Since hearing rumors about the possiblity of Fantasy Springs, I’ve wanted to go see it.
However, considering half the planet of Disney fans want to go, too, I decided I’d wait for maybe a few years before trying to get into the area, leaving me to salivate in front of my TV as news reporters here in Japan introduced all the wonders of Fantasy Springs in various segments when it opened in June.
This past Saturday, however, I decided I was going to just go for it and bought a ticket to DisneySea.
While summer has dragged its heels across our sanity for the past few months, temperatures are finally going down, making theme parks much more bearable.
It was time.
The newest area
For those of you who don’t know: Fantasy Springs is an expansion of Tokyo DisneySea (the only DisneySea on Earth), that has four new rides and I think three places to eat, plus a gift shop.
I think one of the main features of this area is the Fantasy Springs Hotel, which is right up against Fantasy Springs and offers views (for an outrageous fee) into the area from your room. This hotel is booked solid, and when reservations do open up, they’re gone within seconds.
The big draw of this area, for me at least, is that this area has a Tangled ride. Nowhere else does.
One of the great complaints I hear from Disney World fans is “Tokyo Disney got a ride for Rapunzel; we got a bathroom.”
Getting in
The tricky part of Fantasy Springs is that it’s completley closed off from the rest of DisneySea via a tunnel, with three main ways of getting into it:
- Have a room booked at the Fantasy Springs Hotel
- Use the Tokyo Disney Resort app once you’re in DisneySea to select one of two fastpass options for any ride in Fantasy Springs. The first fastpass option costs money while the second is free.
- Once inside DisneySea, do a “Disney mobile order” where you order food from the online menu of one of the restaurants at Fantasy Springs and pay with a credit card (you need a credit card linked to your Disney Resort app for this, of course), then pick a time you want to go pick up the food.
(Please note: The GPS for the Disney Resort app is absolutely insane in its precision. It does not count you as being “inside the park” until you have had your park ticket scanned and you are standing near the great globe in the fountain in front of DisneySea. For Disneyland, you’re not “in the park” until your ticket is scanned and you’re looking at the little bed of flowers out front)
If you can score any one of these ways of getting in, you’re allowed to go into Fantasy Springs at the time they give you to pick up the food or ride your ride (you can come and go as you please to the area if you’re a Fantasy Springs Hotel guest) and wander around inside the area for as long as you want.
(Please be warned: Once you leave Fantasy Springs, you can’t go back in unless you have another fastpass/food reseravation or are blessed with a room at the hotel.)
The plan
The great challenge of going to Disney when the weather is more forgiveable is that everyone else flocks to the parks, too. And during Halloween, dressing up in Disney character costumes (something that’s normally a no-go at the parks unless you’re a little kid) is highly encouraged, drawing in even more crowds. I personally loved seeing how jaw-droppingly amazing a lot of the costumes were, though, so I wish Disney would make this a more permanent feature.
For the past month, I’d been checking my Disney Resort app — which outside the park will still offer wait times and tell you where fastpasses are available — to see how quicky fastpasses for Fantasy Springs disappeared, and even on weekdays, they were snapped up within an hour of the park opening.
Thus, I devised a plan for trying to score a free fastpass.
The park opens at 9 a.m. and stays open util 9 p.m.
Super diehard Disney fans seem to enjoy arriving two or more hours before this opening time and just camping out in front of the security checkpoints you go through before scanning your park ticket.
Not being a morning person, I decided my only hope was to arrive an hour before the park was scheduled to open. I prayed the crowds would still be relatively small so early in the morning.
It was a madhouse.
The line to get into the park was about twenty people deep and extended about a mile out from the security checkpoint. It was like we were waiting for a meet-and-greet with Taylor Swift.
Like USJ, Disney will open the parks early if they notice the crowds are getting unbelievably bad.
They only seem to announce an earlier opening in Japanese, though, so just keep in mind that if you see a sea of people waiting to get in, the gates will probably open early.
The gates did, indeed, open at 8:30 a.m., and the line I was in slowly inched its way toward the security checkpoint.
DisneySea, anyway, has a checkpoint now reminiscent of an airport security checkpoint now. You wait for a machine to scan you, and if there are no problems, you go on through. If there is something detected, however, you get put into another line, where they physically go through your bags.
I think considering they were handsearching every single bag the last time I went to DisneySea, this is a huge improvement, and the whole process took a lot less time.
The miracle
As soon as I made it through security and scanned my ticket, I immediately dashed off to one side of the entrance and fumbled through the app to the Tangled ride on the map the app has.
