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Possibly the greatest achievement at Walt Disney World during the Michael Eisner era was Disney’s Animal Kingdom. It’s a beautiful blend of a theme park and zoo that expands on both concepts. We can joke about the “NAHTAZU” ad campaign, but it’s also true! Well before the park was announced, Joe Rohde put together a small team of Imagineers to develop concepts for the project. His first team member was Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards, an artist who worked with him on projects like Pleasure Island.
Zofia is my guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast to talk about her work on creating Disney’s Animal Kingdom. We also talk about her background growing up in Poland under communist rule. Zofia arrived in the United States and did not expect to stay. She started working on films and television and created hand props for Pee Wee’s Playhouse. A chance interview led her to join Imagineering in 1987. She connected with Rohde and joined the Animal Kingdom project two years later.
I loved hearing Zofia’s stories about what it was like during the early days developing the park’s concepts. She was the overall concept and show designer for Conservation Station (now Rafiki’s Planet Watch). Zofia talks about her interest in conservation, which has inspired more recent projects beyond Disney. She has so many cool stories from her time at Disney, including the first research trip to Africa. We conclude the show by talking about some of Zofia’s more recent work. She’s an accomplished artist and has an incredible career beyond her role at Disney.
Show Notes: Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards
Explore Zofia’s artwork on her official website at zofiah.com.
Check out Zofia’s work on the Elephants of the Earth at the Los Angeles Zoo in 2011.
Support The Tomorrow Society Podcast through a one-time contribution and buy me a Dole Whip!
Transcript
Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards: The night before the animals were let out for the first time for the African Savannah, I walked it with Kelly Forte, my producer, and it was one of the most impossibly beautiful environments I’ve ever seen. It was just absolutely spectacular. And having been in Africa, I was blown away how Florida was able to look like that.
Dan Heaton: That was Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards, a former Disney Imagineer who’s here to talk about the development of Disney’s Animal Kingdom. You’re listening to the Tomorrow Society Podcast.
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Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 116 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. Hope you’re all doing as well as can be given the situation right now. I am super excited about this week’s guest, Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards. She joined Walt Disney Imagineering in 1987 and worked there for a little over 12 years. She was a senior concept designer on Pleasure Island and on Disney’s Animal Kingdom.
Going back to the start of that park around 1990 with Joe Rohde’s small group that he put together to come up with ideas, sit in a small little trailer and basically put together note cards, visit Africa, did so many things that ultimately led to the park we have today. And beyond that, Zofia also has a really interesting story growing up in Communist Poland and then ultimately moving to the United States, not expecting to stay and working in the entertainment industry, and then by chance ending up working at Imagineering.
She has a lot of fun stories about Disney’s Animal Kingdom, but also about her career beyond that. It was a real thrill for me to get to talk to Zofia about what she’s done and we barely scratched the surface of her career. Well, like I mentioned a minute ago, Zofia has so much more from her career than Disney. I would recommend you check out her website, Zofiah.com. There’s a lot of really beautiful artwork that she’s done. She’s a fine artist and has created exhibitions, so many interesting things that are worth checking out. So let’s get right to it. Here is Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards.
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Dan Heaton: It’s really exciting because you’ve worked on so many great things, especially the Animal Kingdom, but also other things. But I’d love to start with your background. I know you grew up in Communist Warsaw in Poland, and I’m just wondering what that life was like, but also how you got interested in art and kind of being an artist when you were growing up at that time.
Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards: Well, so as you said, I was born and raised behind the Iron Curtain at the last years. I left Poland in 1980, and I was a teenager at that point. My whole family was scientists. My father is a nuclear physicist and my mom was the director of National Bureau of Science. She was doing, her specialty is methodology, the science of ways and measures, and even though she’s 87 at this age, she’s still writing articles all the time, and she’s actually a phenomenal scientist.
So both parents were scientists, however, I, from the very early on seemed to exhibit some art talent and my parents very much supported it. They were very enlightened in that way. And so I remember that the first book that I ripped up was a British Museum Encyclopedia of Art. And the first two pictures as a four year old, not four year old, that was two or three that I ripped out of the book was De Milo, the one without the arms or head, and I think Blake’s illustrations.
So art was always something I was very fascinated with. Culturally, art was an escape. The very gray reality of communist Poland pre-1980, it was Polish art has always been excellent and very subversive in nature of Polish art was very much a tradition of sort of speaking over the heads of the sensors, the communist sensors. So it’s very sarcastic, it’s very clever. It’s Polish posters were always pretty phenomenal and there was a lot of really great experimental theater, the Grotowski Theater and a lot the China Theater, and this is what I grew up on.
