Beauty and the Beasts

By Richard Corliss/Orlando

Visitors board Simba One, an oversize tram (seats 32) that will take you on a safari through "the Serengeti grassland system," and as one fellow steps into the open-air vehicle, he asks, "Is it air-conditioned?" No, mate, this is reality. Real crocodiles lazing primordially below that rickety bridge. Actual cheetahs motoring their stretch-limo bodies across the savanna. Genuine loamy smell over there near the warthog. (Hakuna matata, guys--it's only nature's perfume.)

And real work for the travelers. The recorded voice at the start of the adventure encourages you to "Grow eyes!"; there are dozens of shy creatures--Waldo-beasts, if you will--waiting to be discovered by the visitor who is visually acute. Look hard for the gray elephant trying to tuck herself behind the grayish rock. Flick a peek to one side and catch a pair of two-ton white rhinos who seem to have sleepy-mean eyes to butt the tram (hatari!). And don't miss the gawky East African crowned cranes off to the right. The driver turns on a radio, a sweet Swahili tune (Hapa Dunianai by the Voices of Celebration) wafts through the air, and the cranes turn into an impromptu chorus line, stepping gracefully to the music.

Is it "real," or is it that artful contradiction, Disney reality? For this is Disney's Animal Kingdom, the spectacular, instructive, $800 million new species of theme park that will open next week, surrounded by the usual ballyhoo and, for Disney, the usual naysayers and pickets (see box). "We're in the magic business," says chairman and CEO Michael Eisner, "and this park is all about magic and illusion."

The magic of numbers, the illusion of intimacy. More exotic creatures are on display in the 20-min. safari ride than would likely be seen on a week's trek through Africa: okapis, nyalas, zebras, giraffes, ostriches, Thompson gazelles, hippos and a quintet of eland that your driver must stop for as they cross the bumpy road. And thanks to feeding stations hidden in tree bogs, the animals will usually be grazing in view. Thus Animal Kingdom solves the dilemma of the modern zoo: how to keep animals out of cages but still on more or less predictable display.

The animals' behavior is not so much altered as stage-managed. To the visitor, that lion and lioness sunbathing on Pride Rock look close enough...well, close enough to eat you. But they are separated from the tram by an unseen gulch too wide for the beasts to straddle. The savanna where they roam was once drab cow pasture, but every weed and rut has been meticulously contoured and art-directed to resemble an African plain. Disney's Imagineers did a convincing makeover. When Franklin Sonn, the South African ambassador to the U.S., saw the place last month, he said, "This is the bush veldt. This is my home."

At 500 acres, Animal Kingdom, fourth of the Walt Disney World parks--after Magic Kingdom (opened 1971), EPCOT Center (1982) and Disney-MGM (1989)--is the biggest. The company hired 2,800 workers to build the park and 2,500 "cast members" (performing employees) to entertain and instruct all the visitors. As many as 10 million are expected the first year.

The scope of Disney's ambitions--newer, grander world upon world--looks giddy to outsiders, but it's just good business to Judson Green, president of Walt Disney Attractions. "We have done more in the past three or four years than we ever have," Green says, "and we will do even more in the future." Each new "more" will also aim to be different--a continuing revolution by evolution of the park thematic. "Young people, especially, don't care what you did in the past," Eisner says. "They want to know what's next. And we've found that copying ourselves is not always successful. It certainly isn't fun."

Most Wall Streeters agree with Disney's strategy. In the 14 years of the Eisner era, the company has built Disney-MGM, two water parks, 14 hotels, six golf courses, a Pleasure Island village of night clubs, the Downtown Disney megalomart and a huge Wide World of Sports complex spun off from its ESPN cable franchise. The result: Orlando, once a sleepy gas stop between Cape Canaveral and Tampa, is now the world's top resort destination. So why stop now? Given Disney's gift for--nay, obsession with--synergy, the cross-pollinating marketing possibilities for the new park are endless. "Think of all the animal-related programming, from Bambi to Simba," says PaineWebber analyst Christopher Dixon. "Disney can now use Animal Kingdom as a way to promote and revitalize many of its animal brands."

