Avatar, Disney’s Animal Kingdom, and Walt Disney World’s 5th Park
By Dave Shute
AVATAR AT THE ANIMAL KINGDOM
Disney announced in September its intent to develop an Avatar-themed area of Disney’s Animal Kingdom.
There’s a subset of Disney fans who are generally positive and optimistic but who do get quite annoyed by just a couple of things:
- Things Disney does, and
- Things Disney doesn’t do
The Avatar announcement left plenty of scope for annoyance on both fronts.
Objections to Disney World doing Avatar at Animal Kingdom include resistance to the simple-minded politics of the film, frustration with its overlap with Pocahontas, concerns about its absence of compelling characters, and the fact that by the time the land opens–2015 at the earliest, more likely later–Avatar memories may be thin (despite James Cameron’s Avatar sequel plans, as the sequels may be late and/or unsuccessful).
Preferences for what Disney should do instead often focus on the Beastly Kingdom, a planned but never-built part of the Animal Kingdom featuring Disney villains.
Avatar is resented specifically for perhaps forever closing off the Beastly Kingdom from getting built, and more generally for being a frail reed on which to invest hundreds of millions of dollars.
I don’t buy either set of objections–the objections to what Disney is doing, or the objections to what it isn’t doing.
My guess is that not only will Avatar-land be terrific, but also, as Jim Hill speculated coyly at the end of this article, that Disney World will open a whole new park sometime near its 50th anniversary in 2021, one with plenty of scope for Disney villains.
AVATAR AT THE ANIMAL KINGDOM IS A GOOD IDEA
Most of the objections to Avatar as such don’t hold up.
Yes, it has one-sided politically-correct caricatures, but the simple-minded good-guy bad-guy approach adds clarity to the main conflict without slowing down the rest of a great story.
Avatar is built around putting archetypes into action, not on character development or the subtleties of complex motivation on the part of the bad guys. This is quite common in plot and action driven stories. Unlike Milton’s Satan, Chernabog is not remarkable for being a complex character with multiple competing and shaded motives…
Yes, it shares themes with Pocahontas, but this is what makes it fit the Animal Kingdom’s theme of environmental and cultural sensitivity. However, Avatar differs profoundly from Pocahontas in setting, and setting is a fundamental difference, as the key art of a theme park is creating the visual setting.
Yes, Avatar’s characters have faded in memory, but characters aren’t that important to many great Disney rides.
Think of Space Mountain, Tower of Terror, the Haunted Mansion, Test Track, Pirates of the Caribbean, Soarin, Big Thunder Mountain, Mission Space, Expedition Everest, Kilimanjaro Safaris…none of these has a character in sight…and none was based on synergy with a pre-existing Disney property.
Yes memories of Avatar may have faded, and its sequels may come out later and/or less effectively than hoped…but Dinosaur shows that a great ride based on a forgotten movie is still a great ride.
I don’t find that the objections to Avatar make compelling arguments that Avatar-land can’t be a great land with great rides.
What a great Disney World land needs is a great setting; what a great ride needs is its own great setting and great action to unfold in that setting.
Avatar provides plenty of opportunities for both.
Jim Hill (in a different but equally good post) quotes Tom Staggs, Chairman of Parks and Resorts, on this:
“One of the things that we found…was that the scenes that people liked best were not the obvious things, like the big battle scenes, and that sort of thing. It was the creatures. It was learning to fly. It was being in the forest at night.”
Avatar provides plenty of scope for fun action in cool settings.
Moreover, James Cameron has a lot of imagineer in him. Don’t go by Avatar alone on this. Check out any of the material on the making of his movies, especially Aliens, Terminator 2, True Lies, and The Abyss. His commitment to technological innovation and to expansively creating and visualizing the settings and details of his films–especially through model-making–is astonishing, particularly since he’s so good to start with at plot and action (well…maybe not in The Abyss…).
His track record suggests he may even be too much of an imagineer, with real potential for Avatar-land to come in late and over budget from the sheer distractions of all the possibilities available!
And as for Avatar precluding the Beastly Kingdom?
Well, that takes us back to Jim Hill’s 5th gate point…and that’s continued here.
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