“It’s Tough To Be A Bug” closed at Disney’s Animal Kingdom several months ago to be replaced with a Zootopia show called Zootopia: Better Zoogether. We were lucky enough to attend a preview of this new attraction ahead of its November 7th debut, so let’s unpack what works and what doesn’t in the first fully-new 3-D theater show at a Disney theme park in 22 years.
Watch Tom’s Honest Review of Zootopia Better Zoogether
The “It’s Tough to be a Bug” attraction was a 3D show hosted inside the Tree of Life Theater at Animal Kingdom starting when the park opened on April 22, 1998. This was an interesting thing because the movie A Bug’s Life had not yet been released and wouldn’t be until November. The other interesting thing was that the animation for It’s Tough to be a Bug was not done by Pixar (the animation studio that created the movie), as they didn’t have the bandwidth or the staffing to do so.
From its debut, Bugs was a divisive attraction. In the great tradition of Walt Disney Imagineering, there were several technological achievements and first-time effects. However, since it was a show based on one of mankind’s greatest fears, there were many who were turned off or frightened by the show. With this, it wasn’t hard to imagine that someday there would be a replacement. In the early 2010s, it felt likely that a DisneyNature short film or something of the sort might go in the space, but alas, that never materialized.
There were a lot of very creative things about It’s Tough to be a Bug. Those effects in your seat were a brand new thing. The Hopper audio-animatronic character was one of, if not the most complicated figure built to that date. The Flick animatronic was no slouch either. It was a very effects-heavy show, probably because its was one of those that had to follow MuppetVision3-D and the tremendous and game-changing success that was in 3-D attractions.
Despite the movie marketing and the cartoony fun, “It’s Tough to be a Bug” was undoubtedly true to the story and the mission statement of Disney’s Animal Kingdom, as shared on the park’s dedication plaque…
Welcome to a kingdom of animals… real, ancient and imagined: a kingdom ruled by lions, dinosaurs and dragons; a kingdom of balance, harmony and survival; a kingdom we enter to share in the wonder, gaze at the beauty, thrill at the drama, and learn.
Dedicated this 22nd day of April, 1998
Michael D. Eisner
“It’s Tough to Be a Bug” was one of those great 1990s Disney edutainment shows where the audience didn’t feel like they were learning while they watched it, but they were. You learned all sorts of facts about bugs, how bugs are important to our lives and the final message that we should live in harmony with them because they make our world “one honey of a place”. This is all true to the above dedication of the park.
And so we switch gears towards Zootopia. As many of you may remember, when Disney first showed their “blue sky” ideas for DinoLand at Animal Kingdom, the original concept was that the area around the DINOSAUR attraction would become the mammalian metropolis of Zootopia. Now, that would mean that the DINOSAUR ride would be reimagined as a Zootopia ride, probably with a similar story and effects to the Zootopia: Hot Pursuit attraction that opened in Shanghai Disneyland, just with a different ride system. Around the ride would be the city of Zootopia, which you could explore, and I was very excited about. That was before I had been to Shanghai to see it, the land wasn’t open just yet. Once I finally got to Shanghai to see the world’s first Zootopia land, I was blown away. Imagineering did the most tremendous job bringing that world to life, and I think it is a great shame Disney World will not see that. It can be argues this would not git into Animal Kingdom either, but it certainly would fit as well as experiences that celebrate the relationship between Disney animation and our natural world.
In that “blu sky” plan, the other half of the land (Diorama area) was going to be Moana. Plans included a Moana boat ride and a re-themed spinner (TriceraTop Spin). Just months later, Disney announced it would not go forward with plans to split DinoLand into two areas (Moana and Zootopia), opting to build the Tropical Americas, which does make more sense in the grand scheme of the park because it is a region, and a lot of the lands in the park are regions or continents. You have Asia and Africa, and now you will have the Tropical Americas, so three regions of our planet.
When that plan shifted, I’m sure there were Disney executives and others who said, “Hey, we really want to get Zootopia into Walt Disney World and we really want to get it into Animal Kingdom since It’s an animal movie.” Sure, Zootopia is a film about animals, so one might think that naturally fits, but you would need to finesse it a little bit.
I have argued in the past that I thought the Zootopia land would have worked because it is a celebration of man’s curiosity with animals and the need for us to humanize them in our art. Certainly the history of the Disney company, the very roots of the company are steeped in animating animal creatures. It’s a very important part of who the Walt Disney Company is and who Walt Disney was. I think you could have made that work. This show takes zero steps to make it function within its park.
