I saved Animal Kingdom for Monday, the last full day of our vacation. Although I enjoy Animal Kingdom, it’s been my least favorite park of the four. Don’t get me wrong—it’s still AMAZING, and there’s a LOT to do and see…I just have a stronger affinity for the other three parks. BUT, I’m not sure I can say that anymore! With the addition of Pandora (a new “land” themed around James Cameron’s epic AVATAR movie), and the expansion of Animal Kingdom hours to include the evenings, and the staggering beauty of this park at night—Animal Kingdom moved into the “MUST NOT MISS” category from the “We’ll visit every other trip” category.
Animal Kingdom is an interesting theme park, and unlike any other Disney theme park. It’s part zoo, part theme park, part conservation education experience. Visually, it’s very beautiful, especially if you love the outdoors and plants and trees. There’s green pretty much everywhere.
Animal Kingdom is very large and spread out; you definitely want to wear very comfortable walking shoes for your day at Animal Kingdom. I tend to put Animal Kingdom near the end of my trips when I include it because I don’t want to get too worn out the first couple of days—BUT putting it at the end was a challenge this trip, because we were both pretty tired by the time we got to Animal Kingdom!
Next trip, I will probably plan Animal Kingdom for the middle of our trip, and I’ll try to plan a rest day or a light day for the day after AK. This trip, I had a pretty good plan, I thought, heading into our Animal Kingdom day. The park opened early that day, plus it had extra magic hours that started at 7 am, which is VERY early for most vacationers. In my experience, if you arrive at the park early, you can usually crank through a lot of attractions in that first couple of hours the park is open. We had a fast pass for the most popular new attraction at Animal Kingdom, Flight of Passage, located in Pandora, but it wasn’t until early afternoon. We’d been anticipating the opening of Pandora for years, and I had heard really good things about this attraction, so I planned for us to go to Pandora as soon as we entered the park, and get into line for Flight of Passage.
My theory was that we’d have a short line, ride the attraction, check out Pandora, perhaps ride the other Pandora attraction, Na’vi River Journey, which is a boat ride, and which we were unable to get a Fast Pass for. (Note: When booking FastPass Plus reservations, Disney often groups the most popular rides in a separate “tier” and allows you to only book a FP+ for ONE of those attractions. In the case of AK, Flight of Passage and Na’vi River Journey are in their own tier, and you can only choose one of the two when making your FP+ reservations. You can choose two more FP+ reservations from ALL the other AK attractions when you are booking your initial three, but only one of the three will be able to come from the “Pandora” tier. For more information on FastPass Plus reservations, read here and here) I had gotten up at 5 am on the first day I could book our FastPass reservations for our vacation, but unfortunately, the earliest reservation I could get for Flight of Passage was 1:45 pm. I wasn’t too worried though. Based on my experience, I usually use FastPass+ reservations to book attractions I know we’ll want to ride a second time, and plan to get to the park early and take advantage of lighter crowds in the early hours to ride everything we want to ride and then hit our FastPass attractions later in the day.
In this case, however, my plan did not work as well as I’d hoped. Perhaps it was the combination of Pandora being new and SO popular and the first day of Thanksgiving week, but there were a GAZILLION people there for extra magic hours and EVERYONE headed straight for Flight of Passage. Now, I have to say this: I do not regret our day AT ALL. It didn’t work out like I planned, but we had a great time and LOVED everything we did. Having said that, if I had it to do again, I would make some different decisions—and I will definitely take what I learned into account when planning my next Animal Kingdom visit.
Pandora is BEAUTIFUL. If you’ve seen Avatar, I think you will have a greater appreciation for what they’ve done here, but even if you haven’t, it really is gorgeous, and looks like something not-of-this-world. A lot of people weren’t happy when Disney chose to partner with James Cameron and theme a “land” and attractions around Avatar, even though it was one of the highest grossing movies in history—it wasn’t a Disney property, and while I personally really enjoyed the movie, it had its flaws. Many also questioned how it “fit” with Animal Kingdom. If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll know that it has a very strong emphasis on protecting the natural environment and the symbiotic relationship between the natural world and all the species that inhabit it. (Granted the “natural world” in the movie is on a planet VERY far away…but the basic theme is inherently, take care of the planet…or you’ll destroy everything that is good and beautiful.) Since Animal Kingdom has such a strong emphasis on appreciating nature as well as conservation, the decision to put “Avatar” in Animal Kingdom always made sense to me personally, but I know there are many differing opinions on the topic. That said, there are at least two more Avatar movies coming, and if they do well—which I suspect, they will, I think Disney’s decision here will be validated and embraced. Even without the new films, though, it’s hard to deny the popularity of these attractions. I’ve been watching, and the stand-by lines for both the Pandora attractions pretty routinely stay ABOVE 2 hours. Even if you’re not an Avatar fan, I think this area of the park is really something to see. AND, it looks and feels very different at night than it does during the day, so it’s worth a second look if you visit during the day.
