The Disney Park Operator That Has Just Taken Over A Zoo

Disney’s theme parks are famous for being exported all over the world. However, its sprawling Walt Disney World complex in Orlando is home to one park which stands alone. At least for now.

That park is Disney’s Animal Kingdom, which has earned a special place in fans’ hearts for showcasing animals in natural settings without using cages. Instead, steep ridges and cleverly hidden trenches keep the animals apart from each other (and from visitors) in enclosures that are so vast the perimeters can’t be seen. They are set in flawless recreations of everything from the lush jungles of Asia to the arid deserts of Africa with a soaring artificial tree in the middle of the park.

Disney originally promoted Animal Kingdom with the phonetic pseudo-African marketing slogan “Nahtazu” to convey that it isn’t like a typical zoo thanks to its blend of education and excitement.

On the one hand, guests get a glimpse at the work that goes on behind the scenes and can talk to animal experts standing near the enclosures. On the other, Animal Kingdom has rides which attract thrill-seekers from all over the world. In keeping with the park’s original ethos, many of the rides are themed to nature and animals – both real and mythical. Amongst the highlights are an exhilarating safari through an artificial savannah, a rapids ride which sees guests chasing illegal loggers on a raft, and a rip-roaring roller coaster through a massive scale model of Mount Everest, culminating in an encounter with a yeti.

The park opened in 1998 and was one of the flagships of the so-called Disney Decade, a period of massive expansion for its theme parks. It was spearheaded by the company’s then chief executive Michael Eisner, comfortably the most significant figure in Disney’s modern era. In fact, if it wasn’t for Eisner, Disney quite possibly wouldn’t exist today.

The New York native joined Disney in 1984 after an eight-year stint as chief executive of Paramount where he launched ground-breaking movies like Saturday Night Fever, Beverly Hills Cop and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

At the time, Disney was a shadow of what it is today. Construction costs at Disney World had spiralled and attempts to make more modern movies had led to forgettable live-action films such as sci-fi flop The Black Hole and Condorman, starring Michael Crawford. Combined with a failure to focus on new animation, repeated re-releases of its back catalogue and declining quality standards at its theme parks, Disney was at risk.

“They lost the company basically by overspending on Walt Disney World,” explained Eisner at his Beverly Hills office in one of his many interviews with this author. “People don’t remember that but Walt, and particularly his brother, coming out of the Depression, were afraid of debt, so instead of using debt to build a pretty much over budget theme park in Florida, they used their equity. They sold. They lost control. They also way overspent and they didn’t have the attendance so between losing control, not having the attendance, not doing new animation, having very few live-action pictures, re-releasing the old library theatrically prior to home video, the company was at risk.”

He added that “it was being torn apart. It could have been over in six weeks. When we walked down Main Street the second day in Disneyland I realised what a valuable asset it was.” Eisner knew what was needed. “[George] Lucas, [Steven] Spielberg, us at Paramount, were making Disney-esque movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark and such,” he explained. “Disney movies were being made but not by Disney.”

A Magic Touch

With a wave of his magic wand, Eisner brought Disney back to its roots of hand-drawn animation yielding beloved classics like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King.

“We concentrated on reinvigorating animation, particularly musical animation,” explained Eisner. “We obviously made an early deal with Lucas for Star Tours and Raiders of the Lost Ark because we had no recent movies for which to put in the parks. We then had a lot of recent movies, whether it was the Roger Rabbits, or the Aladdins, or Beauty and the Beast or The Lion King or whatever.”

Eisner then commissioned rides based on them as well as merchandise to sell in the theme parks. Watching the movies made children want to visit the parks and while they were there, they bought the toys that reminded them of the visit when they got back home and encouraged them to return. Eisner doubled down on this spellbinding cycle by building more theme parks to boost Disney’s footprint in new markets. As he explained, “We went to Europe and Japan. We started negotiating in Hong Kong. We opened in Hong Kong. All that before I left. They have since gone to Shanghai,” which opened in 2016 and, until recently, was the studio’s latest park.

That only changed last year when Disney announced that its seventh resort will be built on Abu Dhabi’s Yas Island after Eisner’s successor, Bob Iger, signed a deal with government-backed theme park manager Miral. In just the past 15 years Miral has become the leading operator in the industry, alongside Disney and Universal, thanks to its trailblazing boss Mohamed Al Zaabi and his supremely-skilled team.

