Zootopia: Better Zoogether is now playing at Animal Kingdom, and we’ve had a couple of chances to check out Walt Disney World’s newest attraction. This review covers the good, bad & ugly of the 4D show, how it compares to what it replaced as well as other similar attractions, thematic integrity with the bigger picture of DAK, and more.
In case you’re unfamiliar with it, Zootopia: Better Zoogether is an all-new 4D show inside the Tree of Life Theater, replacing It’s Tough to Be a Bug. That was an original Animal Kingdom attraction that closed earlier this year to make way for work on this.
The concept for Zootopia: Better Zoogether has guests visiting the different biomes you only glimpse in the film, traveling along with Judy Hopps, Nick Wilde and other characters. Zootopia: Better Together draws some of its inspiration from Zootopia 2, which is Disney’s blockbuster holiday film.
When you migrate over to the Tree of Life Theater, you’ll find you arrived just in time to the main stage for the “Zoogether Day” festivities with familiar furry faces and new friends, like Heidi Howler – a slick-talking wolf who hosts the Zoogether Day LIVE! broadcast with excitement, energy, and quite a bit of howling.
Zoogether Day, a celebration of unity amongst the diverse biomes across the city, features special performances such as ice-skating spectaculars from the heart of Tundratown, synchronized swimming direct from Marsh Market, and tiny mouse drone shows soaring over Little Rodentia. Everything culminates in a musical finale by superstar Gazelle, which we’ll see from the livestream watch party.
What Zootopia: Better Zoogether Replaced
Zootopia: Better Zoogether replaces It’s Tough to Be a Bug, which invited guests to become honorary insects and don a pair of “bug eye” glasses. The show was hosted by Flik from A Bug’s Life, and was an ‘edutainment’ attraction that combined the Pixar film with facts about how insects survive in the wild.
During the show, dodge flying quills from a tarantula, feel a harmless spray from a soldier termite and sniff the putrid “defense stench” from a stink bug. It’s Tough to Be a Bug culminated in Hopper, the grasshopper villain, interrupting the demonstration with a goal of exterminating the audience.
It’s Tough to Be a Bug was a strong show. It broke the fourth wall, contained clever puns and sharp writing, working on multiple levels. It also was a mixed media presentation, with 3D movie effects, Audio-Animatronics figures, and in-theater 4D surprises. Suffice to say, there was a reason why It’s Tough to Be a Bug–an opening day Animal Kingdom attraction that had been performed since April 1998–wasn’t retired until 2025.
At the same time, it’s fair to say that It’s Tough to Be a Bug had a fantastic run by 3D show standards.
It’s time to be exterminated had come, even though it held up shockingly well for a film from 1998. Like MuppetVision, it hadn’t aged all that much. At the same time, it also wasn’t a classic. Sure, there were some guests who mourned its loss, but it just wasn’t the same. It’s probably fair to say that the Walt Disney World fan consensus would be that these shows should be rotated out more often.
It’s also fair to say that there were elements of It’s Tough to Be a Bug that were off-putting for many guests. I’m not quite sure whether I should admit this, but seeing the terrified faces and hearing the screams puts a smile on my face. Grown adults cowering in fear at the in-theater special effects is a delight. (Okay, that sounds a little crazy.) It was like the legacy of Alien Encounter living on!
It’s also worth noting that many repeat visitors skip It’s Tough to Be a Bug due to entomophobia. I would hazard a guess that many first-timers don’t enjoy the experience all that much, either. Then there are the parents of small children who went in expecting a family-friendly film and left with terrified children thanks to the startling effects and dark segment with Hopper.
In my younger and more carefree childless Disney Adult days, I might’ve offered some flippant response to that, quoting Calvin’s dad and saying being scared by bugs “builds character.”
As a parent who accidentally scared his toddler with a ride that put an adorable monkey into dark and precarious situations (oops), I now know better. Recovery from those experiences can be a challenge, to say the least!
Does Zootopia: Better Zoogether Fit Animal Kingdom’s Theme?
The above starts to touch on why I’m a sympathetic audience to this show. But I’ll take that one further as we switch gears and address Zootopia’s thematic appropriateness for Animal Kingdom.
This is important to a lot of Walt Disney World fans because Animal Kingdom is arguably the last thematically pure park at Walt Disney World. EPCOT has fallen. Who even knows what’s up with Disney’s Hollywood “Studios.” Magic Kingdom is still great, but it’s more malleable in the first place; even so, plenty of compromises have been made.
