Chimelong Spaceship in Zhuhai, China is the latest groundbreaking project from the Guangzhou-based Chimelong Group. Opened in September 2023, the massive attraction has already set seven Guinness World Records, including the world’s largest indoor theme park and the world’s largest aquarium. The attraction covers over 4,000,000 square feet of enclosed space and also includes the world’s largest simulator attraction with 304 seats on a single motion base.
Standing around 650 metres long, with over 1 million square feet of public space on each of two massive levels, the aquatic park is located next to the all-new 1,250-room Chimelong Spaceship Hotel and is part of the same resort as Chimelong Ocean Kingdom.
The Spaceship’s principal attraction is a spectacular marine science walkthrough divided into 10 separate zones and biomes. The Bezark Company, a California-based international creator of immersive experiences, was brought in to help Chimelong realize its ambitious vision for each of these zones through original storytelling, new IP characters, animatronics, media, and interstitial entertainment.
Adam Bezark, president/chief creative officer, and Michael “Baz” Balzer, lead creative director, told blooloop about the process.
A fun project
The Spaceship project, Adam Bezark says, was fun to work on:
“It’s been a crazy roller coaster of a gig! We had known the Chimelong folks for a long time but had never done a project with them. They kept saying, ‘We have got to do something together,’ and we kept in touch for several years. Then, at one point we checked in with them, and they said, ‘There is this small thing you could help us with’, and they told us about this project they were working on, which was an aquarium/theme park hybrid that they were building next to the existing Ocean Kingdom Park.
“We had seen Ocean Kingdom and loved it. Now Chimelong said, ‘Well, here’s our next project. It could use some entertainment and IP. Can you come over?’”
When they arrived, the Bezark team discovered that construction of the gigantic building (designed by Legacy Entertainment and Hetzel Design) was already underway. Plus, Chimelong had the basic zones and animal exhibits notionally framed.
“They knew it would be an epic marine life experience. The designs they had up to that point were traditional, aquarium-type designs. They were educational, and there were nice environments, but there wasn’t much in the way of entertainment or storytelling.”
The guest experience at Chimelong Spaceship
Balzer takes up the narrative:
“Chimelong Spaceship is, with 397,064 square meters of enclosed area, the world’s largest indoor theme park. The whole ground floor is one single, linear walkthrough experience. The experience is divided into geographic regions. Visitors start in Asian Wetlands, then progress to a South American rainforest, then to an African freshwater preserve, a Coral Reef, and so on.
“Eventually, you get into the deep-water region where there are open ocean animals,” he explains. “It was organized as an interesting conceptual flow. They wanted more fun and storytelling to tie the zones together into a coherent experience. We went away and came back with a few quick ideas – some fun little character things that were relevant to each of the areas.”
The Chimelong team suggested Bezark show their ideas to Su Zhigang, the chairman and founder of Chimelong Group.
“That was an amazing moment,” Adam Bezark says. “We showed him just a couple of quick little ideas about how to add the kind of fun and character they were looking for. And Mr. Su got it immediately. And suddenly our world exploded.”
Based on the quick ideas the Bezark team pitched, Mr. Su asked the group to come up with story, characters, and entertainment concepts for the entire main floor mega-experience.
The creative process
Michael “Baz” Balzer is Bezark’s senior creative director. Describing the creative process, he tells blooloop:
“We had that meeting with Mr. Su in December of 2018. The last thing he said was, ‘Can you guys come back in two weeks, and bring your whole team?’ We came home on 23 December and were back in China on 15 January. Within a couple of days, we had 10 or 12 people on the ground in China. We were given a little conference room to set up shop.”
Bezark adds: “That trip was around three weeks. It was a kind of rolling charette, where we brainstormed our way from zone to zone.”
“Some zones were pretty far along already. Some areas were empty, and we had to figure out what that room was going to be, so there were a couple of blank canvases. It was very different for every biome or area we worked on.”
By the end of that effort, the team had resolved 11 zones in the park, along with an overarching story for the entire experience.
“We presented all of the story concepts to Mr. Su and his management team,” says Bezark. “They loved it. We jumped from blue-sky concepts straight into design-build production. Things were moving a thousand miles an hour…
…and then Covid happened.”
Chimelong Spaceship: a beautiful space
The Covid shutdown in 2020 happened at a critical point in the development of the park, right in the middle of production. The Bezark team had been travelling to Chimelong every month to check on and direct the project’s progress:
“And then we had two years of not being able to.”