I have reported extensively on Al Zaabi’s magic formula which has made Miral an industry leader. As he explained to me, at the heart of it is his philosophy that the “next experience will be better than the previous one. That’s what we do always at Miral. We keep pushing the bar.” It has a lot in common with Eisner’s approach which he describes as “the strategy of excellence. The strategy of whatever you do, do it really well.”

In order to ensure that Disneyland Paris was the most immersive theme park ever built, Eisner amassed a team of Disney’s finest designers, known as Imagineers due to their imaginative use of engineering. They included the late Eddie Sotto, who meticulously created the park’s turn-of-the-century themed Main Street, Tom Morris, the architect of its majestic castle, and Jim Shull, one of the most talented artists to have ever worked for Imagineering

The clearest evidence they succeeded is the fact that the Disneyland Paris is still Europe’s most-visited theme park even though a new attraction hasn’t been built there for more than three decades. As this report revealed, launching Disneyland Paris may actually be the studio’s best-ever deal.

Eisner’s effect didn’t just extend to expansion. “We improved the food at Walt Disney World which was terrible in 1984. We built 30,000 hotel rooms, high-quality hotels, which they didn’t have – they had two. We built a studio tour, we built Animal Kingdom.”

In recent years the park has shifted more towards showcasing mythical creatures than actual animals. The catalyst for this was the opening in 2017 of the groundbreaking Pandora – The World of Avatar land. The Imagineers excelled themselves by recreating the floating mountains from the Avatar films and developing a simulated ride on the banshees that appear in them. As Djuan Rivers, the park’s vice president at the time, explained to my colleague, the elaborate environment makes visitors “realize that nature is the predominant force in Pandora. The same as in the movie.”

This connection to the park’s original theme has become increasingly tenuous since then with the next additions being rides themed to Indiana Jones and computer animated Oscar-winner Encanto. Neither attraction will feature live animals which has angered fans and stands in stark contrast to Miral’s approach.

A New Wave

As I have reported, in 2023 Miral swung open the doors to SeaWorld Abu Dhabi, which quickly made a splash. It is the world’s largest indoor marine-life theme park and, like Animal Kingdom’s enclosures, its tanks are so big that not only can’t guests see the edges of them, but they often stretch above, below and to the sides of the walkways.

The Tropical Ocean pool looks like a decent-sized lake from above and visitors can see inside it from different levels as the park is several stories high. Guests enter by going up escalators as the bulk of the park is actually on the first floor. Pathways wind downwards around the Tropical Ocean pool with windows cut into the cave-like walls so that guests can see into it from below. There’s even a restaurant which is set under the tank so diners can look up at the fish swimming above.

It is deliberately designed so that the animals don’t have to be in certain areas of the tank to be seen. This gives them more freedom and makes the environment more natural. There’s even an aviary above one part of the pool so the fish inside it can interact with the colorful tropical birds above. Remarkably, the pool is a minnow compared to what lies next door.

The highlight of SeaWorld Abu Dhabi is found in Endless Ocean, the world’s largest single-tank multi-species marine life aquarium. More than 68,000 creatures live in the 25 million liters of water in Endless Ocean which is meant to be themed to an exploration base on the seabed but actually resembles a space station.

The area seems to be made for Instagram with massive windows onto the watery world. One is a soaring circular aperture that looks like a huge lens. There are also perspex tubes through the tank, bubbles you can step into inside the tank, transparent walls and mock submarines lined with domed viewports. The tank immerses visitors in so many ways that it gives the impression the fish are on the outside looking in at the guests rather than the reverse.

Like Animal Kingdom, it is filled with high-tech attractions, including one which is perhaps the most cutting-edge in the world. As I have reported, its seats rotate around the inside rim of a 360 degree LED sphere in time to swirling scenes.

Both parks share the same high standards of care and are members of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) as well as the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA). Again like Animal Kingdom, SeaWorld Abu Dhabi gives guests a glimpse into the work that goes on behind the scenes courtesy of an Animal Care Center accessible from the breathtaking main hub with its wraparound LED screen. What’s more, the park even has a dedicated research and rescue team to help local marine life in distress and ensure that it flourishes.

