[Joe] Hi I'm Joe Rhode, Portfolio Creative Executive for Walt Disney Imagineering.
[Jon] Hi, I'm Jon Landau, producer of AVATAR and the AVATAR sequels
and a "wannabe" Imagineer.
[Joe] Well I am proud and happy to be celebrating the third anniversary of Pandora and so tickled that it's still going strong.
[Jon] I think it's been eight/nine year since we started talking about it.
[Joe] That’s right, the time since it opened is really just a fragment of the total amount of time we’ve spent together working on it.
[Jon] Once we learned what Animal Kingdom was, and why AVATAR was the right fit there, we were sold on a partnership with Disney.
[Joe] Animal Kingdom has a way of telling a story where it wants to be about you. Very quickly we were like
how do we turn this into an adventure for people to have and not just a revisitation of the adventures that the characters in the film had had.
You know, most people who have heard of Animal Kingdom know that it’s built around these three values.
intrinsic value of nature, psychological transformation of a person through extraordinary adventure, and a personal call to action.
These are the themes that underlie the film AVATAR.
[Jon] I always viewed the movie as a challenge to people to open their eyes and to understand that their actions
have an impact on the people around them and the world around them.
That’s what Animal Kingdom, I felt, challenged people to do. To open their eyes and look at our world differently and
to leave the theme park with a call to action that they can make a difference.
[Joe] The terrifying aspect for me early on was the fantastic nature of the property, I was writing these memos going “You guys are crazy! This is crazy! How are you going to do this?
How are you going to make gigantic mountains look like they’re floating? How are you going to have principal characters that are 12 feet tall?
How are you gonna have all these organic gigantic plants that glow? How are you even gonna do any of this stuff? Fantastic property, but you have to build it!
Jon and Lightstorm and James Cameron also are engineers, they understand how physical things get built. So when we would approach these challenges
we both were coming at it from it from the sense there’s a story thing we need to accomplish, there’s an illusion we need to accomplish,
and there’s a physical set of things that needs to get done to accomplish that.
[Jon] Early on, we made the decision collectively that we would count the land itself, as one of our attractions. And I think it truly is.
I think people can spend all day there. Nowhere else is there a theme park where you go outside and you have a canopy that is part of the storytelling that grounds you in the world.
Flight of passage, the technical achievement of immersing someone that is also then complemented by a thematic score that peaks and ebbs and flows
and highlights the emotions of that experience. That sense of of coming out of an attraction and still being in that same place that you entered
where you're looking up and floating mountains because technology has allowed us to do that. Nowhere else can do that and it affects you emotionally.
[Joe] My favorite time in this land is after the sun has set you can see everything you can see the whole land you can look deep off into the forest perspective and see distant floating mountains.
You can see all those plants, the mountains everything, but all those flowers are starting to glow
all that light is starting to come up you get the best of everything and it gives me a chance to enjoy it
it’s an extraordinary alchemy of forces coming together to make a place that is that potent.
but once it all comes together, it comes to life, and suddenly it’s drawing you in like it’s real
[Jon] To anyone who’s taken the time to watch, stay healthy, stay safe, we look forward to getting you back to Pandora.