So I was always fascinated with theater, with costume, with art, and that’s what I wanted to do. But as a girl behind the Iron Curtain, the chance that I was ever going to be able to travel around the world and to really do what I wanted were not small. It was a difficult place. However, I also think that this was a great creative training because in Poland, when you live in a poor country, a third world country, at that point, you make things you make do. You make things out of nothing. So I always thought that their necessity was mother of invention. I had very early training, resourcefulness and creativity.
I had to make my clothes, I had to make my shoes. And I used to buy white flannelette and hand painted to make it look like the paintings from the Lascaux in France and make my own clothes from scratch. And so I basically learned a lot of inventiveness there and a lot of ability to put together very disparate objects and create something very new and different out of them. Also, because my parents were both scientists and they supported me as an art. I’m also kind of a geek and a nerd for technology and science, but I’m an artist. So this, unbeknownst to me, it was a perfect training to become an Imagineer.
Dan Heaton: Oh yeah, totally. I mean, I think about you talk about resourcefulness and not having everything, you don’t have unlimited resources you have to make do. And then even just the science technical side of it, it totally describes that. So you were primed for it at an early age.
Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards: I guess I was.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I’d love to know too, you mentioned that you didn’t have the opportunities and of course you mentioned that you ended up moving to the United States in 1980. So how did that end up happening? How did you ultimately decide and were able to move to the U.S.
Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards: I came here for a short vacation to visit my mother’s sister in 1978 when I was 17 years old, and I felt like Dorothy leaving Kansas and coming to us when in the end of summer I had to go back to Poland. I thought Dorothy was an idiot. Why would she ever leave? It was insane, but I had to go to Poland. It was really depressing. This was 1978, and then I basically managed to get used to it, but I always wanted to come back and travel back to the United States.
And so in 1980, my aunt again invited me for summer, and I came here in June 1980 and shortly after that, the strikes Solidarity came from the underground, the strikes and the Polish Shipyard started, and I had some family members involved, very close with Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity movement.
So my family basically said, just wait out the summer and see what, just hang out there so you’re safe at the same time. My aunt basically said, as long as you’re here, why don’t you go first to Pasadena City College? And then she used to teach at the ArtCenter College of Design, and the chair of illustration was a lovely lady, Catherine, who basically really loved my work and she helped me get into the ArtCenter.
So I was able to get in. I never knew if I was ever going to be able to finish because I was really not planning to stay here forever. I had a fiance in Poland; I had my whole family in Poland, all my friends, while I loved the United States, it wasn’t home. At the ArtCenter, I met my husband, the love of my life, and so the rest is history.
He drove up in a small little MGTD and yellow with a wooden dashboard and that was it. So we basically got married after I graduated and I decided to stay here. I graduated from arts and illustration and fine art. At that point, I was neither aware nor interested in theme design as a career. I really didn’t know theme design existed; I was going to be either a film production designer or a costume designer or a book designer. I freelanced while I was at Art Center.
Even during the school I freelanced, I did theatrical costumes at Cal Tech and I dressed Dr. Richard Feynman, the late Dr. Richard Feynman, this famous physicist that figured out what happened to Challenger at the South Pacific and the musical. So I have been very fortunate to have met a lot of very kind people who have brought me in, helped me out, introduced me to people, and because I was Polish and I knew how to sew, that’s how I was able to make costumes for South Pacific.
So things sort of worked out. I was doing children’s clothing, I was doing exotic dance costumes; I was a children’s book illustrator. I was broke, but it doesn’t matter; I was happily married. And I somehow moved into art direction for independent film and video productions through some fellow Art Center alumni who became my lifelong friends. And that’s how I sort of got into the whole film business, which led me into the Pee Wee’s Playhouse, but not to themed entertainment yet.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I have to jump in there because Pee Wee’s Playhouse aired a while ago, but my daughters now – they’re 11 and seven – they’ve really enjoyed that show. So I have to ask you a bit about, I know you just worked on it for a bit. What was it like to create some various props for that show?
Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards: Well, Pee Wee’s Playhouse was truly a cultural phenomenon, and this was some of the best morning cartoons between the Ralph Bakshi, Mighty Mouse, and Pee Wee’s Playhouse, I think on Saturday morning. I have never seen anything since like that or before. Paul Ruebens was a really gifted designer, and he created this character. He really paid attention to every detail, and his set really was like a themed entertainment because the backside of things were themed.
It wasn’t like a typical TV or a movie set, and he was very involved with every detail. I was basically given the lead about Pee Wee’s Playhouse through a friend that knew somebody on the set. When I called the guy whose name is Jim Higginson, he was the prop master, he said, oh no, the position is already filled. And that was on Friday. Then on Sunday night he calls me and says, can you come tomorrow?