I had no hope. The park had been open for a good 45 minutes at that point, and I was sure that everyone who’d entered the park before me had grabbed everything.
I tapped on the ride, which said that fastpasses were still unbelievably available, and though I thought it just meant the app hadn’t updated properly yet, I still tapped through all the stages needed to reserve a fastpass.
And I got one.
For 6:20 p.m.
Fantasy Springs
Because my fastpass was for the evening, I only have seen Fantasy Springs at night, but the way everything is so nicely lit up made it worth it to me.
The area, itself, is a lot smaller than they make it out to be on TV. I thought it’d take a good half hour just to walk around the entire area, but at a quick pace, you can easily do it in about 10 minutes.
I gawked and marveled at everything before realizing the line for the Tangled ride was snaking along the walkway almost near the entrance to the area.
It turned out, despite having a “fastpass,” the wait was 65 minutes.
I’m not sure if this is because hotel guests are clogging up the line, too, (those lucky people) or because they’re trying to get more people into the area so there are fewer disappointed fans, but I was just shocked to be suddenly standing there, wondering if I was going to make the mobile order time I had scheduled for Rapunzel’s The Snugly Duckling restaurant next door to the ride.
Rapunzel’s Lantern Festival
I have a couple of complaints about this ride.
- The waiting area is almost entirely outdoors. Considering how brutally hot the summers are here now and how bitingly cold the wind off Tokyo Bay (which DisneySea sits right along) is in the winter, I thought the operators of Tokyo Disney Resort would do us poor visitors a favor and making lines for new rides more indoors than outdoors. To me, it just seems like a good idea. I’m not sure what they were thinking with this.
- The ride, itself, is unbelievably short.
These two complaints aside, I loved this ride.
There is something breathtaking and magical about being able to see the lanterns floating above you while you watch Eugene and Rapunzel singing to each other on their little boat that just tugs at your heartstrings.
I also personally liked that the villain (Mother Gothel, your horrible person) was completely cut from this ride. It’s just a happy, relaxing ride.
I think if the crowds for this ever do die down to like 15 minutes (will this ever happen?), it’s a nice ride to end your day on.
The Snugly Duckling
Curious if I could tempt fate twice, after scoring the fastpass for the Rapunzel ride, I did a morbile order for the Snugly Duckling quick-service restaurant (quick-service just means you order, find a table, then go get your food from a pickup window when it’s ready).
I managed to order a caramel muffin and the strawberry and lemon dessert in a pretend, plastic frying pan. It came with a souvenir, tiny, plate with the Rapunzel ride on it, a design which I love.
While the caramel muffin (let’s face it – this is a cupcake) was fabulous in that it wasn’t as rich as I had dreaded it would be, the strawberry and lemon dessert was rather bland. I mixed the lemon mousse (I’m assuming it was a mousse) with the strawberry puree as much as I could before eating the pastry on which they both sat, but the dull taste of the pastry simply overpowered everything.
If I can ever go again, I’ll only get the caramel cupcake from here.
The gift shop
Considering Disney, I thought there would be a gift shop at every single ride for this area. I had just assumed, stepping off the Rapunzel ride, I’d be shepherded right into a gift shop with Rapunzel everything under the sun.
Not the case.
Fantasy Springs (for now anyway) has only one gift shop: on the first floor of the hotel, facing into the park.
It’s not a vast shop, but if you want to say you bought a Fantasy Springs souvenir inside the actual Fantasy Springs, then this is the shop for you.
Just keep in mind that most shops throughout DisneySea offered Fantasy Springs stuff, and I thought the shop was kind of lacking in what I was looking for (just some pencils would have been nice, more necklaces, keychains, shirts that aren’t just t-shirts), but I know Fantasy Springs only just opened so I’m sure the greater Disney powers that be will fine-tune this later.
Overall
Though it’s a tiny area with impressive wait times, I have fallen madly in love with it. I loved all the carvings of Disney characters around the water features, I loved seeing Captain Hook’s ship docked in a little lake, I loved finally feeling like I was part of that great Rapunzel scene from the movie.
I think this area will be nothing short of magical when the crowds finally do die down enough that access will no longer be restricted and wait times still won’t be an issue. I don’t know how many years that will take (10 or more?), but I’m in it for the long haul, so I can wait.
Considering Disneyland is redoing Space Mountain right now, I’m thinking maybe when that’s newly opened, maybe interest in Fantasy Springs will wane a tiny bit, and that’s when I’ll pounce and try to go back again.