Disney’s Animal Kingdom has reached a crossroads that all the secondary Disney parks have come to. The castle parks (Magic Kingdom, Disneyland, etc.) have had their thematic integrity problems within their individual lands, but the secondary parks have all have major identity crises (with not even DisneySea free of criticism thanks to Fantasy Springs). All of those secondary Disney theme parks at the Disney resorts around the world began with one vision and one mission statement and lost that along the way.
The first secondary park was EPCOT Center in 1982. The front of that park is kind of Tomorrowland in permanence. That early Tomorrowland was a World’s Fair that had to constantly be updated. Similarly, EPCOT constantly had this need to update, and as you reached different periods of time, sensibilities changed. As you got into the 1990s, there was more of an edginess and even kitschiness (self-referential humor and overt kookiness) that I think EPCOT had to embrace. Through all of that though, the edutainment stayed. Test Track was very different from World of Motion, but Test Track still taught you something. You learned all about how cars are tested out before they let them out of the factory and out onto the road. It’s educational. It doesn’t have the breadth of topics that World of Motion had, but it’s still educational. It’s even true of even things like Mission Space–not anyone’s favorite attraction, really, but still, it’s in theme and fits the park’s mission statement.
Not long after that, Disney’s Hollywood Studios went through its identity crisis and honestly, it still is. It went from a park that shows you the magic of how movies, television, and music are made, to a park that just celebrates those arts, sometimes in a very roundabout way with immersive themed lands.
And now, Disney’s Animal Kingdom has reached that crossroads as well. The park has two directions to move forward in: one where we continue stories of conservation with an edutainment theme, and another where the park purely contains intellectual properties that fit an animal or nature theme.
Joe Rohde was the lead Imagineer who brought Disney’s Animal Kingdom to life, and he has kept the vision alive. Even though he exited the company a couple of years ago, he’s come back in an advisory role to help guide the next generation of Imagineers in updating the park. Joe has been very outspoken about how Zootopia wouldn’t fit in Animal Kingdom, and that’s likely a big reason why management was talked out of making a whole land for it. That being said, it wasn’t enough for the company not to try to shoehorn it in somewhere else. While Imagineering seemed to win the fight for thematic integrity and is moving forward with Tropical Americas, the park icon has been given away in the trade-off.
No matter how you felt about “It’s Tough to be a Bug”, it fit in Animal Kingdom again because there was an edutainment aspect and they fit where they were. They’re under a tree, in the dirt, in the ground, and in the bark of the tree, too. It made perfect sense.
I loved that idea of the large creatures on this planet are big and bold on the Tree of Life and you notice you can’t miss the, but then to honor the smallest creatures that play such a vital role, you had to look deeper to find them. This wasn’t only true of the attraction, but they even gave the park icon the story that it was an ant who planted a seed that became the entire Tree of Life. It was one of the more creative and charming backstories to ever be envisioned at Walt Disney Imagineering.
When it was announced that Zootopia would be taking over the Tree of Life, I was immediately uneasy, despite how much I love the film and the characters. The original explanation made it sound like it was going to be a show about biomes, and that’s when I scratched my head and thought, “there’s going to be two films at Disney World, particularly about biomes?” Of course, Awesome Planet, which debuted at The Land pavilion in EPCOT a couple of years ago, is about biomes as well. However, at some point, things clearly shifted and it was decided to make a 9-minute Zootopia short that in no way connected to conservation or the real animal world.
I vividly remember the lead-up to the opening of Pandora: The World of Avatar from 2011 to 2017, we (the fans) were unbearable. There was no one who could see how a land about an alien planet could fit in at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. We were all proven wrong in 2017 when Pandora opened. Not only was it phenomenal in quality, but it actually somehow made perfect sense. The conservation themes were overt, but they didn’t take you out of the story you were in. It was the perfect combination of thrill and wonder and excitement, but also edutainment. Again, when it’s done right, you don’t even know you’re learning.
Now, let’s start specifically talking about Zootopia: Better Zoogether as an attraction. The new marquee is big, bright, and bold, a departure from the former attraction in the space to make sure guests don’t miss it.
As for the queue, the whole outdoor queue is pretty much untouched, except for the addition of more temporary netting. I believe that a branch or two fell off the Tree of Life a couple years ago, and since then there’s been some concern that branches might keep falling. Similar to what we saw at the Swiss Family Treehouse, the lawyers must’ve mandated safety netting to keep guests safe. Sadly, this ruins the atmosphere around the park icon. Walking through those gardens, exploring the space around the Tree is true Disney magic. Imagineers built a truly incredible structure, a park icon that you get to have the most intimate interactions with. You very often end up alone on those weird little winding paths and you get these great intimate moments where it’s just you and the Tree, and a waterfall, and nature, and its very powerful. The queue has a bit of that, but it’s really obscured by all this netting and scaffolding that’s still hanging around. Hopefully, this can be addressed and taken away soon.