The guy didn’t work out. So I’m like, sure, why not? I had no clue. And so it ended up, I worked on the second season of Pee Wee’s Playhouse, which was the first one recorded in Los Angeles at the studio Zoetrope Hollywood Studios, which were, I think created by Coppola and Lucas. So this was kind of a legendary place and it was an incredible team.
I’m basically here, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and I was basically tasked with, I was asked to design and build hand props, which was macaroni blankets, giant tea bags, weird salads, miniature Countess models. I don’t even remember all this stuff, but I know it was just weird stuff. Then there was of course these mechanical props, which were the characters and the different, and then there was the actors, which were also fantastic.
It was kind of zany and dorky and awesome. And I, through this project, have met some great producers, great designers, didn’t quite take advantage of it because I was still a little girl from Warsaw. It was only a few years after I came here and I didn’t really understand the whole concept of networking, but I was exposed to a lot of stuff and I was learning.
I was ready to go and become the production designer through those friends that I mentioned before that I was doing the independent film and video productions, I really wanted to get into art direction and production design. And that Pee Wee, which was the hottest show on the market at that point for kids, was a great jumping off board. So I felt pretty cocky. I felt really good, and I loved it; I loved it. I still have a script somewhere, I think.
Dan Heaton: Well, it says something, I mean, you mentioned there’s nothing like it. The fact that even I sit down and watch it now and it doesn’t feel like, oh, that’s so old or dated instead, I’m just like, I can’t believe this was on TV. And I mean that in the best way possible. It’s so inventive and cool. Well, you mentioned that you weren’t interested in themed entertainment design, but you ultimately did join Imagineering in I believe, ‘87. So how did that happen? How did you go from working in film and TV production and then ultimately end up with Imagineering?
Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards: As I said, I thought working on TV, I’m hot stuff. I’m on the way to stardom, whatever, and I can call myself an accidental Imagineer. I think that Imagineers knew I was an Imagineer before I did, because how it happened was my earliest and my always muse was the proto Imagineer, which is Leonardo da Vinci, which basically fused or practiced both art and science and mechanical engineering, and he was an inventor, and that’s what Imagineers are.
And I’m a maker, I’m a thinker, I’m a doer, I’m an artist. I’m both emotional and rational. So Imagineering is such an amazing fusion of art, science, technology, and for experiential and environmental storytelling, and they are masters at it. So I really feel that Imagineering was my graduate school, how I got to it, I knew nothing about it. It was not my cup of tea. I personally prefer surprise of authentic places and experiences, and as I said, I was pursuing the TV and film art direction while working at Pee Wee.
A friend from Art Center, she was on a job counselor, asked me to pass on to another friend news about an opening at WDI at graphics, and she also suggested I interview too. I wasn’t terribly interested, but I said, okay, why not? I did it to humor her. My first interview was with Mike Morris and Peggy Van Pelt. At that point, I was 26 years old, 25, something like that.
I was offered a job and I accepted it after a couple of months delay to finish Pee Wee, and I intended to stay there only for a year or two because I was to move back to Hollywood. Also, I was hired for graphics, and while I can do graphics, I don’t do it that much. I do it the initial concept, but it’s a different mindset of a graphic designer to finish all the dots of every eye and very, very precise.
I’m much more dynamic and impulsive. I was hired for graphics, but I was immediately pulled to his group by Rick Rothschild. He had this entertainment centers group, and I was in there as only one of two women. The other one was Susan Cowan, really wonderful person. The first person I met in this group was Joe Rohde. My first comment to Joe Rohde was that he had a Dali mustache because he took the mustache and he kind of rolled it into spirals. It was the first time I saw him, it was my first sentence to him, and that’s the circle of history because became good collaborators and good friends for many years and still friends. I was basically put into the old Epcot demo area in the 1401 Flower warehouse, and there was Joe Rohde, Susan Cowan, Jim Steinmeyer, who is this insane, amazing magician.
He designs all the magical tricks for all the greats. Tommy Miranda, who is a producer from Broadway, William Stout, who designed Conan the Barbarian, an incredible art director and cartoon and comic book artist, and Larry Hitchcock. It was an amazing, amazing group, which was also very subversive, and they did pranks all the time. We did pranks all the time, and we did this insane cartoon called Mickey at 60, which I don’t know if you’re familiar with, but that’s something you should see.
Oh my God. Mickey at 60, the series that was done between Jim Steinmeyer and Bill Stout, and it’s looking at Mickey and Minnie and the whole Disney characters, how they aged, and lemme tell you, it a’int pretty, it’s a little bit like those time sheets by what was the guy in the front, John Horny, the time sheets, the famous time sheets of John Horny, which was also always a joke and kind of usually a very sarcastic and cutting joke.
