Amusement Parks & Family Entertainment Amusement Parks

likens to being the eighth wonder
of the world. “The Tree of Life is
amazing. The body of the tree has
325 bas-relief that are viewable
from every angle,” said Sze. “As
you walk around the park, it is
often within your vision and you
will always be finding a new crustacean,
wild horse or butterfly
amongst its branches and bark.”
Surrounded by the park’s
Oasis, a collection of rocky grottos
teaming with brightly plumed
birds and anteaters, the architectured
Tree of Life hides one of Animal
Kingdom’s most interesting
and educational features, the 3D
animated story, “It’s Tough to be a
Bug.”
Designing Bugs Simultaneously
“We started with the notion
that bugs are the largest single
species of creatures; they make up
more than 80% of all the things
that move around the Earth,” said
Rothschild. “In developing the
story, we realized that most people
see bugs as being pests. So we
got together with a team of top
entomologists and asked them if
they had eight minutes in which
to tell a story about bugs, what
would be the three most important
things that could be said.”
The response that the WDI
team received was that without
bugs, we could not exist. The
entomologists wanted to see an
attraction that would make
human visitors, young and old,
not only look at bugs as either
beautiful like butterflies or amazing
in what they can do, like ants,
but also appreciated for their
incredible contributions to the
environment. In other words,
without the crawling Dung Beetle
that eats waste or the buzzing bee
that pollinates plants and crops,
we humans would have a hard
time surviving.
“Knowing the story that we
wanted to tell, we were also
aware of the fact that Pixar was
developing the movie A Bug’s Life,
starring Flik the Ant and Hopper
the Grasshopper,” said Rothschild.
“We thought if we could bring
those characters in to tell our story,
that would be great.”
At that time, Pixar was in
the early process of development
which presented some additional
challenges for the production
team. “The Disney organization
was getting the animatronics to
work with Pixar, who was doing
the animation of Flik and Hopper.
Rhythm and Hues, who won an
Academy Award for Babe, did all
the other bugs and backgrounds,”
said Rothschild. “We needed to
bring all those people together
with the Disney forces to create a
seamless experience for the audience
member. Only at this time,
Pixar was not very far in the
process. In fact, they did not have
one solid animation of Hopper
and we needed to begin building
this eight foot animated figure of
him for the attraction. I think this
might be the only time that the
attraction for a film was built
before the film was done. It made
it very interesting at times,” he
added.
For the Disney animatronics
team there were some very
special problems when creating
the moving figures to accent the
3D animated film. First, the animatronic
characters are seen by the
audience just before the film
begins. “Creating the animated
figure of Hopper was a big new
step in terms of the fact that he is
certainly the most sophisticated
figure we have done to date for a
couple of reasons, one being his
scale,” said Rothschild. “We are
talking about a grasshopper that is
eight feet tall and he has to move
like he does on film and in reallife.”
One of Animal Kingdom’s
most interesting and educational
features is the 3-D
animated story, “It’s Tough
to be a Bug.”
The challenge for the team
is that the audience sees him one
minute in the theater as an animatronic
and then thirty seconds later
animated on screen. The animatronic
figure needed to move and
walk in a manner so that the audience
would believe that Hopper
had moved from the stage to the
screen.
Flik presented similar challenges
in that the audience finds a
blue hued ant in the ceiling of the
theater (within the roots and substructure
of the Tree of Life, a very
appropriate place for an ant to
hang out) and then five seconds
later, he also walks into the film.
“The whole approach to the way
we developed the faces to articulate
when compared against the
animation film’s articulation was a
challenge which I think we delivered
well on,” said Rothschild.
Another bug for the
designers to work out was in placing
the mechanical workings of
the animatronics into the thin
limbs that are characteristic of an
insect, and then getting him to
take his place quickly, appearing
almost like magic before the audi-
ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE December 1998 11