To cut to the chase, we were in line at Flight of Passage by 7:10 a.m. We waiting in line for more than two and a half hours. I’m not kidding when I tell you I have NEVER waited that long for an attraction in my life, and I specifically plan our trips around the concept of short lines and avoiding waiting longer than 30 minutes for anything. I’m not a patient person, and I really don’t like to stand in line. That said, it had been three years since our last trip. This is a new, very popular attraction. Also, the first hour, we had NO IDEA how long we’d be waiting, since we were in a line that was WAY outside the attraction. It was about 1 hour before we even reached the attraction entrance. By that time, we’d already invested so much time, we decided to stick it out. We took a lot of pictures, we chatted with the people around us. We had a lot of fun playing with the kids from the family behind us. And once we were inside the “mountain”, Disney’s theming helped keep things interesting, and while it didn’t make the wait seem short, it certainly wasn’t terrible. I’m glad we waited, because if we hadn’t, we would have only ridden once…with our FastPass Plus reservations that afternoon…and I definitely would have regretted that. This is an attraction that AS SOON AS IT WAS OVER, I wanted to ride again. It is, quite honestly, the best attraction I have ever ridden.
To provide some perspective, my favorite attraction is the Haunted Mansion. I am also a HUGE Pirates of the Caribbean fan….I love a good classic dark ride, and I am NOT a fan of motion simulators. I always ride Star Tours at least once with my husband. It’s a very cool attraction, and I love Star Wars, and I love seeing the new scenes every time we ride…BUT I don’t feel very good after that attraction. I tend to leave that ride a little queasy and it takes me a while to shake the feeling. I could NOT ride the old body wars attraction at Epcot—I tried once and it made me miserable. I am a girl who gets carsick if I ride in the back seat of a car. I have to take Dramamine to fly. I really struggle with motion sickness and it is no JOKE. Interestingly, Soarin’ doesn’t bother me at all—and I have heard that some people have issues with that one, but I do not have any issues with Soarin’.
I don’t know what it is about this ride, but it does NOT feel like a motion simulator. It feels more like Soarin’ to me than it does Star Tours. This attraction is trying to make you feel like you are riding your own banshee (a dragon-like flying animal from the Avatar movie), and it works on every level. The attraction “vehicle” looks a bit like a motorcycle to me, and it represents the banshee. Guests must be at least 44” tall to ride Flight of Passage, and I have heard that some guests have had issues fitting into the ride vehicle—I am plus size woman, and I did not have any issues fitting the vehicle. You get on the bike-like seat and scoot forward; then some padded surfaces come up behind you…as long as those can safely get into place, you can ride. I’ll admit to worrying about it while I was waiting in line; I didn’t want my husband to know I was concerned—and I knew if I couldn’t ride it, I was going to make sure he still did…BUT I did worry….Fortunately, in my case, there was nothing to worry about. I rode the ride quite comfortably. I will admit, I was much less stressed the second time, knowing that a) the ride would not make me feel sick and b) I had no issues “fitting” into the ride vehicle. This is really an amazing experience. Again, I compare it to Soarin’—you feel like you are riding a hang glider (well, I’ve never ridden a hang glider in real life, so I don’t know what that actually feels like, but on Soarin’ I feel like I’m flying, which I figure has got to be close, right?). On Flight of Passage, I had a similar feeling, like I was on a hang glider or something, flying, diving, climbing—it was beautiful, visually, and definitely evoked the look of Pandora in the Avatar movie. One word—EXHILARATING!!! I really, really, loved this attraction. And honestly felt it was worth EVERY MINUTE we waited for it. Of course, I was REALLY happy to have Fast Pass Plus reservations to ride it again later, without the wait 😉! Now that I’ve ridden it (twice), I really want to ride it again…but I don’t think I’ll ever wait that long for it again…but for the first ride? Totally worth it.
The only downside to spending the first 3 hours of our day in line for Flight of Passage is that it sort of jumbled our plan for the rest of the day. SO, we basically threw the original plan out the window, and focused on what was most important to us, and worked those things around our dining reservations, and the nighttime show we planned to attend. As a major planner, just “going with the flow” is sometimes difficult for me, but it worked pretty successfully on this day. It might have helped that I was pretty worn out by now, and really just wanted to SIT, haha.
So for this visit to Animal Kingdom, we spent a lot of time in Pandora (we visited again after dinner so we could see it in the dark…and it was GORGEOUS), visiting first thing in the morning, and again in the early afternoon for our FastPass Plus for Flight of Passage. We never were able to ride the other popular Pandora attraction, Na’vi River Journey. It’s a boat ride, and looks pretty great, but the lines stayed at 100+ minutes all day, and we just were NOT up for waiting in another extremely long ride. We also spent a lot of time just wandering around Pandora and LOOKING at it. They did a great job of making you feel like you are someplace ELSE. And of course, Flight of Passage empties into a giant gift shop with LOTS to look at. We also enjoyed the Na’vi Drum Ceremony.
We saw the Festival of the Lion King show (as always….amazing), we saw the Finding Nemo show (one of my favorite shows on Disney property), we had lunch with characters at Tusker House, dinner at Tiffins (new, I’ll be doing a review separately), we rode Everest and saw It’s Tough to be a Bug (one of Frank’s favorites).
Finally, we watched a couple iterations of the projections on the Tree of Life and watched the striking Rivers of Light nighttime water show.
I’m going to do separate posts about Rivers of Light and Tiffins, as those are both relatively new. Look for those in the next couple of weeks.
In the meantime, Happy Dreaming!!
Brooke