It was a great group and I think that that’s why I stayed because I also came from Europe from a real tradition of real places and real experiences. In some ways, even until today, the construct of themed entertainment where you engineer something for somebody in such a precise way is kind of alien to me. I like real places, real patina and real dust, and I feel like Imagineering beautifully replicates it, but it’s not real.
Dan Heaton: Yeah. Well, that’s interesting because you mentioned the group that worked on Pleasure Island. I talked to Rick Rothschild a few months ago about that and just how interesting that was. But I think about the Adventurers Club, which I believe you’re involved with there, and how that to me is the anti themed entertainment controlled environment. It’s like you go there, I mean when it was open and people just, it was different every time. So I almost feel like you were perfect for that type of destination because you weren’t as into such the controlled environment.
Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards: I think so, and I think that this was my sheer luck that the first person I bumped into was Joe, because Joe is a self-described culture vulture, and he really has phenomenal visual memory. He’s really smart, he’s very disciplined in his thinking, and it’s very much the way I function and I design too. I’m really rational and cerebral, but at the same time I’m also really try to be really ruthless in editing. And once he develops a construct, he has a lot of self-discipline and discipline and justification to the team and to the top brass or anybody to, he has good reasons why he does things the way he does them.
He also wants to, has a genuine admiration and respect for primary sources. A lot of designers that I see today are scrapbooking from existing attractions and existing parks and existing thing. I am much more into developing something new and original. I don’t do cookie cutters. And I think that that was a great match with Joe because he doesn’t do it either and that’s why Animal Kingdom stands out from all the parks and the fact that it really is just the fact that it has live animals is very different than all the other theme parks because they’re unpredictable.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, and I mean Joe Rohde, he’s been doing even recently these little short videos on the Disney YouTube channel from his house and he has all, and I think what is his house? I don’t even understand, but you’d mentioned primary sources. He has all these pieces where he’s like, oh, I picked this up in Nepal or whatever. I think that perfectly what you just said makes sense because he’s not saying, oh, we designed the Animal Kingdom based on some attraction from 1988 or whatever.
Just throwing out something he’s saying, we designed this based on this trip that I took and everything. So I think that’s perfect in that it’s a perfect match. I’d love to know too, because I know not that long after you joined, it’s interesting to think about the Animal Kingdom started. Those early concepts were well before it opened, and I know you were part of that small team with Joe and with others, Kevin Brown, Christopher West, others that put together those early concepts. So I wonder how did you get involved with that and what was that kind of small group like at the start?
Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards: Well, Joe, basically, Marty Sklar put out the call to the whole company asking for designers, asking all designers in the company to come up with project with ideas for animals. And I basically threw up on the paper 15 ideas, and I basically came up with crazy stuff, but Joe already knew me and he knew that we had a similar style and he picked me as the first designer for the group.
So I was the first concept designer in the team, so it was Joe, Chris West, Kevin Brown, Tony Miranda, Paul Comstock, Eric Eberhart. And shortly after that, Eric Barr also started working with us and it was pretty crazy. We were in a tiny little trailer where Mickey’s of Glendale is right now, like a tiny little dingy trailer. Everybody thought we were the butt of every joke because what are we doing in zoo who cares?
Basically we were flying under the radar for probably about the first year because we really started in late 1989 and we went to our first AZA conferences, the zoo conferences. I think the first one was in San Diego. Then we went to Bronx Zoo and we went to somewhere in the Midwest and multiple zoos Philadelphia in ‘89 or ‘90, there was our first AZA conference and we were basically, there was three or four of us or five of us, and we were very quiet and we were just listening and people said, oh, Disney is here. What for?
You guys are joking and nobody’s ever going to do it. And also within the company there was a lot of people were very skeptical about Disney doing anything with live animals because of this unpredictability and also because of very high labor costs and the sensitivity of the subject because people love animals or hate animals, but if you do something wrong to the animals, you’re going to be boycotted, protested, all kinds of weird stuff.
So we had to slowly and very gradually build up both our knowledge and respect within the community. We had to pull in early into our group or seek advice from William, Dr. Bill Conway, at Bronx and then was Russell Meyer at the Conservation International and from Atlanta. There was just a whole bunch of different people.
Rick Barongi came with us very early on from San Diego Zoo who was also very respected in the community and there was just a lot of people that we talked with and tried to make it a very legitimate thing to differentiate from the site roadside attractions like a gator land or something. And I’m not trying to single out Gatorland, but basically a lot of roadside attractions with animals that are really used as amusement without the whole ethical, at that time there wasn’t the same ethical foundation to why are you doing it, what is it for? Is it just entertainment? Are you trying to do something in conservation as well?