There have been a couple of close calls, but legendary Imagineer and “guardian” of Animal Kingdom, Joe Rohde, always managed to work his magic and make alien additions feel like perfect fits.
Joe Rohde previously pushed back against fan requests for Zootopia land in Animal Kingdom. According to Rohde, Zootopia’s “animals are proxies for humans and human issues rather than animals in their own right facing animal-related issues. We try to enforce the ‘no pants’ rule. Classic characters excepted.”
I’m not one to question Joe Rohde, as the Disney Legend is a genius who is responsible for some of the best instances of making lemonade out of lemons. But I’d hazard a guess if you asked him about Avatar in Animal Kingdom back in August 2011, he would’ve laughed.
And if you asked him about Zootopia today, he’d likely change his tune. As outspoken as Rohde is, he’s also very diplomatic. When he had the political capital to keep Zootopia out of DAK, he used it. But that day passed when he retired.
In any case, we wrote that Animal Kingdom is “arguably” thematically pure because the flip side is that it arguably is not.
When Pandora – World of Avatar was first announced, the fan reaction was absolutely scathing. Animal Kingdom purists were livid that an inconsequential blockbuster movie about blue alien sex cats would be added to their beloved zoological theme park.
It’s hard to believe this today since the clear consensus on Pandora is resoundingly positive. But trust me on this, as someone who deep in the fan forum trenches in the early 2010s. It was a hot topic for like 5 years, and not even a controversial one; consensus then was the exact opposite of today.
For our part, we were never in the vehemently anti-Avatar camp. You should never bet against James Cameron or Joe Rohde. By and large, Rohde worked his magic and made Pandora work. The world-building is fantastic, as are the framing devices and storytelling to weave it into Animal Kingdom.
Fans have largely quieted down about Pandora not fitting Animal Kingdom, just as they have Cosmic Rewind not fitting EPCOT. This is arguably less about Imagineering doing a great job with storytelling and more about Imagineering doing a great job on the substance.
Building world-class attractions or wow-inducing lands has a way of quieting the criticism. I do not personally believe that Pandora is a perfect fit for Animal Kingdom, but honestly, I don’t care that much because I love the land and the value it adds to the park as a whole. Perspectives might change if Pandora were a carnival of spinners (Dino-Rama: Avatar Edition), but with a brilliant backstory.
Nevertheless, I would hazard a guess that if you polled casual first-timers after their visits to Animal Kingdom about which land stood out as having the least to do with the spirit of the park, it would be Pandora. If you zoom out and ignore all that work to make lemonade out of lemons, and just do a basic ‘smell test’ assessment, it’s a more difficult sell.
Zootopia is basically the exact opposite. Diehard Walt Disney World fans know that Animal Kingdom revolves around the balance and harmony between the human world and the animal kingdom. On that basis, Zootopia actually isn’t perfect for the park. But first-timers and even more casual guests just see animals. Zootopia is a movie featuring a lot of different animals, Animal Kingdom is the animal park at Walt Disney World. Superficial as it might be, it’s a fit for most guests.
I’m more or less at the same point with Zootopia as I was with Avatar, or other properties for that matter. Honestly, part of that is Animal Kingdom never resonating as much for me as did EPCOT Center.
Another part is accepting that times change, as have priorities and consumer preferences. Just as there’s no going back to the original ‘edutainment’ EPCOT Center, so too is there no going back to Beastly Kingdom or other original DAK expansion plans. And Animal Kingdom badly needs expansion. Letting good be the enemy of perfect is somewhat silly 35+ years later. Compromises are in order.
One of those compromises is recognizing that Zootopia is a marquee IP, and it was going to go somewhere at Walt Disney World. Under the original version of the 10-year plan from 2022, the land that was built at Shanghai Disneyland was slated for Animal Kingdom (along with Moana).
With the return of Bruce Vaughn to Imagineering, and perhaps some consulting with Joe Rohde, we instead ended up with the plan for Tropical Americas featuring Encanto and Indiana Jones Adventure. Also not thematically perfect, but two more ‘close enough’ fits for me that can work with the right storytelling.
In other words, to the extent that Imagineering tried to make lemonade out of lemons with Zootopia, they did so by tucking the IP away inside the Tree of Life as opposed to with the substance of the show. I was optimistic that a focus on the diverse biomes, which was part of the original announcement, meant there’d be a nominal effort to tie Better Zoogether into the theme of Animal Kingdom.
No such luck. Zootopia: Better Zoogether could just as easily be in Disney’s Hollywood Studios. In fact, if you told me that this was originally slated for Animation Courtyard or literally any other theater on property, I wouldn’t be surprised. This show could go literally anywhere.