In the final part of the outdoor queue, we finally get something related to Zootopia. There are these posters that explain the history of Zootopia: how they started as very much like our animal world. It started with animals in the wild and there were predators and prey, but then eventually they evolved and started a society where anyone could be anything, and they built the Tree of Life in honor of it.
This undermines the entire idea of this park. These few posters alone decimate everything this park stands for. This is like some weird dystopian future where humans died and all animals live together in harmony and do not eat each other.
This park is about the natural order and the beauty in that. I don’t know if anyone has ever seen this slightly successful arthouse film called The Lion King, but there’s a song in it called The Circle of Life. Some animals eat other animals. That’s how this works, and this park tells you that is a beautiful thing. Suddenly, we have a show where the message instead is “someday animals will be better than that and they’ll just live together in harmony kids.”
Unless somehow there is an evolution of these animals coming, some of them do have to eat the other creatures to live. Also, where are the birds, apes, reptiles, and fish? I know Zootopia 2 is not out yet, so maybe there is some explanation about fish, and at the very least it seems there will be one about reptiles, but a show about unity in the Animal Kingdom where entire large sects of animals are ignored seems really odd.
The approach to this attraction is a giant tree with 325 different animals on it and then the show underneath features a city where many of these animals ARE NOT ALLOWED? The show about animal unity is kind of hypocritical when the city of Zootopia doesn’t actually allow many types of animals to live there.
As we talk about the actual show inside, I want to separate the quality of the attraction from the thematic integrity. The thematic integrity is at zero. It makes no sense whatsoever. However, the quality of attraction is not too bad, but it’s not great either.
There’s a lot of beautiful propping that they clearly spent money on in the interior waiting space. There are some things they didn’t, like the giant ball of bug feces, the dung ball, that they turned into a dirt unity ball that all the animals have put their handprint on.
The new propping includes the tubes that Little Rodentia residents will travel through, tiny mouse bathrooms, and even tiny mouse Disney theme park garbage cans. There are some very clever posters throughout celebrating the acts that you’ll see in the Zoogether Day celebration. However, I don’t know that I’ve ever had a love/hate relationship the way I do with the center display, which is the Pawdora display, a play on Disney’s good partner Pandora Jewelry. Now, this attraction takes place during a Zootopia-wide festival celebrating when their entire community came together in peace. Of course, everything is monetized now, including peace festivals, so there would be a real world there would be merchandise for the event. The purist in me wants to take a baseball bat to this display because it makes me so angry. It is insane that there is a fake merchandise display inside the waiting area of the park icon of the theme park about nature and conservation. There is a queue with a fake jewelry display for animals to buy jewelry in their weird dystopian civilization. That being said, the displays look so good and get a nice chuckle from guests, so it clearly works, if only on that level. All of the propping in the queue is beautiful and none of it looks cheap, even if it doesn’t;t belong here.
At this point, guests have grabbed their CarrotVision glasses (orange version of MuppetVision 3D and Mickey’s Philharmonic glasses) and it’s time to enter the show. Apparently, there is a poster that establishes that the CarrotVision glasses are so powerful that they make you feel like you’re really in a different place. I missed this poster and any audio cues that might exist that explain this, but either way, it’s really lazy storytelling.
The first thing I want to talk about is that Disney is no longer allowing Cast Members to give safety spiels. This also recently happened when the Country Bear Musical Jamberee opened at Magic Kingdom. I love that they do it, but Melvin, Buff, and Max have taken the job away from the Cast Member as well. I don’t have a problem with this, it’s just an interesting evolution of the role of the cast in theater shows.
The show itself makes guests the live studio audience at the Zoogether Day Celebration, which will go “live via satellite” to performances all around Zootopia. In the story though, we are not physically traveling anywhere outside the Tree. This illusion is shattered as we jump from location to location, with in-theater effects and such taking place, even though we are sitting back in the studio.
As far as in-theater effects, there are very simple lighting changes, blasts of air, bubbles, smoke, and the effect they kept from the previous show of creatures traveling under your seat. There are some major effects from the previous show that are neglected, as nothing lowers from the ceiling (which has its holes haphazardly sealed with flat, one-color coverings) and the back pokers are deactivated.
The Benjamin Clawhauser audio-animatronic appears very early on in the show, and yes, ti is indexical to the one you’ll find at Shanghai Disneyland ( minus his costuming). It’s an impressive figure, but still miles behind a fully-functional Hopper as far as the number of moving parts.
