WDW Magazine April 2016 - Disney's Hollywood Studios | Page 111

to do a park that was about a subject so different from any subject that had led to a park before.
And the look and the feel of Animal Kingdom is very much determined by the idea that this
subject of live animals is more realistic, more political, more real world, more involved with
negotiation, more involved with outside people from outside of the theme park business than
what we had done before.
Gavin - Yes, incredible project and incredible park now. And now you are still working on that park?
Joe - Well, Animal Kingdom has gone forever. So really, from the very first morning that anybody
sat in a room to talk about Animal Kingdom until this morning–the meeting I just came from– I’ve
been working on Animal Kingdom. Partly because the skills necessary to do Animal Kingdom
become very specific, because of all those other things, all the design rules that are related to the
animals. And that sort of bleeds into the whole park: the realism of the park, the research of the
park, the way in which the stories in the park are a little bit more unresolved, the behaviors a little
bit unscripted. That all becomes this sort of learned pattern of design, a pattern of design that
we Animal Kingdom people are particularly trained in. I meet every Friday morning, and we go
over Animal Kingdom issues with the SQS team and with the designers. I’ve been working on
Animal Kingdom forever since it opened.
Gavin - And you’re still creative director?
Joe - Still creative director over Animal Kingdom. But then, Animal Kingdom becomes kind of
the epicenter of other ideas that are kind of like it somehow. Like Aulani is not an animal park.
But it is involved in very high levels of research into a subject that is not one of our intellectual
properties or creative properties; and involves negotiation with people who are not only not part
of Disney but not even part of our industry–that being indigenous Hawaiians; and involves a
level of texture and design that is more real than the typical, idealized situations you see at the
theme park, and on and on and on. And therefore, falls inside of a kind of an Animal Kingdom
portfolio type of work, and therefore, comes to myself and my portfolio. It happens like that. So
it’s more loosely related in that it’s going to involve a lot of research, it’s going to involve a lot of
negotiation; it doesn’t involve a lot of company-owned intellectual property, you know. It is
related to the outside real world. Those things tend to come my direction as jobs.
Gavin - Well you know, there are a lot of reasons why [Disney decided to built Aulani]. We had a
lot of guest information, a lot of internal information that our own demographic people, our own
people, our own guest would love to see us do something in Hawaii. But the truth is land in Hawaii
is very, very precious. It’s hard to get land in Hawaii. And the land you want is beach front property.
And when you invest in beach front property, there’s a whole trigger mechanism of the scale of
what you have to build to make your investment back, because the property’s expensive.