, um, Gazelle‘s – hit song “Try Everything.”
Weirdly, that seems like an all-too-simple overlay of Animal Kingdom’s tepid “Rafiki’s Planet Watch” – a sort of mini, ’90s nature center accessible only by train. The offerings at Planet Watch today are basically a petting zoo and a hastily-added Animation Academy – not worth the train ride to get there, and not really worth being open at all.
Obviously, limiting access to your new land by forcing guests to ride a train to get there isn’t operationally feasible… but if Zootopia had to come to Animal Kingdom, there does seem to be a smartness about physically and narratively keeping it removed from the park proper, so that neon skyline doesn’t shine out over Africa and Asia. (Disney did the same thing with Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland, which is situated outside of the park’s traditional berm and has no signage to direct guests to it from Frontierland or Bayou Country.)
Of course, that’s apparently not where Disney is thinking of putting Zootopia anyway…
3. IT’S CLEARLY ON DISNEY’S SHORTLIST OF POSSIBILITIES.
Join us if you will in remembering what it was like to follow along with the staggering oddity of the 2022 D23 Expo. The first Expo for a post-pandemic, Chapek-helmed Walt Disney Company transformed by seismic changes in every sector of travel and entertainment, fans turned out to the first Parks Panel since 2019 expecting (and indeed, needing) reassurance that Disney was back on track, thinking big, and investing in Parks that had stagnated in the pandemic years (when Universal’s competing parks had grown).
Instead, what they got was a downright awkward multi-hour presentation in which Parks Chairman Josh D’Amaro danced around the uncomfortable truth: he had practically no updates to give and literally nothing to announce. Instead, he was joined on stage by the head of Walt Disney Animation Studios (a fairly overt embodiment of the Disney+ Parks era) to show awkward “Blue Sky” artwork, continuously reminding fans that none of this was official, it was just for fun, and isn’t it fun to see behind the scenes of our thinking?
One such “out loud wond’ring” began with D’Amaro oddly saying that even though they didn’t actually have anything to announce to replace it, they were prepared to say that people don’t like Dinoland at Disney’s Animal Kingdom (generally true, but a weird out loud admission in its own right). So hey, ‘what if we replaced it with Moana, but also, Zootopia!’ The curious artwork seemed to suggest that most of Dinoland could become a tribute to the islands of Polynesia, but then the Lost Legend: DINOSAUR would be reclad or replaced with Zootopia, creating at least a Zootopia dark ride (if not a mini-land) accessed through the South Seas? Huh?
Now to be clear, a change in management saw longtime Imagineer Bruce Vaughn return to Imagineering, and soon after, plans for Dinoland were modified. Instead, the former Dinoland will become “Tropical Americas” – a land still capable of containing Disney intellectual property (in this case, Indiana Jones and Encanto), but encasing it in a much more authentic wrap that better aligns with the park’s Africa, Asia, and Pandora.
But for many, it’s a shocker how close Animal Kingdom came to housing a neon animal city! After all, these three reasons don’t even get close to convincing many Imagineering fans (including this one!) that Zootopia belongs at Disney World’s fourth gate. And trust me, I hear your thinking – “It’s a movie filled with animals!” “It’s fun, and Animal Kingdom needs fun!” “Who cares, it’s for kids!” So let me address those arguments on the next page…
I completely respect and understand your views here, but I don’t see how Zootopia is any less appropriate than, say, Avatar in Animal Kingdom.
And with the unleashing of IP realms in all the parks–Cars is Frontierland? Marvel is California Adventure? Tiana is Frontierland? Pixar, Big Hero 6, and Star Wars are lands?!– I don’t know that there any rules anymore.
(And FWIW I wouldn’t have a problem with Robin Hood in Animal Kingdom. 😹)
I actually think this is a great point of distinction worth thinking about! It may be that an IP is not inherently right or wrong for any given park’s theme, but that it’s the way that IP is embodied and manifested that either fits or doesn’t. So Avatar is obviously the perennial example of an IP that on its face would be a bad fit, because how does this PG-13 20th Century Fox action movie fit alongside Africa (centered on the question of value) or Asia (which is about coexistence) or even Dinoland (which is about animals as pop culture).
But the execution makes the difference – Pandora is a nature preserve, and we are eco-tourists. Sure, I guess some anonymous ancestors of ours tried to strip this planet of its resources, and I guess it was a war zone, but that was a long time ago. The land’s rides and even restaurants are about communing with and understanding the native Na’vi – their culture, their customs, their cuisine. We are on Pandora as humble observers, jaws dropped by the beauty of the natural world and maybe (hint hint) leave understanding that we should value Earth’s native people, flora, and fauna just as spectacularly.
I don’t know, maybe you could do the same with Zootopia, and use those characters and that world to investigate something real and something connected to those higher, capital-T Themes that underwrite Animal Kingdom. But that’s not even in play. Cloning the land from Shanghai was. And I don’t think there’s any way to reasonably spin that into being about “the intrinsic, untradeable, and supreme value of nature.” It’s a city… with animal puns. It’s a buddy cop comedy movie… where the characters happen to be designed as a rabbit and fox. Again, having animals doesn’t mean it’s about animals. So if we’re going to hold ourselves to a high standard, I think we should be adamantly against Robin Hood being in Animal Kingdom. Is “having animals” really the only bar to entry you want for this park?
As for your other examples, I think it’s obvious that none of those make any one particular kind of sense in the bigger picture, but the essential difference is that the parks they inhabit also don’t “mean” much anymore. I wrote about this in my Disney+ Parks feature, but my argument is that basically no Disney Park has a capital-T Theme anymore beyond “A global hub where Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars stories come to life.” The only exception, I’d say, is Animal Kingdom. So for me, it’s worth preserving separate from wishing there were a better bar to entry for those other parks, too. See what happens when I get going?! Haha.
I see your point! I can’t help but wonder how or if the Possibilityland of Beastly Kingdom would have been compatible with this concept. Would it have been more or less relevant than Avatarland–or than a conceived Zootopia-land? 🤔