While on safari

Kilimanjaro Safaris is a central element not on to this land, but also to the backstory of Harambe as an important aspect of the evolution of this place. Our story holds that the Harambe Wildlife Reserve was once a game-hunting reserve, but at some point in the early 1970s – when issues of conservation were coming to the fore – the townspeople made a conscious decision to change the usage of the land. Now it is a preservation zone, with animals available only for photo safaris via guided tours. It was clearly a big decision for the town, with significant potential economic impact, but the collective viewpoint had come around to the point that they felt this was a necessary step.
-The Imagineers, The Imagineering Field Guide to Disney’s Animal Kingdom p. 68









Across the river is Harambe, a recreation of a present-day village in eastern Africa that’s on the edge of a large preserve. After passing through the main street, guests can board a safari vehicle at the huge old baobab for a look at animals. In Harambe we’ll give guests a sense of Africa today. The safari’s story is about the challenges Africans face, especially with regard to poaching and population pressures.
-Melody Malmberg, The Making of Disney’s Animal Kingdom Theme Park p. 68









We’re not trying to present you with the reality of what it is, you’re supposed to be inside a story, inside a story about being in a safari camp in Africa. So, you know, we would do the renderings, expressing kind of where we wanted the story to go. Another problem that we came up against, which is kind of interesting, and a lot of these pictures I don’t know have been seen before, they’re just kind of stuff I pulled from the file. But, so we knew, unlike a scene in a ride, where you can direct people to look over here, we knew two things. One, you can look where ever you please, and number two, we will never know where the focal object is going to be, which is an animal. The animal could be anywhere and you could look anywhere. So, when we did our storyboards we every thirty seconds, we drew a line on the ride track, estimated the average speed of the vehicle, made a dot every thirty seconds, and we drew these hundred and eighty degree storyboards that we would hold up in front of our faces, like this, and go, ‘Okay, that’s at, you know, second number seven-hundred, we’re here seeing something like this, wildebeests might all be over here, they might all be over here, but they’re gonna be here in this scene. Okay, pick up the next one,’ you know. And we’d bend it around our head and go, ‘Alright, this is the next scene, ‘ so we could get some sense of what is this going to be like to progress through this environment, because back then there wasn’t like, you couldn’t do a digital ride-through or something, no such thing existed.
-Joe Rohde, 22 April 2008