Reel Nature: America's Romance with Wildlife on Film

Prologue

prologue prologue In the spring of 1998, the Walt Disney Company opened its newest entertainment attraction, Animal Kingdom. A ~ve-hundred-acre live-animal theme park located on the western edge of Walt Disney World Resort near Orlando, Florida seemed an odd venture for the company associated more with fantasy animals than those of _esh and bone. In the 1950s, Disney’s animators, designers, and engineers transformed the company’s two-dimensional cartoon fantasy world into Disneyland, a three-dimensional magic kingdom. But Animal Kingdom brought a new challenge to Disney imagineers in the 1990s. It was a challenge that required the advice and expertise of wildlife biologists, conservation organizations, and zoos to recreate an African savanna out of the _at landscape of central Florida cow pasture.1 Complete with rolling plains, exotic vegetation, and one thousand wildlife residents, Animal Kingdom is at once an environmental learning center and a tourist’s playground. Here nature is scripted—contrived by human 1 hands—to tell a story that is “at once both natural and fantastic,” from the thrill ride Countdown to Extinction in Dinoland to the Tree of Life, a “technological marvel” that Disney imagineering’s executive designer Joe Rohde describes as “a symbol of the beauty and diversity and the grandeur of animal life on Earth.” At the heart of Safari Village, the crossroads where visitors “pass to reach other lands,” the synthetic Tree of Life towers fourteen stories high; its massive ~fty-foot wide trunk supports a canopy 160 feet in diameter. Some 350 animal carvings adorn its base and sturdy branches, engineered to sway in the wind. Sheltered in the tree’s interior is a 430-seat movie theater where spectators can watch a 3D animated adventure from a bug’s point of view.2 It cost Disney an estimated $800 million to construct Animal Kingdom. The undertaking involved the growth and transplantation of roughly 100,000 trees; the importation of 1,000 animals representing 200 wildlife species; and the inadvertent deaths of at least a dozen animals including cheetahs, rhinoceroses , Asian small-clawed otters, and African crowned cranes as they made the transition from wild jungle to synthetic habitat. In this fantastic creation of authentic nature, immense labor and expense were required.3 Intended to lead guests on “dramatic adventures into the mysteries and marvels of the live animal world,” Animal Kingdom narrates a story of wildlife and conservation that, in the words of Disney Chairman Michael Eisner, both “informs and entertains.” Education and adventure await tourists on the nineteen-minute Kilimanjaro Safari ride. By transporting guests in open-sided, camou_aged trucks, the photographic safari provides close-up encounters with herds of African animals, including elephants, giraffes, and rhinoceroses, on a savanna “so convincingly real that visitors from every corner of Africa itself have said it looks . . . ‘just like home.’”4 In this packaged tour across the simulated African veldt, the wildlife and conservation messages cannot be avoided. They start while visitors wait in line for the ride within easy view of monitors that show slain elephants harvested for ivory. They continue during the ride as the adventurers participate in a thrilling, fabricated hunt for the ivory poachers responsible. In Animal Kingdom, wildlife poaching is a “social evil.” But at forty-~ve dollars for a one-day adult admission, Disney can equally be viewed as exploiting nature. Animal Kingdom is after all a commercial enterprise. Near Universal Studios Florida and Sea World, the park is hoping to cash in on nature as entertainment in a location that has become an international tourist playground.5 2 reel nature Animal Kingdom’s nature is a house that Disney built. The park’s enchantment grows from the experience of Disney imagineers who created emotion-~lled fantasy for over forty years. Yet, everywhere reality intercedes . Constrained by the unpredictable actions of live animals, Animal Kingdom cannot direct this theater of nature on cue. The troops of lowland gorillas on the Gorilla Falls Exploration Trail, for instance, might prefer the privacy of their lush habitat to public display, despite audience expectations. Both animal rights groups and federal regulations prevent the provocation of drama red-in-tooth-and-claw. In Animal Kingdom, nature, except for that produced in the wholly fabricated extinct world of Dinoland, is an innocent and gentle place where animals are “partners in the great web of life.”6 Designed to tell an “awe-inspiring tale of the interconnected nature of all living things,” the park capitalizes on the desire...