However, the park also gives guests a glimpse into the work that goes on behind the scenes courtesy of an Animal Care Center accessible from the breathtaking main hub with its wraparound LED screen. What’s more, SeaWorld Abu Dhabi even has a dedicated research and rescue team to help local marine life in distress and ensure that it flourishes.

SeaWorld Abu Dhabi is one of four parks operated by Miral on Yas Island with the others being Ferrari World, Warner Bros. World and Yas Waterworld, which is themed to the Arabian tradition of pearl-diving. However, that’s not the end of the story.

A Real-Life Oasis

In addition to running theme parks, Miral also operates iconic cultural attractions in Abu Dhabi including the Qasr Al Watan palace as this report explained. Another is Al Ain Zoo which, at a massive 990 acres, is the biggest in the Middle East. It is also one of the oldest as it was founded in 1968 by Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the then Ruler of Abu Dhabi.

Set at the foot of a mountain range in an actual oasis in the desert of Al Ain, a city in the state of Abu Dhabi, the zoo looks like a traditional Arabian fort and is home to more than 4,000 animals including gazelles, Amur tigers, giraffes, white rhinos, monkeys and lemurs. It reopened for the winter season yesterday with new attractions including Glow After Dark, a night time trail of colorful illuminated animal installations and performances by characters dressed in fluorescent outfits like those found in Disney’s Main Street Electrical Parade.

Miral began collaborating with the zoo last year but tickets and experiences were only added to Miral’s system in May so it is a new addition. It could prove to be a significant one.

As this report revealed, before the onset of the Middle East war, construction trackers put the opening of the Disney Abu Dhabi park at the first quarter of 2033. It has been billed as being Disney’s most technologically advanced park but that’s not the only reason it is taking so long to develop. It is also Disney’s first waterfront resort and the concept art shows its crystalline castle sitting on the sandy shore of Yas Island. In contrast, Al Ain Zoo is surrounded by free space almost as far as the eye can see.

There is no indication or evidence of any plans to give the zoo a Disney makeover but there is little doubt that dropping in attractions from Animal Kingdom would be a whole lot easier and quicker than developing a completely new type of waterfront park. Many of the attractions and animals in Animal Kingdom are better suited to the Middle East environment than the one in Orlando and areas like the savannah would be much more convincing there. Crucially, Al Ain Zoo is much more of a clean slate than the Yas Island parks which all have distinctive and deeply embedded existing themes so would be harder to re-theme.

That’s not to say that the Yas Island Disney park shouldn’t be built because it’s more difficult to develop. Disney has made its name by pulling off what seems to be impossible so that’s no reason not to proceed but why not develop a second Abu Dhabi outpost away from the hustle and bustle of the city? Disney’s Animal Kingdom Arabia would enable twin center vacations and would be the ultimate draw for Al Ain. That seems to be aligned with the objective of Abu Dhabi’s theme park strategy which is economic diversification. Abu Dhabi’s fortunes have been built on fossil fuels but as reserves have begun to dry up it has poured the profits from them into developing a leisure infrastructure to tempt tourists and drive a new source of revenue.

Miral has identified the potential in Al Ain Zoo and in February appointed Dennis Nagel as its Senior Director of Zoological Operations and Conservation. Nagel is a tremendously talented 20 year industry expert who was previously Zoo Development Specialist at Thailand’s prestigious Safari World Group. He describes his current role as “leading zoological operations and conservation for Miral Experiences, shaping the transformation of Al Ain Zoo, the UAE’s national zoo, into one of the world’s leading zoological institutions through strategic master planning, collection development, operational leadership, board-level engagement, and global institutional outreach.”

It would particularly benefit Al Ain as it is 100 miles from downtown Abu Dhabi and has far fewer hotels. That may not sound like ideal infrastructure to support a Disney park but the same could have been said of Orlando, which was largely swamp land before the Mouse came to town, or Anaheim in California, where Disneyland was built on 160 acres of orange groves.

The bigger hurdle could be getting there as it currently takes around one and a half hours to drive to Al Ain from Abu Dhabi or neighboring Dubai. However, over the next five to ten years both Abu Dhabi and Dubai are due to be connected to Al Ain by a new high-speed rail network as part of the plan to drive tourism and diversify the economy. Building a Disney park at the end of that line would give tourists the ultimate incentive to hop on the train. As the saying goes, if you build it, they will come.

Additional research by Chris Sylt