Some analysts expect Animal Kingdom to suck customers away from older Disney attractions, but Mouse House execs believe families will simply stay longer. (The typical out-of-state visit is currently three days.) You can't underestimate the power of a six-year-old's tugging at an adult's sleeve, flashing those big cow eyes and saying, "Please, Daddy, just one more day."

Actually, this child had better be precocious. Animal Kingdom does offer distractions for the very young, such as a dinosaur dig (a huge sandbox where kids can, over a day's time, unearth the bones of a "T. rex") and a petting zoo (where recently two children fervently stroked the head of a baby goat, oblivious to the fact that the animal was peeing). But the park could be rated For Mature Children Only.

By this we don't mean that animals may occasionally be seen doing what animals do when they want to make more animals. We mean that the park demands rapt attention. A place like the Magic Kingdom controls your eyes, manacles your emotions, spoon-feeds the kitsch marvels of Audio-Animatronics. In Animal Kingdom, you're the boss. Great stuff awaits you in this all-five-senses assault; you have to find it. Says Eisner: "The 'script' is looser. And the guests have to work, but in a fun way."

You enter the park and, instead of a Main Street or Spaceship Earth, you see paths with no special markers leading you know not where. This is the Oasis, a riot of trees where cast members will point you toward the greenery so you can see a snoozing two-toed sloth in one tree, a couple of military macaws skirmishing in another. Then you reach the park's central icon, the Tree of Life, a 145-ft.-high broccoli stalk--actually an oil rig festooned with fake bark and 103,000 artificial leaves, each attached by hand--into which 325 creatures have been artfully carved. When the family breaks up to go exploring, you'll be tempted to say, "Meet you at the Tree of Life," but the thing is so wide (170 ft. around) that visitors could circle it for ages without finding one another. The downside: you can easily get lost in Animal Kingdom. The thrilling up side: so can your imagination.

Inside the Tree is one of the park's few structured entertainments, It's Tough to Be a Bug!, a 3-D film with in-theater effects on the order of the Honey, I Shrunk the Audience attraction at EPCOT. Inspired by characters in this fall's film release A Bug's Life (from Disney and Pixar, the tandem that made Toy Story), this creepy-crawly mini-epic features a cast of zillions and plenty of clever insect asides. But the kids will love the gross-out effects. One tiny creature, the Termite-ator, blows "snot" at the audience (you will get wet). A stink bug backs up to the screen and engulfs the crowd in his sulfurous stench (face it, fart jokes are funny). At the end, the human audience is asked to wait while the bug audience leaves the theater, and--eww!--it feels as if cockroaches are scurrying under your butt.

Animal Kingdom boasts other shows: a zesty Jungle Book presentation, with gaily colored puppets; and a Festival of the Lion King (the fourth stage show Disney has spun off from its 1994 animated smash) that blends audience participation with tumbling, stilt-walking, Cirque du Soleil-style big-topicality. In Dinoland U.S.A. there's a dinosaur thrill ride, Countdown to Extinction, that uses the technology of the popular Indiana Jones ride in Disneyland, California. But the best spectacles are the ones visitors create, discover or stumble into on their own.

Take a stroll through Gorilla Falls, which executive designer Joe Rohde, who dreamed up the park, carefully calls "a representation, not a reproduction, of an African habitat." Stop to gaze at--then try, just try to tear yourself away from--the terrarium of mole rats, burrowing or eating or just collapsed in a pile like a failed pyramid of cheerleaders. In a cloudy tank, two hippos float with hefty grace. Meerkats (completing The Lion King's "hakuna matata" trio) stand sentinel on a hill, gazing through glass at suspected predators: us. Finally, an ennead of gorillas--four bachelors on one side of a waterfall, a family of five safely on the other--scuff their knuckles as they proudly prowl.

Some of the people behind Animal Kingdom are as charismatic as the beasties on show. Rohde, 42, an intensely jaunty adventurer with a silent-movie villain's mustache and enough gigantic native earrings dangling from his left lobe to fill a display case in a Nairobi Tiffany's, is a fine artist whose drawings from his world travels cued many of the park's lustrous images.

