Word: savannas
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...will take you on a safari through "the Serengeti grassland system," and as one fellow steps into the open-air vehicle, he asks, "Is it air-conditioned?" No, mate, this is reality. Real crocodiles lazing primordially below that rickety bridge. Actual cheetahs motoring their stretch-limo bodies across the savanna. Genuine loamy smell over there near the warthog. (Hakuna matata, guys--it's only nature's perfume...
...animals' behavior is not so much altered as stage-managed. To the visitor, that lion and lioness sunbathing on Pride Rock look close enough...well, close enough to eat you. But they are separated from the tram by an unseen gulch too wide for the beasts to straddle. The savanna where they roam was once drab cow pasture, but every weed and rut has been meticulously contoured and art-directed to resemble an African plain. Disney's Imagineers did a convincing makeover. When Franklin Sonn, the South African ambassador to the U.S., saw the place last month, he said, "This...
Among Mitraud's current projects is a $1.2 million W.W.F. plan to preserve the 1.5 million-sq-km area of Brazilian savanna known as the cerrado. (The less than $1-an-acre budget shows how badly outmatched many environmental actions still are.) The cerrado is one of the world's most diverse swaths of nature, a kind of National Geographic theme park where howler monkeys and hyacinth macaws dance and sing from buriti palms and vast treeless grasslands. But in the past 30 years, more than half its original vegetation has been chewed away--and almost 75% will be gone...
...brim with vibrant, African-carnival colors; the big action sequences, like a wildebeest stampede conveyed by wheels and masks, dazzle with their allusive originality. Some of the most striking images are the simplest. Women with grass headdresses stand in a row and sway to manifest wind in the African savanna. When the lionesses grieve over the death of their King, Mufasa, they pull ribbons of fabric from their eyes to suggest tears...
...because of a cable foul-up. Taymor deals with such matters each day in a series of notes to crew members. "It felt very dark as the grass came in," she told stage manager Jeff Lee one afternoon, referring to the women wearing grass headdresses to represent the African savanna. A burst of unexpected applause from the audience covered up a key musical passage. Timon wasn't lighted properly in the waterfall scene. The wildebeest costumes were shedding...