Why I LIKE Moana -
1. It's better than nothing.
2. It looks like it will a good place to get out of the direct sun and heat and check the app for my next LL
3. I am so looking forward to the walls coming down.
4. It's better than nothing - oh did I list this already?
The whole spine project has been a massive waste of time and money.
The end result will not be substantially different than what was there before.
But the combination of wanting something new and for the walls to come down ASAP has built up this image in people's mind of something truly worth the wait.
It can't just be filler after so many years of off and on construction and promotion. So it will be amazing, even if it's not.
My overarching views of this project: I don't have to schlep all the way to the center fountains to get to any of the pavilions on that side. The Seas, which was my favorite pavilions pre-Nemo, is no longer a dead end. This alone is a plus. A dead building is gone. Plus.
There's been a lot of discussion on Disney failing to keep up with the the future and shuttering things rather than trying. But not one person has mentioned the biggest thing to create the situation we're in now: the failure of the sponsorship model. EPCOT Center was built on that. Now, either it's gone or the few that have hung on pushed for change to get the most bang for their buck. It's one thing with the large pavilions, and you can say that they should just pour out the money to take care of the job themselves, but with the plaza buildings, they were never going to do that and were never supposed to do it. All they had for sure was Coke.
So, the building was dead. Anything is a plus.
We always talk about having smaller-scale attractions to offset the big E-Tickets. Yet Disney creates a smaller-level attraction and...?
EPCOT is full of water features. People bemoaned the ponds that used to be in the hub and were cemented over. Now, there's something put back.
This is just another of the many water features already in EPCOT. It's a more... animated one. It's the dancing fountains (and the backward waterfall) by Imagination raised to a much higher level. Add some edutainment (Water Cycle + Moana references), and it's a great fit for EPCOT.
People complain that the company only focuses on E-tickets or making D-tickets that they try to pass off as E-tickets. They're making a neat little walkthrough. It will probably look cool. I like water. It's replacing literally nothing and will undo the way the hub has been paved over or left to overgrow.
Consider how you might feel if they'd built Journey of Water here:
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Then consider that this is basically what they're doing, only at EPCOT. Sure, it's close to some areas where you could argue that Moana fits (Adventureland in my example, or, more tenuously, The Seas at EPCOT), and you could argue that the space was underutilized before. But having it encroach into an established area the way it is throws off larger dynamics of the park. That they're essentially dead-ending the walkthrough so that it won't be accessible from the central plaza is all the worse for these dynamics, and makes the space more confusing and irregular than it was before.
There is a distinct difference between replacing open green area, chopping out an iconic entrance, and hiding away a place that used to have a nice vista view of it and replacing a dead, empty building that actively blocked view of things with something that has a smaller footprint, opens the space up, and provides
MORE access. Not to mention that despite them both being hubs, the hubs of the two parks are functionally different.
Add to this the fact that both Moana the movie and Moana the character are deserving of larger representation within the resort and it compounds the issue. Why is EPCOT the park where Disney takes massive properties and bunts with them? Frozen, Moana, Nemo . . . these movies made nearly $3 Billion between them, and not including the given sequels. Why do we get a 2 C Tickets and an B Ticket attraction out of them? Especially when two of those properties are crying out to be in Magic Kingdom instead?
Why is Moana sitting in the shadow of Spaceship Earth when she should very obviously be in the shade of the Adventureland palms? It just smacks of poor planning and under-investment, which seem to be emblematic of the current direction of the resort and people take issue with that. It feels like damage control because that's what it is. EPCOT has been the most visible case of this. The park has been failing because Disney refuses to invest properly, and their solution is to . . . refuse to invest properly. At least Cosmic Rewind had a more than healthy budget, though after riding it myself I'll be darned if I could tell you where that money went.
Had they build this in the place that made the most thematic sense, or had they invested seriously in one of their biggest new Princess characters, or had they developed an attraction that didn't feel wholly tacked on to the space that already exists around it, and if they didn't have a suspiciously lousy track record of not doing all these things despite the overwhelming wealth and success of the resort enterprise . . . perhaps we wouldn't have so much to decry.
I don't understand why people are complaining about something over nothing. Should there be more? That would be nice. A Polynesian pavilion with a larger attraction? You'd have people complaining of them misrepresenting culture like Frozen in Norway and people who protested the film to begin with. Adventureland fits well, but it's one of the most cramped corners of the Magic Kingdom. There's a space behind the Crystal Palace that I don't know the use of which probably could hold... Journey of Water Featuring Moana. You could rethemed the carpets and the Agrabah area to fit in with the Tiki Room, but a spinner actually feels like less than what we're getting.
I have no illusions about this being an E-ticket. I haven't seen Disney push it. I haven't seen the people looking forward to this hyping it up. Maybe some people elsewhere, but here it's mostly been people with reasonable expectations and detractors yelling at those people with reasonable expectations that they're blindly hyping it up as a huge feature.
The location thematically for a water cycle lesson is perfect because the water cycle is the meeting point between the Seas and the Land.
It does, but almost no one cares about riding half of them. That wasn't an issue in the park's prime.
Regardless, I'm not mad about the water thing. Would it have made more sense at DAK? Yeah, probably. Could it be in a better location at EPCOT? Yeah, probably. Is it at least something pretty/relatively educational (hopefully) that's better than a festival center or a Starbucks? Definitely.
The water cycle being illustrated makes absolutely no sense in Animal Kingdom. If you tried to shoehorn it in, Lion King is the correct IP for it. Moana has little to do with animals besides two domesticated sidekicks, a shapeshifting human, and one big ol' crap. It's Animal Kingdom style, which is something that's nice to have and the wealth of such an experience should be spread elsewhere. And if you're going to do Polynesian animal stuff, someone already mentioned that Nemo is the play.
He's far from a Disney critic. Right now, he's defending a bunch of plants and fountains masquerading as an attraction. Oh well, at least we're not getting a Moana bathroom. Although that would be more on-theme than Tangled, given its IP-appropriate "water features"
.
People who don't see the difference between "You don't constantly hate on something" and "You defend it to the death and make excuses to try to fool yourself" don't have a place in rational conversation.