“It’s Tough to be a Bug” had many firsts for a 3D show, just as MuppetVision 3D before it. What makes me the most sad about Zootopia: Better Zoogether is that there is not one single item or effect that is a first. There was no time or money spent on creating something that’s never been done before, and in some cases, there are some downgrades in the theater. I certainly expected something to lower from the ceiling, especially once I saw a poster advertising that there would be mice piloting drones in the show. I often think the rule of theme parks is that the new attraction has to be as good as or better than what came before it, and I don’t know that I fully believe that Better Zoogther is either. At the very least, it will be enjoyed by more families and scare fewer guests (and sell more merchandise), and that will very likely work for Disney.
Throughout the show, there are constant reminders that you’re watching a 3D movie. The characters are animated in a way to play to this, including a slow-motion moment with dancing animals. These are the kind of cheap tricks we expect from these types of shows at other parks, and the kind that MuppetVision poked a ton of fun at. It’s weird to see Disney fall into this trap 24 years after that attraction and make for some very gimmicky moments that just feel like they were done to trigger effects, as opposed to be things that further the story first and foremost.
The narrative fully derails when Nick Wilde and Judy Hops show up to solve a crime, and begin talking to Clawhauser as if they’re in the room with him. The problem is not that they can hear each other, it’s that they look directly at him even though they aren’t in the same room. There’s no monitor in that direction for them to see into the theater, so… WHAT ARE THEY LOOKING AT??? Of course there are solutions to this, the time just wasn’t spent to think of or implement it.
On the positive side, the animation in the film is beautiful, in crisp high definition and there are a few genuinely funny moments, but they would have been funny if this was a short on Disney+ and not a theme park attraction. My issue is that the story is purely a crime-solving story. We get that in both films in the series, did we really need that in a film inside the Tree of Life? It works well for a “high-speed” chase ride at Shanghai Disneyland, but it doesn’t work so well in a 3D theater show. These characters are funny in many situations; it didn’t have to be a “whodunnit”.
Zootopia: Better Zoogether is a perfectly serviceable 3D show. It’s a little below the Disney writing and quality standards of show given all of the plot holes and problems discussed above, but that’s not going to matter to a lot of people. It should matter and I expect it does if you’ve made it this far in the review.
Everything we’ve been taught by the Imagineers who’ve come before is that all these little things do matter. There are definitely guests that won’t care, but there’s plenty of us who do and have come to expect the most from The Walt Disney Company above their competitors. Still, plenty of guests are going to watch a 9-minute film with their kids featuring Zootopia. They’re going to have a laugh or two and it’s going to be perfectly fine. This is not going to be some enduring classic, though. This is not going to be some beloved thing that’s going to stand the test of time, but for the time being, for the next 5 to 10 years, 15 years, it will do well enough. People like Zootopia and It’s one of my favorite movies of all time, which is maybe why I’m a little harsh on this and was hoping for a little more, but if we take away the thematic integrity argument and focus just on the attraction as it its own thing, it’s fine. It’s just fine. It’s not bad. It’s not great. It falls somewhere in the middle.
The thematic integrity violations for me are unforgivable. The original musical finale number doesn’t even try to bring it back around to some theme that fits the park. We are just having a 9-minute short version of Zootopia that’s feels like it would have been on Disney+ and it’s good enough. It’s funny, it’s cute, and it’s quick. It It is what it is, I just wish it was more.
As I said earlier, we are at this crossroads where Animal Kingdom is going to suffer the same fate as EPCOT and Disney’s Hollywood Studios if we don’t fight for the thematic integrity. I know there’s people who still like EPCOT or even love the current iteration. Most people still like Disney’s Hollywood Studios and maybe you’re not old enough to know some of the things you’re missing or you know how cool the park was when it all was coherent and cohesive, but we’ve lost a lot. I know I’m not the only person out there who misses when these parks all fit together.
A very talented former Imagineer presented the term “theme park mixtape” when discussing the current state of Walt Disney World and he said it very angrily because in the 1980s and 90s and 2000s, they put so much emphasis on does something belong in a land and how do we make it belong in a land. Saying that the Tree of Life is in Zootopia doesn’t achieve this, especially when you lazily arrive at that conclusion without the proper reasoning. It’s rather disappointing to see them put this attraction where they did and not actually try to make sense of it all. I expect more and I think most Disney fans do.
Are you looking forward to the New Zootopia Better Zoogether show at Disney’s Animal Kingdom? Let us know in the comments and on social media.
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