Mousekingdom Blog

Ciao from Hong Kong guys,

so here I am on a business trip which brought me, after a 23 hour flight from Italy, to Australia last week and which I arranged with a return stop over, for business and leisure in Hong Kong!

Why Hong Kong you ask (hey one has to live right? ;-)?

Do you have any idea of what a Disney theme park nerd like yours truly has to give himself as a “weenie” (there goes the first Disney word of the day ) to get his behinds all the other way to the other hemisphere???

Ok ok, enough corny jokes for one single first blog entry (hey, they do have “Jungle river cruise” over here and those corny jokes, told by devoted Chinese- English sort of speaking cast members- got me right to the bones) lets get to the “meat” of the thing here; my personal (if anybody is interested) impression of Hong Kong Disneyland!

Ehm…well…..how to put it….

Let’s try like this; you might have heard that Hong Kong Disneyland was a cheap park, one with was made just to get money out of the Hong Kong people or government who would never have known better as most of them had never seen another Disney theme park.

You might have heard that everything was built on the cheap, that the theming of the place was totally missing and that they simply carbon copied the cheapest attractions, building, shows or rides that where available and shoehorned them in penny bay to get a themepark (and the Disney presence) in China- the world’s most populated country!

…well…lets say this for a start; Hong Kong Disneyland is a beautiful theme park!

It might not be as “over imagineered” as Disneyland Paris (probably the most amazing Magic Kingdom style park ever to be built) or as jaw dropping as Tokyo DisneySeas. Heck it might not even be “visionary” or “courageous” (read: not quite what you expect from Disney but still perfect and most of all a bold try) as EPCOT Center or Animal Kingdom, but yet it is probably the most “Walt Disney’s Disneyland” theme park which you will ever get to see!

No attraction is done on the cheap, no areas are un-themed and most of all the place has a heart and a sole which just shows that the Imaginers designing and building the place where desperately in love with the “quaint and cute” feeling which Walt was able to give them in his Anaheim theme park.

Don’t get me wrong; I still think that Tony Baxter’s work in Paris is stunning, that he simply took the Disneyland concept to such levels which only a pure Imagineering genius like himself could have ever done, but yet as soon as I entered the gates and crossed the bridge entering in town square my heart started pounding and my brains gave the immediate message “Andrea, this is Walt’s 1955 uncontaminated Disneyland”.

You might not like the idea of it but don’t believe what you read on the web; HKDL has such a heart, such a feel, such a warm feeling to it that you will fall in love with the place no matter how biased or against it you might have been!

But what really works, for me, is not so much the park onto itself but the resort as a whole; the two hotels are stunning and (by European standards) disgustingly cheap! (Let’s only say that the Disneyland hotel will cost you no more than the Cheyenne and is impressive and good as Disney’s best hotels- Floridan, Miracosta etc) but most of all the place manages to achieve what Paris probably never has (and unfortunately might never) achieved; ie complete isolation from the outside world!

The place is 15 minutes from Hong Kong; on of the most overcrowded and “unrelaxed” cities you might ever see and yet it feels like a world onto it’s own!

In the end, as much as PR will say “the park is modelled after the original Disneyland”, Disney might just have created, willingly or unwillingly, the same “isolation” and “separate world feeling” which you get when you are in Orlando!
Finally some more pics…but they don’t do justice to the mood and feel of the place.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 21st, 2006 at 6:18 pm and is filed under Disney Theme Parks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.