Better Zoogether is a suboptimal fit for Animal Kingdom and there’s no two ways about that, but it’s still close enough for me. Not in an absolute or idealistic sense, but as someone who lives in the real world where this was an inevitability. I’d much rather have Zootopia hidden in Tree of Life than its own land in Animal Kingdom.
That metropolis of anthropomorphic animals would’ve been more at odds with the bigger picture of the park, and it would’ve been jarring going from the lush environments and symbiosis of humans and nature to the concrete jungle of the manmade world…but built by animals, I guess.
In a nutshell, what I’m saying is that Zootopia: Better Zoogether strikes me as a good compromise solution to giving a massive IP a presence in Animal Kingdom without fundamentally sacrifices to the park’s identity. It’s not perfect, but it’s tucked away and will pass the smell test for most guests. I’ll take that as a win.
Zootopia: Better Zoogether Show Review
We spent so much time focusing on thematic integrity because that’s the more interesting conversation than the substance of the show. To the extent that there’s a story in Zootopia: Better Zoogether, it’s basically that someone has sabotaged Zoogether Day, with Nick and Judy trying to get to the bottom of who did it.
In actuality, the plot is threadbare. The story really only exists as an excuse to advance the action, which there’s a lot of! You would be forgiven if you had no idea why anything that’s happening is happening, or even if you missed the big reveal that the [spoiler redacted] is actually [spoiler redacted]. (Not even sure that’s a spoiler, but rather, a blink and you’ll miss it moment.)
You’re watching this all unfold via satellite, but you’re also sorta part of the action. It’s framed as a passive experience, but in execution, it’s very much an active one. There’s no point in trying to make any sense of this, reconciling the plot with the presentation or untangling what’s happening; I’m not in the mood for a headache, so I won’t bother.
For the most part, Zootopia: Better Zoogether is just an attraction that has a lot of stuff happening, everywhere, all at once. Zoogether Day is a party, and that’s basically what this show is. You see a lot of locations and race past a wide-variety of characters in the span of ~9 minutes.
The show is very chaotic and frenetic, with fast cuts and scenery changes for no discernible reason.
In this sense, Zootopia: Better Zoogether reminded me of [articles I’ve read about] popular YouTube videos aimed at kids. How they are basically nonstop dopamine hits. I will spare you my rant about short form content and modern attention spans, my perspectives on which are probably obvious to anyone reading this 3,000 word review as opposed to watching it in 23-second TikTok form.
The action in Zootopia: Better Zoogether is unrelenting and downright disorienting. It’s clear I’m not the target audience, and that this show is aimed squarely at children. This is unlike Zootopia, the movie, which appeals to both children and adults, working on different levels.
This saddens me a little. It’s long been the case that many Hollywood creatives felt that theme parks were beneath them. I would say an “inferior” art form, but honestly, I don’t think they viewed theme parks as art in the first place.
Thankfully, the parks had the first generation of Imagineers, and then the subsequent generation with folks like Rohde, who did take them very seriously. Even if there was a ‘lemonade out of lemon’ project dictated by some IP mandate from on high, the Rohdes of Walt Disney Imagineering could be trusted to do their very best to make it work.
Zootopia: Better Zoogether, like the Beauty and the Beast Sing-Along before it, feels like an abandonment of that. Instead of crafting a show that could work for kids and adults on different levels (Frozen Sing-Along is a good recent-ish example of this done well), this show was made solely for small children.
This isn’t to say that adults won’t be able to enjoy Zootopia: Better Zoogether.
To the contrary, it is mindless fun. A good ole fashioned assault on the senses. I could see doing this midday after a long morning in Animal Kingdom, right as fatigue is starting to set in. This will jolt you right awake–probably a better pick-me-up than Starbucks!
The show packs a punch, and one that hits hard thanks to crisp, modern visuals. There’s also something to be said for the 4D effects, which are admittedly a hoot. They add some mild thrills and fun, giving the audience a good laugh on a couple of occasions. The shows stoops to a lot of blatant “cheap 3D tricks,” as another far superior show once put it, but hey, it works.
I also like the original song, and appreciate both that and (a portion of) “Try Everything.” The finale finish with just the latter would’ve been the safer route, and while it would’ve been nice to have the full rendition of that, I’m a fan of theme park originals.
The utilization of the Clawhauser Audio Animatronics figure throughout, as opposed to during specific segments, is also interesting. Reasonable minds may differ on this, but I like how he’s sort of always there, reacting. It adds a bit of balance to the otherwise hectic presentation.