Inevitably, some elements evolved in new directions. However:
“We’re amazed at how it turned out,” says Bezark. “We finally got back over there for the first time in two years, last July, and saw how everything had come together. It’s lovely – just wonderful. Mr. Su pulled off an incredible achievement. To be able to withstand that kind of disruption at that point in the development phase, while your parks are shut down (and so is your revenue) is courageous and extraordinary.”
The completed Chimelong Spaceship, he reiterates, is a massive space:
“There are three or four hours’ worth of content to explore just on that lower level. It is a staggering amount of stuff, and they executed it beautifully.”
From Singing Oysters to Scaredy Shark
The exhibit zones had different visual styles. Bezark and Balzer described a few of their favourites.
“We took our cues from the environments being built,” Balzer says. “We explored what kind of characters and stories might come out of each environment.”
Bezark agrees, explaining:
“One area that got a major revision was the shark exhibit. It initially looked like a Star Wars-type high-tech laboratory. Our idea was to develop a story that addressed how people feel about sharks, bringing them along on a fun, educational journey. People are afraid of sharks, but when you learn about them, they’re really cool.
“It was one of our youngest coordinators, a marine biology enthusiast, who said, ‘Well, what about a little shark who’s afraid of sharks?’ And Scaredy Shark was born.”
Scaredy Shark is a cute, cartoon hammerhead shark who is scared of everything… especially other sharks. Bezark adds:
“As you go through the shark exhibit, she becomes increasingly aware of how awesome sharks are, what her role is as a shark, and how to live in that universe. By the end, she’s happily doing what sharks do. It’s really cute.”
“Figuring out Scaredy opened the creative floodgates for us,” Balzer says. “Once we found that storyline, we built a new environment to replace that high-tech, futuristic spaceship environment. It became a spooky cave with a scary, haunted house style. Along the way, there were a few animatronics and interactives. So, you would see Scaredy Shark learning and growing a little more confident.
“Then there was the reveal of the shark tank, and after that, it’s lighter and happier: sharks aren’t so bad, after all. By the end, it’s celebratory.”
IP that supports Chimelong Spaceship’s message
This, he explains, is a good example of how the Bezark team’s process worked:
“We sometimes worked from the character back, sometimes from the message forward: What is the point of this exhibit? What’s the takeaway we want, and how do we get there? Sometimes it was Mr. Su just saying he wanted something amazing and mind-boggling, like a Coral Monster.”
This, Bezark says, is the character that Chimelong is most proud of:
“It began as a conversation with Mr. Su and the in-house team. They explained they were building the world’s biggest indoor live coral reef, which would be populated by marine creatures and fish, and visible not only from inside the park walkthrough but also from the restaurant of the adjacent hotel.
They said, ‘We are going to have this beautiful reef and all these exhibits about coral. What else can we do?’ We said, ‘Well, what if you feel as if you can shrink down to the size of a fish and be among the coral, and there are some little coral characters who talk to you?’ Mr. Su said, ‘No. Bigger, bigger, bigger.’”
The Bezark team’s response was the giant Coral Monster – a massive, eight-meter-tall animatronic that anchors the entire Coral exhibit.
“It’s huge,” says Bezark, “and it’s marvellous.”
The Coral Monster
Balzer presented the team’s new concept as a giant coral reef that comes to life before our eyes, turning into a gigantic friendly creature… accompanied by its friends, a group of colourful Coral Babies. “Mr. Su saw it, and he loved the idea.” Thus, Chimelong Spaceship’s Coral Monster was born.
“It became a lovely opportunity to talk about the coral lifecycle. Once we had that character, we spent quite a long time developing the show. It tells the story of what coral is, that it’s alive, and touches on the many perils that humans pose to coral. Issues like bleaching due to climate change, or physical damage from divers or boats.
“That helped us come up with the media that appears behind the Coral Monster and his family. It feels as if you’re the size of a fish. You’re looking up at the world and seeing giant projected humans snorkelling in and damaging the coral. Later, having learned a bit more, they return to repair the coral.”
The Coral Monster show can work in two modes, he explains:
“It can run as a pre-programmed, recorded show, and, with a flip of a switch, can also operate in puppet mode, so the Coral Monster can talk with kids and answer questions.”
Bezark adds:
“I don’t think that’s been done a lot before, and certainly not at this scale. It’s cool to see little kids talking to this giant but friendly-looking Coral Monster.”
“It can be a very interactive show,” Balzer says. “There are also live performers who can interact with the audience and get them talking to the Coral Monster. It has wound up being one of the most fun and colourful shows in the whole place.”