So yeah, that was pretty fascinating to get into it. So we were in our little tiny trailer, everybody thought we were a joke and we were slowly but surely throwing big index cards on the board and having whiteboard with a lot of Joe’s or Kevin’s writing on it. We were just sitting eight hours a day for weeks at a time kind of coming with different ideas. I don’t know if you knew that there was an Ocean Safari concept. I’m just cleaning my office this week from 20 years of the trip and I found notes for Ocean Safari and I thought, huh, oh yeah, that rings a bell.
Dan Heaton: So in Florida you were going to do an Ocean Safari. Yeah, I have not heard of that.
Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards: Well, no, honestly, I think we all forgot about it, but I know that I have the notes. And then there was a, which I think the Beastly Kingdom, which I know that there’s much more talk about it. Some ideas we took and throughout was Noah’s Ark, which was too biblical. There was the Carousel of Life, which was swimming, leaping flying carousel, which I was doing like an early sketch for, and then we went for the Tree of Life and Tree of Life stuck. It was really cool stuff.
You probably are aware that initially, so originally all of us, all five of us or six of us or however many of us there were, but it was a very small group, worked on masterminding the whole park, and then the team started growing and there was other designers, other architects coming into it. So the original Joe stayed over the whole thing. Kevin was doing some of the overall writing, and then I started focusing on a part of the park, which was Asia. And so the original Asia Safari initially was much bigger. It was an Asia river ride. It was almost the size of African safari. But it wasn’t what you have right now with the mountain and plunging boat and all this.
It wasn’t as much of a thrill ride, but it was much more cognitive ride of a story of man’s impact on environment, how you start with the pristine environment, how people do the clear cutting and you putting the needs of animals versus people. And it’s not a black-and-white story because when you have people in poverty and subsistence, they need to live off something and if they use an animal and poach it and sell it, they make enough for them to survive except the actual profit is builds up the line.
So the people who actually did it get only very small fraction for it. We saw very early on in our research, phenomenal exhibit at the Bronx looking at the two sides of the coin. So the original story of Asia was more controversial. It was really looking at both the story of man’s impact and then how nature reclaims it, and then looking at going from South Asia, from India then to Nepal and then going back to the south to Indonesia to the orangutans. So this was this incredible cultural tapestry. It went not just because right now the Asia safari, the ride is mostly Nepal, northern Asia. The head was looking at India and Indonesia and much more. We had elephants walking on the bridge over the river.
Dan Heaton: Oh wow.
Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards: It was pretty cool. It was pretty cool. But things changed. It’s okay.
Dan Heaton: It’s interesting. Yeah, now, now there’s a raft ride and then Expedition Everest there and stuff. It’s interesting to think about too because even the African safari had more about poaching and everything that’s now been kind of pulled back. So it seemed like there were changes. But to get to your original point though about zoos and everything, part of me still goes there now and thinks is amazed how many different ways it could have not worked. You know what I’m saying based on what you said?
But it worked so well. It somehow managed to avoid all the possible becoming two theme parky or becoming not good for the animals or whatever. It all just somehow works. I think that the group you had just seemed to find a way to get it all together. But I know you also did an early research trip, which I’ve read about to Kenya and Tanzania and everything to kind of get started. And I was wondering, I read about that and I’m just really curious what that trip was like for that kind of small group when you were doing that initial research in Africa.
Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards: Well, the original trip happened in August 1990, and this was just the core team. It was six of us or five of us, I think six of us. I keep thinking five, but I think all of us went and it was, oh my god. And if Disney knew what we did, then we wouldn’t be able to do it because we literally, there was one flight I think into Tanzania where I had to sit on Kevin’s lap because there was not enough seats on the plane and they didn’t take our luggage because there was not enough.
The plane was too heavy. Then we had to land in the middle of Fiji River on a seasonally dry patch. It’s not a real landing strip, it was just shallows. But then it gets deeper. And then we went to this camp, which was this huge baobab tree with some huge scorpions in it, and I think they put the scorpions next to the bar and it was one of those tented camps.
So there was some pretty hair raising adventures all around. But I think that this is again, the genius of Joe and actually started even before Animal Kingdom. We were doing the entertainment centers and they really wanted us to go and experience things because as a designer, you cannot do secondary information. As a designer, you genuinely control of any of a destination entertainment. You genuinely control all the senses of a person. You cannot take it from a picture in a book. When we went on this trip, we had some pretty hair raising adventures, but we also learned tremendous amount of stuff.
So this was the first team research trip. And then between ‘90 and ‘95 when the project was officially announced, the project was turned on and off probably four or five times. And it was really heartbreaking because with Disney, if you worked on something and they don’t do it, you have a black hole in your resume and you have no idea what you’re doing next.
