![]() This may be the final answer to the challenge Walt Disney set himself seven decades ago: giving visitors a “real” cinematic experience when they enter his theme parks. The designers have planted bromeliads and aloes and every kind of spiked floral oddity alongside Avatar-inspired fakes such that they are impossible to distinguish. ![]() At night, the entire habitat glows with bioluminance that transforms a stroll into a light show.Ĭelebrating Pandora - The World of Avatar with #VisitPandora #AnimalKingdomĪ post shared by Walt Disney World on at 5:15pm PDTĪmong the many advances here is the seamless blend of horticulture and stagecraft. Likewise many of the effects great and small, down to the patches of lichen that not only have to pass for living but survive the poking and prodding of millions of sticky fingers a year. One engineer I talked to did acknowledge that he didn’t think the neck-craning centrepiece of Pandora – the massive, water-shedding boulders that seem to float weightlessly against constraining vines – could have even been built a decade ago. Most of this the designers won’t talk about. Pandora, naturally, deploys all that is new and cool as material sciences, projection technology and theme-park trickery continues to catch up to their frenzied imaginations. My companion pronounced the steamed cheeseburger bao bun ($10.99) “very cheeseburger-like,” and he meant it as a compliment. I thought the build-your-own Satu’li bowl of salmon and quinoa and sweet potatoes was exceptional for $12.99. And, like Epcot, Pandora has its alcohol license, thanks be to Eywa! (That’s the Na’vi goddess you can look it up in one of the online dictionaries dedicated the Polynesian-inflected Na’vi lingo that is scattered around the park.) The Pongu Pongu drink stand and the Satu’li Canteen feature a couple of custom ales ($9.50 for 22 ounces) and a Banshee Pinot ($9). Sit in a booth, and a 3-D printer soon will deliver an action-figure likeness of yourself – as blue, nose-less and pointy eared as Zoe Saldana ever was.ĭisney’s march to better eats continues, and the food in Pandora is as good as I’ve had in any Disney park except for some of the around-the-world options at Epcot. And in an update on the cartoon caricatures that visitors have been buying at theme parks for years, you can have yourself Avatar-ed in this shop. That gift shop, the Windtrader, hawks Pandora-specific tchotchkes that include a clever banshee puppet to squat and squawk on your shoulder. ![]() (The winding queue for the flight ride – dubbed an instant classic by some early riders – was reportedly peaking at four hours.) WENN More about them later, but know that both are already drawing epically long lines. There are only two actual rides in Pandora, the Na’vi River Journey, a family-friendly boat trip through a luminescent Na’vi forest, and the Avatar Flight of Passage, a spectacular mock ride on the back of one of the dragonlike banshees that figured so prominently in the film. But the point is to linger, and they’ve made that an easy pleasure to do. You could cover every inch of the place at stroller speeds in about 15 minutes. The tiki-steampunk vibe gives a dedicated detail-spotter like me lots to look at. Manhole covers, for example (working portals to Disney’s real-world, secret underground infrastructure), are hearty relics of the RDA occupation and they sit in the gauzy shadows of a sparkling waterfall. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. That ingenious conceit allowed planners to combine dystopian ruins (the colossal exo-armor battle suit from the movie’s climax sits rusting outside the gift shop) with lush streambeds and flowering vines. The Disney iteration, though, takes place generations after the miners have been driven out (hopefully with ample job-retraining for these victims of the War on Unobtanium) and the peacefully gigantic blue Na’vi of Pandora are busy restoring it to space-age splendor. Cross the bridge from Discovery Island and the habitat shifts to a Day-Glo rain-forest setting that will be familiar to “Avatar” fans as the faraway utopian moon that was threatened by a rapacious Earthling mining corporation, RDA. The five-year collaboration between Disney and Cameron’s production company opened last month as a new land in Animal Kingdom, one of four major parks that make up Walt Disney World. Oh, to be centered in Central Florida! WENN Maybe this won’t be so true in the humidity and humanity of a crowded Orlando August, but Pandora in May made me want to stand and stare and breathe mindfully.
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