Honestly, I think this would’ve been even more fun with a Flash the Sloth Audio Animatronics figure moving his arms around slowly in delayed reaction to what was happening. By the end of the show, he’d be done with the first scene. Maybe.
In the end, I didn’t actively dislike Zootopia: Better Zoogether, so there’s that (something that I can’t say about some other recent shows). It’s vapid, but it’s also cute. It’s fun. It checks some boxes with beloved characters and music.
At the same time, it’s completely forgettable and reminds me more of a Netflix blockbuster (which I swear are engineered to be memoryholed one day after viewing) or than it does Zootopia. It could also just as easily be 4D film at Universal–if you swap out the Zootopia characters for Shrek or the Minions, this easily passes as one of their “high octane” productions.
It’s unfortunate that Better Zoogether doesn’t capture the heart or best qualities of Zootopia, or that anyone over the age of 12 will need to turn their brain off to enjoy this, but it is enjoyable once you do that. Zootopia: Better Zoogether is okay. Passable.
How Zootopia: Better Zoogether Compares to Other Shows
We haven’t updated our Rankings of All 87 Attractions at Walt Disney World since the beginning of the year and, suffice to say, a lot has changed since. Regardless, here are a few rankings from that:
87. Beauty and the Beast Sing-Along (Worst Attraction at Walt Disney World)
85. Disney & Pixar Short Film Festival
54. Kali River Rapids (Weakest Ride at Animal Kingdom post Dino-Rama)
53. It’s Tough To Be A Bug
48. Turtle Talk with Crush
47. Mickey’s PhilharMagic (Modern Masterpiece)
36. MuppetVision 3D (Highest Rated 4D/3D Show)
Note that these rankings attempt to be as objective as possible, but that’s impossible–and potentially an exercise in futility. There’s a 100% chance you will not agree with every single one of our rankings–but there’s also a 100% chance that no one would agree with every single one of your rankings.
You don’t need to agree with my specific rankings above, anyway. They’re more for contextualizing how I feel, more generally, about 3D/4D films. I have written repeatedly that these are ‘low ceiling’ attractions, which is to say that even at their very best, they’re among the weakest category of attractions at Walt Disney World.
That should be evidenced by the fact that MuppetVision 3D–one of my all-time favorite attractions the loss of which I’ve lamented in countless posts–couldn’t crack the top 30. Same goes for Mickey’s PhilharMagic and Turtle Talk. Both of those are, in my view, exceptional attractions. That they barely slip into the top 50 speaks more to this category and the competition than their quality.
In any case, if I were to rank Zootopia: Better Zoogether on that list (and I will soon since it was the last new 2025 opening), it’d be around #73. That’s one spot behind Frozen Sing-Along, two behind Journey into Imagination, and other only-okay dark rides.
Zootopia: Better Zoogether ranks ahead of Alien Swirling Saucers and–critical to this review–all of the films that debuted close-together at Walt Disney World in late 2019 and early 2020. In their defense, those were mostly filler not intended to be on par with a more ambitious 4D film.
The problem is that all three other parks at Walt Disney World can get away with–and even need more filler. Animal Kingdom is becoming more skippable until Tropical Americas, and Better Zoogether doesn’t fix that problem. Animal Kingdom is a park badly needing meat, not sweets.
If you’re looking for the silver lining here, Zootopia: Better Zoogether is light years better than Beauty and the Beast Sing-Along. That film is like bad fanfic that is actively awful–it makes my blood boil just thinking about it. Zootopia: Better Zoogether is also better than Fast & Furious Supercharged or CommuniCore Hall & Plaza, and didn’t require enduring 5 years of a giant dirt pit to get! Sometimes, you’ve gotta savor the small victories.
Zootopia: Better Zoogether may not be good, but at least “zoorst” in this case is not actively offensive or downright bad. It’s just inferior to Walt Disney World’s best 4D films from a different era, not the hit that Animal Kingdom needed, and completely forgettable.
That’s disappointing, as we really enjoy Zootopia, were more or less okay with its tucked-away inclusion in Animal Kingdom, and looking forward to a much-needed addition to the park. But on the plus side, perhaps that adds to its repeatability–doubt I’ll remember anything that happened the next time I’m dragged to see the show.
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Your Thoughts
Have you seen this show? What do you think of Zootopia: Better Zoogether? How would you rate/rank it relative to other shows at Walt Disney World? Excited to experience this during your Christmas-time trip to Walt Disney World? Do you agree or disagree with our review? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!
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