We all have put our hearts into it, our souls, long hours, everything. But the project eventually happened. So the team trip was incredible. There was really informal, really getting into places. We were in Zanzibar, we were in Africa. I actually, it shows how inexperienced I was as a young girl. I used to read adventure series about this boy whose father was a hunter in Hamburg and he traveled all around the world. As a girl in Poland, there was no chance of me to do this. So when I came to Africa, I was in my dream. I was in awe on the first morning at the three tops in Nairobi, I just went out for a walk and I see buffalo in the bushes and I hear stuff and I’m thinking, oh, this is nice. It was like Disneyland.
When I came back, Joe almost had my head on a platter because I could have been chopped in pieces, but it was really weird. There was this real sense of being part of an ecosystem unlike anything I’ve ever been before. I was just very fortunate, but it was an incredible, incredible adventure to be there. On this first trip we walked, I think in Tanzania and we saw a poached elephant, and it was before somebody took the ivory off, but we basically walked into the thicket, we saw some vultures over it and we saw a poached the elephant.
So there have been some incredible experiences in there that were possible because our group was so small and so informal at that point, and we were able to see things and bring them into the concept and translate them into the guest experiences that if you are well cushioned by the insurance agents and travel agents and everything else, you probably wouldn’t get to do it. But it was early, we were already flying under the radar and we were also very lucky and had a lot of great people along the way to help us out.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean I think now, maybe not, maybe it wouldn’t be so easy, but I’m glad you got to do it. It sounds amazing and probably sounds like a great adventure regardless of the park itself and everything to do with it. But I know you worked on a few places like the Conservation Station, which is now called Rafiki’s Planet Watch, and you were the concept and show designer there. That’s a really interesting place to me just because you actually get to go in and the animals are right there. So I’d love to hear a little bit about what it was like to work on that and the concept for that.
Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards: Well, because I was in the project from the very beginning and I was as part of this initial core team, I interacted with our advisors, with the advisory board, with the experts. I met Jane Goodall, I met Cynthia Moss, who’s an elephant expert with Medicare in Africa, Bernice Strauss, multiple, multiple amazing people. I also have personally done, even while at Disney. I’ve done a lot of independent work for environmental causes. I did the first museum for Heal the Bay in Santa Monica, Atras Place, which was a volunteer project and then did the whole bunch, like a summer thing.
So anyway, this conservation was very close to my heart in I think it was ‘96, I don’t remember exactly the day, it was ‘96 or ‘97 or ‘95, somewhere around there. The Asia Safari. It was shortly after the announcement and my part of the park, the Asia Safari and Asian and Second Village Nature Walk were deferred from the opening game menu and they were slated as the first build out scheduled for 1999.
So in effect, I lost my attraction. It was like the carpet was pulled from under me, but it was a strategic decision. The attraction was built next year and beautifully completed by John, a really wonderful designer. But I was moved on to Conservation Station because of my familiarity with the concepts or with the issues and because of my familiarity with the players, there was a key meeting in somewhere.
It was like an amazing thing for me to go. There was key stakeholders meeting between the zoo and the conservation community, the Silverbacks, the Conway and Maple and all those guys, and the Disney top corporate top brass, which was Judson Green, Sandy, who was the head law legal counsel, and a whole bunch of guys who were the ones that were, especially on the corporate side, they were skeptical of the luggage that comes with dealing with life creatures that people are attracted to and with these really big issues.
My job was to do the presentation that would be able to bring everybody together. This was few months after I was moved on this on Conservation Station, I was able to do it and we started the whole work laying foundations for the Disney Conservation Fund, and we got the buy-off from the zoo community, and even Roger from PETA who was the head of PETA, I think, and some other organizations in there.
We were able to move forward with Conservation Station as the element that basically makes it really valid, legit, and serious, that elevates it over just exploitation of animals as entertainment. And it also was very clear that Animal Kingdom inadvertently we’ll raise the bar in the whole industry for animal husbandry. Disney couldn’t afford to do it in a schlocky way, in a cheap way, and we had the resources and the brain trust to do this.
So we were doing some amazing animal behavioral enrichment. We were doing some studies in Conservation Station. I became very good friends with Anne Savage, who was the chief scientist at Conservation Station and Beth Stevens, who I think is right now, running the Disney Conservation Fund. There was some amazing research happening there, and we designed a Conservation Station as a real reveal of the science and the husbandry and all what’s being learned to present to the audience and to provide a real both cognitive and emotional link to the rest of the park.
