PAPENBURG, Germany -- The atrium's 13-foot-tall chandelier, with its 40,000 Swarovski crystals, hung in a protective plastic shroud. Twenty-three wall panels, containing more than 200,000 tiles, were yet to be placed in the Royal Court restaurant. Italian artisans were touching up gilding in the lobby that serves two restaurants.
During three shifts a day, about 2,000 workers are preparing the 4,000-passenger Disney Fantasy for its Feb. 9 delivery from the Meyer Werft shipyard here to Disney Cruise Line. (View a slideshow of the ship here or by clicking on the photos.)
The naming ceremony for the Fantasy will be held in New York on March 1. After travel agent and media preview cruises, the vessel will begin revenue service in the Eastern and Western Caribbean out of Port Canaveral on March 31.
The Fantasy is 14 months younger than its fraternal twin the Disney Dream. Within a month of the January 2011 launch of the Dream, Disney Cruise Line executives were making changes to their plans for the Fantasy. Most of the changes are unlikely to be noticed by passengers who have sailed on the Dream: They include tweaking LED ceiling lights, elongating by 16 inches banquettes in Palo and Remy restaurants and reducing the toddlers' nap area to enlarge the adjacent play area of the Oceaneers' Club.
But during a walk-through of the Fantasy at Meyer Werft this month, larger changes on Fantasy were evident both indoors and on the open decks. Planners were motivated by both the traffic flow of the Dream and focus-group studies, and the fact that Fantasy will be sailing seven-night cruises while the Dream does three- and four-night voyages, meaning passengers will be onboard the Fantasy for longer periods of time.
"We don't like the status quo," said Bob Zalk, a senior show producer at Walt Disney Imagineering. "Change is in the DNA of this company."
Among the major changes from Dream to Fantasy, the Dream's lido-deck Wave bar has been replaced by the AquaLab, an interactive splash park where kids can get squirted and drenched. Key to the design are two, 10-foot-long "leaky walls": As a child covers the water squirting from one hole, another gushes.
"Sailing seven nights, we have three sea days and knew we would need more deck space," said Frank de Heer, vice president for new ship development for Walt Disney Imagineering.
So in addition to the AquaLab, canopies cover more deck space than on the Dream, and two small pools were built in the adults-only area forward. One of these pools cleverly repurposes a bulbous satellite dome by encircling its base with a tiled pool; a "rain curtain" falls from nozzles in a canopy beneath the dome.
Inside the ship, the adults-only lounge area, called the District on the Dream but named Europa on the Fantasy, has been radically changed. The bars are more hub-and-spoke, centered on a circular entry bar whose lighting effects will evoke a carousel's motion.
Disney rotates its guests through three table-service restaurants for dinner. Diners will eat in the 696-seat Animator's Palate twice during a Fantasy cruise, and a video shown on the second night promises to be a game changer.
The interactive cartoon features Crush the sea turtle, who chats with specific diners, and will be shown on the first night in the restaurant.
But on diners' second evening in the Animator's Palate, they'll be given place mats bearing the outline of a human figure. Each diner creates a sketch within this outline, and the place mats are collected and scanned. Next, a computer places three of these figures at a time next to familiar Disney characters like Mickey, Donald and Snow White in a clever animation. In unison, images of the passengers' amateur drawings and the Disney characters will march and dance on the room's 130 monitors.
"This animation took more than three years to develop," Zalk said. "We tested it once on the Dream, and all we heard were oohs and aahs."