Jungle Book Show at Animal Kingdom

We saw the Jungle Book Show at Animal Kingdom on Sunday. My first word of advice? Look at the Animal Kingdom map and understand where the entry for Fast Pass is versus where the entry for general admission is. The Asia side of the river is designed for all the Fast Pass members. If you go to the wrong side of the theater? You'll have a long ridiculous long hike to get to the correct side.

When we arrived, the theater was mostly full. The cast members were discouraging attendees by telling them that there was standing room only space remaining. That turned out not to be true.

It takes a long time to fill the theater. To fill the time, they have entertainers that get the crowd to dance and sing and do the wave. The theater is incredibly large, so, they have one entertainer for each of the two sections, and they banter back and forth. Click here to see some of it.

The show begins with floats coming down the river containing singers and dancers. They form into floating stages in front of the theater.  The problem is the center stage faces down river, not the stands where people are sitting. And it was so far away from where we were sitting, we couldn't tell what was happening on the center stage.

Additional dancers come to a dozen different platforms on the shore such that we had six dancers on the platform in front of us. The dancer danced Indian style dances to music from the Jungle Book. For the most part, this was the entire show for us: watching these dancers. I'll explain more in a moment.

Water canons fire off in the distance to provide a projection screen similar to Fantasia in Hollywood Studios. These projection screens are gigantic. Perhaps it was our angle, but, I couldn't make out anything that was being projected. Supposedly, they were projecting scenes from the movie, but, I couldn't tell.

At one point during the show, additional floats come down stream with fire dancers on board. The fire dancers were very good. At the end of the song, the fire dancer's floats went back up stream.

Now, back to the dancers. For the most part, we just watched the dancers in front of us. My wife thought it was like watching a high school dance recital, but I thought the dancers were very good. The show is billed as magical and stuff, not as a dance show, so, that aspect was disappointing. My children didn't know the Jungle Book story, so, they were completely lost and didn't know what was going on. In retrospect, I should have explained the story to them in advance.

There are fireworks. Two low flairs are shot at the end of the show. That's it.

Would I go see this show again? Probably not. To see a video of the show, click here.