For example, Dr. Ann Savage was doing some incredible research about elephant communication, and they were able to create for them to special colors that would allow them to record the very low frequency sounds because as you know, elephants communicate across very wide areas and allow to understand which elephant was making it. You cannot do it in the wild the same way, but just the enclosures in Animal Kingdom were large enough that you were able to actually get much more stuff in there.
So this was so absolutely fascinating about being part of Conservation Station, and I designed all the exhibits in it. I designed all the graphics on it; I did the mural where you first enter, which has I think a zillion hidden Mickeys. I did the marquee, designed a marquee for the front of it, and then I had some incredible people. And I think my producer was Kelly Forte and I was a senior concept designer and art director on it. I don’t even remember the title, but it became my baby, and it was just an amazing thing.
However, when the park opened, we really needed to pass it on to the animal care staff and husband and stuff. So again, I kind of stepped back in the sidelines because it wasn’t like one of those rides. It was much more of a, they gave legitimacy to our effort, but we have designed the whole structure in advance to end then with all the people that came in and took over and they did an amazing job and still doing an amazing job.
Dan Heaton: Oh yeah. I mean it’s still, when you’re there, you happen to be there, whether it’s surgery or checkup or something, and you think, wow, this is happening in the middle of a theme park. It’s so neat to see, so it’s great. I wanted to ask you too, you referenced the Asia Walking Trail, which I know got pushed back, but I think you also were involved with the other walking trail in Africa, which I love those walking trails as I’ve gone more and spent more time just walking on them, just seeing how much there is and they just seem to go on and on and how just detailed they are. I’d love to know what you were involved with that and just how that came together.
Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards: Well, originally I was in the Asian Walking Trail, which was basically a sunken village, which was looking at the different environmental versus human issues. And then when the Asia went away or was delayed, I did help Mark Shumate, a good friend of mine and one of the nicest people I ever met, and great designer was brought into the project and I helped, but he was actually the art director on it. So I was basically doing, I was working with Jane Goodall on roots and shoots as part of the exhibit with the hippos. I was working with Ray Mendez who was doing some moat exhibits in there, in the station there.
I was doing just a whole bunch of environmental enhancements throughout on the walk and worked with POVs and on all the enclosures of the different animals and worked on some of the enhancement stuff. But it wasn’t my main thing. I was basically helping with it, but I would not take credit for the whole thing. I was part of the team in there that helped to enhance it.
Dan Heaton: Well, no, sure, that makes sense. Because there would be so many people involved on that, but just in general, the park just came out so well and I think has evolved in a really interesting way. But I’d love to just know in general for you, beyond what we’ve talked about, what stands out to you just about that experience or what’s maybe one great memory that you have from working on the Animal Kingdom?
Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards: I think that there’s a gillion of different memories. I think that there was two memories that are sort of connected, and I think that they were both in early 1998, the night before the animals were let out for the first time for the African Savannah, I walked it with Kelly Forte, my producer, and it was one of the most impossibly beautiful environments I’ve ever seen. It was just absolutely spectacular. Having been in Africa, I was blown away how Florida was able to look like that. And that really, the credit goes to Paul Comstock, John Shields, the people who were basically doing all the landscaping in there.
Then the other from the time, it was the night before the soft opening when the people were going to walk first into the park. It was really late at night one or turned the morning and Zsolt Hormay, the genius rock work dude, that very close friend of mine too from Hungary, we were sitting under the Tree of Life and they had these huge globes, glowing globes there, and hanging up the tree.
There was some kind of a party and he started playing an Indian flute, and I was just lying on the ground looking at the tree, and it was like one of those moments them thinking it’s absolutely transcendental. It was absolutely beautiful. But it’s this incredible experiences with meeting people all over the world through this park and through this experience living the dreams that I thought were never possible for me as a girl from behind the Iron Curtain and learning something new every day, really overcoming all kinds of technical, logical logistic challenges and also breaking my assumptions.
Very often we had designers coming from California, in California, we think we’re smarter than everybody else. But we’re not. I remember midnight talks with the guards at the Conservation Station who basically told me everything so much about Florida Everglades and how much they knew about it, and it was just beautiful. So it was very humbling and enriching experience. It was great.
Dan Heaton: That sounds amazing.
Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards: Yes, it was.
Dan Heaton: Yeah. Well, I want to make sure before we finish to asking about a few things you did beyond Disney. I think you’ve done some really, really amazing things. One of them is you’ve been involved with the NOAA with their national marine sanctuaries, like the Hawaiian Islands, National Marine Sanctuary and Great Lakes Heritage Center. I’m just curious for you, just what interests you. You’ve already mentioned your interest in conservation, but about projects like that had a lot like this during your career?
Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards: I think that I have always felt that Disney has an insanely top set of tools. Disney are masters about storytelling, about creating the environments, but I felt that because it’s a corporate entity, they sand all the corners and they make everything palatable for everybody, and the real world is much more than that. So I always wanted to take everything I’ve learned at Disney and apply it to real life projects, to basically, it’s like you take a child’s painting and you frame it and all of a sudden it looks like Matisse, not Matisse like Po Clay or something. Well, these guys cheated.
They took it from the kids. If you take something, the execution of an idea implies the worth of the idea. And I felt that there is much more need for us as designers to take what we have learned at Disney and genuinely apply it to the public realm, to public spaces that are easily accessible for all of us that are not, you don’t have to pay to play.
So that was the main reason why I was involved with NOAA with the National Marine Sanctuaries. I have done great, as you said, Great Lakes Heritage Center. I’ve done an American Samoa, I’ve done Channel Islands, I’ve done some other concepts for it. It was an amazing group of people and it was challenging to work with because it’s government, so there’s a lot of non-decision making along the way and budgeting in little tiny pots of money.
But it was really great. I really enjoyed it, really, really enjoyed it. And then Aquarium of the Pacific, and I also worked with Cirque Du Soleil, and I worked with the Experience Music project. I’ve done both commercial and non-commercial, but the non-commercial ones are really special because they are accessible to people, just anybody.
Dan Heaton: Oh, totally. And I should also mention too, you’ve done art exhibits. I wanted to ask you about your oceans living the dream of the sea, which is like these portraits of these marine explorers. What was that like kind of more creating, it’s different that environments actually the art you created for that.
Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards: I never stopped being a fine artist, and so I have expressed my fine art through both painting. There was a couple years before the astronauts, I think around 2011, I started doing a portrait a day of somebody who is public or private. Somebody in some ways affected my life, and I did it because I felt that surrounded by screens, we stopped paying attention to each other, stopped understanding and respecting each other.
So I basically started painting and painting and painting every day. My great mentor and a friend, Jerry, who was the director of the Aquarium of the Pacific, invited me to create 27 custom portraits of people who were somehow contributed to the ocean sciences and climate sciences. It was a fascinating experience. I have actually met Picard and I didn’t meet passed away, but Sylvia Earl and Bob Ballard and multiple people, I mean, there’s some incredible people that we are all so much too, and I did their portraits, which was really fun.
So the exhibit was supposed to be there for one year, but it ended up being there for two years because so many seemed to have people have to enjoyed it, and I think that that was so great about Jerry is that he’s both a scientist and a deep, deep scientist, but he also is recognizing the value of art as a way to carry the message and carry the fascination with something forward and bring people into a new realm through it.
Dan Heaton: Excellent. Well, I just have one more question. In general, you’ve done so much in your career, and I know we’ve only covered a small amount, but I’d love just to hear just what is one other favorite project or other thing you’ve done that you feel really proud of during your career?
Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards: Wow.
Dan Heaton: Long list. Big question.
Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards: Big question. So if I can really, maybe what I can say is move forward to where I’m now and where I’m now right now is I am going back to going public places and working more on sculpture and light installations that have relate to the places where it come from. I did this great project in El Paso called Sun City Lights, which I have done concepts for several major sculptural and light installations. And I am also doing, I’m going more into fine art right now, and I think that that’s my latest favorite project.
Animal Kingdom will always be favorite in a lot of ways, but I think that there is a lot to be said for individual voices and how we share what our abilities and our passions and our thoughts to spark public conversation and to open people’s eyes to things that they have not thought about. So I think that right now is basically the projects that I’m working on right now. I dunno how else to put it because otherwise it’s like I’m trying to make a list of everything I’ve done and it’s pretty difficult.
Dan Heaton: I totally understand.
Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards: Keep doing stuff. I’m a workaholic. I always was. My mom is 87 and she’s literally on fire. She’s getting job proposals from Singapore and all over the world in Switzerland and Sweden for the articles that she’s doing in her field. I’m like, Hey, I got the genes. I hopefully will be active for a long time to follow. We’ll see.
Dan Heaton: Well, I’m right with you. I understand having that personality. There’s so much to do and it’s always good to move forward.
Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards: So little time.
Dan Heaton: Totally. Yes, totally. I wanted to mention your website, ZOFIAh.com, because there’s just so much beautiful art on there. Well beyond the Animal Kingdom, some really great work and it’s beautiful, and I would recommend everybody check it out because it’s really something to see.
Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards: Thank you so much. That’s lovely.
Dan Heaton: Oh, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I love the stories about the Animal Kingdom and beyond. It’s been great talking with you.
Zofia Kostyrko-Edwards: Thank you very much, Dan. It was a pleasure talking with you. I appreciate it.
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