Pandora – The World of Avatar
Pandora – The World of Avatar is a themed land at Disney's Animal Kingdom in the Walt Disney World Resort, Florida. Opened on May 27, 2017, it recreates the Valley of Mo'ara on Pandora, the fictional moon from James Cameron's Avatar films, across some 12 acres on the park's western side. The land replaced Camp Minnie-Mickey and occupies ground that had originally been set aside for Beastly Kingdom, the unrealised land of mythical creatures planned for the park's opening — a role Pandora in effect fulfilled two decades later, giving Animal Kingdom its land of imaginary animals.
Development
Disney announced the project on September 20, 2011, after reaching a licensing agreement with Cameron and his company Lightstorm Entertainment for the theme park rights to Avatar (2009), then the highest-grossing film ever released. Animal Kingdom was chosen because the film's conservation themes matched the park's own. Design work was led by Imagineer Joe Rohde, the park's original lead designer, working closely with Cameron and producer Jon Landau.
Camp Minnie-Mickey closed on January 6, 2014, and construction began days later, on January 10. The build took more than three years and was widely reported as the largest expansion in the park's history. Pandora opened on May 27, 2017, and its arrival, together with new evening entertainment elsewhere in the park, completed Animal Kingdom's transition from a park that closed at dusk into one operating well into the night.
Setting and design
The land is set a generation after the conflict between humans and the Na'vi depicted in the films. In its backstory, the mining company RDA has left the valley, and the tour company Alpha Centauri Expeditions now brings visitors to see a landscape recovering under Na'vi stewardship. No ride signage in the conventional sense marks the attractions; instead, woven reed-style artwork hints at what lies ahead.
The dominant feature is a range of floating mountains, the tallest rising about 156 feet, held up by steel supports concealed within rockwork and planting and shaped with forced perspective to seem far larger. Their forms were inspired in part by the sandstone pillars of Zhangjiajie in China, which had themselves influenced the film's design. Beneath them, paths wind through invented Pandoran plant life mixed with real planting, streams and waterfalls. After dark, much of the land glows: bioluminescent effects in the planting and pathways make the valley read as a different place at night from the one seen by day.
Attractions
- Avatar Flight of Passage — the land's principal attraction, a flying theatre ride in which riders are linked, through the fiction of an avatar, to a mountain banshee (ikran) for a flight over the valley, the ocean and other Pandoran landscapes. Its queue passes through caves, former RDA facilities and a laboratory containing a full-size Na'vi figure in a fluid-filled tank. It has consistently been among the most in-demand rides at Walt Disney World.
- Na'vi River Journey — a slow boat ride along a Pandoran river into a bioluminescent rainforest populated by audio-animatronic animals and plants. The journey ends at the Shaman of Songs, a Na'vi figure roughly ten feet tall whose fluid movement made her one of the most technically advanced audio-animatronics Disney had produced at the time.
Dining and shopping
Satu'li Canteen, presented as a former RDA mess hall now operated by Alpha Centauri Expeditions, is the land's main restaurant and was notable on opening for popularising build-your-own grain and protein bowls in a theme park setting, as well as steamed pods. Pongu Pongu, a drinks stand whose name is glossed in-story as "party party" in Na'vi, serves frozen and alcoholic drinks. Windtraders, the land's shop, sells Na'vi-inspired goods and hosts a station where visitors can be matched with a small banshee puppet to adopt.