"I love wild things!" enthuses landscape architect Paul Comstock, 47, a gangly blond with an Andy Devine voice. Comstock is one such creature; he has drummed for rock bands as well as designed rock gardens, and he punctuates his remarks with urgent gesticulations, as if he were on strings maneuvered by a mad marionetteer. It was his job and pleasure to dress the park in 4 million trees, shrubs and grasses from six continents.

The planting is not orderly--no exotic topiary of Disney's beloved barnyard critters. The look is what Comstock calls "promiscuous and harlequin," a quiet riot of greens, a forest painted by Rousseau. Comstock found some of the plants in Nepal, riding a mother elephant named Durgha Kali who recalled Paul from a previous visit and insisted on porting him again. As Comstock tells it, he would point to plants; Durgha would pull them out and pass them up to her master. Like any good Imagineer, Comstock must not only talk to the animals (and plants) but also put his vision across to the bosses. As he says, "You gotta sell somebody on takin' some chances!" The sales pitch worked, and Animal Kingdom is also a Vegetable Kingdom, gorgeous and peaceable.

Rohde and Comstock help fulfill an old Disney credo: the park is the ride. If the wait time is too long for the big attractions, you can have a blast just glomming the architecture and atmosphere. That is truest in Animal Kingdom. The backrests of park benches are carved as turtles, eagles, crocodiles. Harambe, the African "village" near the safari ride, is not idealized in Magic Kingdom fashion. It is stylized: worn, with cracked pavements below buildings of a Moorish-Disney design that might be called "mosqueteer." For visitors with an antic mind and a free year or two, Dinoland offers a trove of comic minutiae, including "Chester and Hester's," a garage full of dino-doodads.

Animal Kingdom tries to preserve wildlife while making it part of the show. The Conservation Station provides an education lite on wildlife and rain forests and has an animal E.R. that shows surgeons at work on, say, a macaw's anus. Keeping the animals healthy is the evocatively named Peregrine Wolff, 39, director of veterinary services. Importing 1,000 animals to central Florida (mostly from zoos and wildlife centers) has been an education for everyone. "The mammals are trained to come in at night," says Wolff. "Do they always? No. The white rhinos went on a five-day love feast, and the male gained 50 lbs. browsing on plants. And animals are so athletic. You think an animal can jump only 10 ft. and build a barrier to keep it from doing any harm. Then, just to prove how stupid you are, it'll jump 12 ft. So we adjust."

Life is full of adjustments. The Zulus who came to Florida to build the thatched huts in the Harambe village found their hotel rooms too cold; so, says a Disney employee, they built fires in their rooms. Some of the 82 Africans who work in the park are troubled by the "help" of their U.S. colleagues. Mmathabo Marule, 20, from Johannesburg, was vexed when shown how to use a microwave: "I had to tell her we do have those at home."

Some attractions are being adjusted. A parade of cast-member "creatures," expected to run twice daily, was still not ambulatory a fortnight ago. The Jungle Book and Lion King shows were getting final tweaks. Dinos in Countdown to Extinction were to be given scarier lighting and infusions of bad breath. The safari ride's story line, about a baby elephant separated from its mother, is lame drama--no match for the amazing beasts on display.

But these are just growing pains for a park that is a living organism. Its cast of star characters is bound to expand and contract. "Animals will be born and, unfortunately, animals will die," Wolff says. "That's part of the natural process." Some local fauna have already squatted in these fabulous digs. And the park itself will grow. Next year the Asia section opens, with a flume thrill ride and a second safari. A still more remote realm, a kind of beastly kingdom, will feature creatures from fantasy. Eisner also hopes to devote an area to domesticated animals.

All of which should bring families back for their fun and Disney's profit. Audiences return to a movie like Titanic to relive the same experience. They'll go back on the safari to catch things they missed the first time. And isn't that a good thing? In a pop-culture era offering passive, instant gratification, this park seduces visitors into becoming active searchers for the bounty of animal and floral life. By adroitly mixing the educational and the enthralling, Animal Kingdom proves they can be the same thing. It's a fun field trip for adults of all ages. And a great walk in the park.

--With reporting by Tammerlin Drummond/Orlando

With reporting by Tammerlin Drummond/Orlando