The African Watering Hole at Chimelong Spaceship
The African biome is highlighted by a manatee and dugong animal encounter experience, with scenic design that incorporates architecture and natural settings from across the continent. It is also the location for the first floor’s only dedicated dining option — a large open dining area that seemed to be begging for a little show magic.
After designing an animatronic manatee and dugong entry experience, Bezark looked to build on Chimelong’s long history of animated dining experiences:
“Chimelong has a tradition of doing animatronic shows in their cafeterias,” Bezark observes. “Every new project they do is an order of magnitude more polished and cooler than the one before. They’ve only been doing this for around 20 years, and the amount of creative growth they’ve shown is staggering.”
For the restaurant experience, it was decided to create a fun, musical show set at a watering hole on the savannah, starring animals that would naturally congregate there. The job of Balzer and his team was not only to make it cute, but also to make it meaningful, and to imbue it with a degree of authenticity.
“The Africa show might have been the most research-intensive part of this project,” Balzer comments. “A lot of this park’s experience is walkthrough. In China, the flow through a walkthrough exhibit tends to be very brisk. This was one of the very few instances where people are sitting down, and you have their relatively captive attention for 20 minutes, so we took it as an opportunity.”
A family show with a focus on authenticity
Balzer continues:
“We consulted with a range of experts across different areas of academia, arts and culture to make sure that we were capturing the correct musicality for different regions of Africa, the right instrumentation for the music, the right graphics, textiles and colours, all of which have tradition and meaning.
“The animatronic dining shows you see at Chimelong all have little singing numbers, and characters taking you through stories. We love that format. We decided to stick with it and created a band for The Watering Hole at Chimelong Spaceship.”
“It’s a five-piece band; each animal musician in the group is playing an instrument representative of a specific region of Africa. That character also shares a couple of words, during the sing-along, in a language that is spoken in that region of Africa, so everyone gets a chance to learn a phrase or two in a bunch of different languages.”
They imagined The Watering Hole as if it were a real bar, with regulars who hang out at the bar telling terrible jokes represented by animals:
“It’s more immersive than a classic animatronic dinner show. It’s all around the room, so you’re sitting among the animals,” Balzer says. “One of the coolest things was that when we got to production, we got a legendary Kora player, Foday Musa Suso, to come in and play the Kora parts for this.”
In most cases, the authenticity of the design was about the environment:
“In every zone that we went through, effort had been taken to make sure that it looked just like the South American rainforest, or the Asian wetlands. This was a moment for us to make sure that this felt culturally like Africa. Doing that throughout was part of the real fun of the challenge.”
Chimelong Spaceship and the company’s tradition of excellence
Chimelong’s success, Balzer says, comes from its relentless devotion pursuit of excellence. “The company always goes the extra kilometre to achieve great results for their audience.”
Bezark agrees:
“Mr. Su is a world-class impresario who trusts his instincts to make billion-dollar decisions… and his instincts are never wrong. He has built this empire purely on his gut, and a sense of what people will enjoy. It’s stunning how successful he’s been. He still guides the creative work himself. He trusts a very small team of people around him to carry out his visions, allowing him to connect directly with his audience.”
A love of entertainment
Mr. Su told the Bezark team something that endeared him to them early on:
“He said that other companies often build theme parks as a real estate investment. There was a time recently when a bunch of projects being built around China only existed to secure land, so they could build condos and malls. They would put a theme park in as a cultural nod to the local government and would do so as cheaply as possible, just to tick that box.
“He said, ‘I never want to do that. I just want to entertain people, and that’s what I’m here to do. I want to create great entertainment.’”
Over the years Chimelong has built on that vision, gradually adding beautiful multiple parks, hotels and entertainment to its portfolio. They’ve also gradually added western design companies into their extended team: companies like PGAV and FORREC for master planning, for instance, and firms like Bezark, THG, Miziker Entertainment, Zeitgeist, Super78 and Rick Rothschild to create attractions.
“He listens,” Bezark comments. “He absorbs the information, then converts our Western thinking into what works for him and his audience. Also, he held it together through Covid, which must have been devastating, but he never lost his good cheer and optimism: he never stopped looking forward and is still moving ahead towards new adventures and new ideas.”
In November 2023, The Themed Entertainment Association (TEA) announced Su Zhigang as the winner of the Buzz Price Thea Award, recognizing a lifetime of distinguished achievements.
“He’s a force of nature,” says Bezark. “He truly is the Chinese Walt Disney, in terms of his energy and his desire to build great things for people. We love the fact that he likes having folks like us come in to play, too, because it’s such fun. It took us years to find an entertainment company that loves this work as much as we do… and is doing it out of love.”
