Finding Disappointment

Single Rider Tour 2008 — part seven in a series

Now that my vacation is officially over, I can go back and review a few key things from my trip in a bit more detail. First up, the long awaited, much anticipated Finding Nemo-based ride at Disneyland.

It's easy to say that Pixar became Disney's saviour for animated films. Unfortunately it seems that scaled-back budgets will continue to make for flat ride experiences in the US parks. For proof of this, compare the Winnie the Pooh ride in Tokyo's Disneyland versus any of the US parks. I can't help but wonder how the Finding Nemo ride at Disneyland in Anaheim would have benefited if the Tokyo Land Management company (the actual owners of the Toyko park) running the project.

Starting off my list of disappointments, the wait. The wait for this ride was the longest I would find in the entire park on my visit. Part of this could be that they were only running two subs, which apparently can only travel in tandem, and with the show running as long as it does, the limited number of seats, and the slow load/unload process, it's easy to see why my wait was 40 minutes even though the line itself looked short.

Next up, the subs. Now I'm all for recycling, but here was a chance to make improvements to the original subs rather than just sprucing them up with a new paint job. Other than the difficult and slow load/unload process, the biggest issue with the subs is the size of the viewing portholes. The experience becomes completely compartmentalized, and one you experience by yourself rather than as a family or group. I found this to be very unsatisfying, and a little un-Disney when looking at Disney's modern thoughts on the ride experience. The portholes are so small that if you blink, you've probably missed something in the rich detail in the ride. I'm sure it came down to budget when they were refurbishing the subs. The subs would have benefited by having the tiny portholes replaced by larger viewing windows. Such windows allow the experience to be shared by several people at once, and make it that much more meaningful to them.

My other complaint was that the scenes had so many set breaks that again, if you blinked, you missed part of the story being told. Again, larger portholes would have made for a better storying telling experience.

The animatronics and animation were, more or less, successfully integrated into the ride, though the animatronics seemed a little under animated when compared to the animated elements of the ride and that created a noticeable separation between storytelling elements, and that took me out of the story. This again is a situation where Disney used to be top dog; their animatronics were second to none. Some of these animatronics looked like the belonged in Knotts Berry Farm or any other generic theme park.

I'm hoping that John Lassiter can help the penny-pinchers in the Anaheim park realize that their cost-cutting ways detract from the guest experience and hamper the story telling process&helli;and that's why Pixar has been so successful; to them, story is king.