Sadly, the Walt Disney company is gradually shutting down it’s 2-D animation department. They’ve decided that the reason Treasure Planet failed and Finding Nemo succeeded is that Finding Nemo was animated in 3-D. That Finding Nemo featured a fresh, funny script and brilliant voicework by Ellen DeGeneres, while Disney’s 2-D features lately have had mediocre scripts or worse, apparently has nothing to do with it.
All Disney really needed to do was hire some great writers and then (and this is the crucial part, the part that executives generally mess up) get out of the way. Instead, they’re shutting down one of the best hand-drawn animation studios in the world.
This is the kind of thinking that Michael Eisner is paid millions for.
More details over at MousePlanet..
Hm. What about Lilo & Stitch? That was 2-D, and wasn’t it successful?
Timothy Burke had a good post on this too:
http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tburke1/perma80503.html
Wow, this is such depressing news. Hopefully they’ll come to their senses and reopen it.
Michael Eisner will be forever remembered in Hollywood history as the guy who really knew how to get those little plastic tie-in toys into the McDonald’s Happy Meals. And I guess for keeping his hands off Pixar. Ah, the life of a soulless bureaucrat.
The rot set in when Katzenberg went. Also, Jerry Bruckheimer must die.
At least the Japanese still seem to be interested in traditional animation.
[rant]
Stuff like this really pisses me off and really depresses me all at the same time. My significant other and I have run around and around this issue for months now and still have not figured out how it is that studio executives can miss the point by such a wide margin.
We see this every year in the cinema. The Matrix is a surprise hit, so suddenly we see a glut of movies that have bullet-time photography and computer stories. They almost all flop and the studio executives scratch their heads, never quite putting it together that maybe the stories in those knock-offs sucked while The Matrix was at least fairly original. I promise you a rash of pirate movies in the near future (Pirates of the Carribean did pretty well) and a glut of superhero movies (because the fact that people saw Spiderman and X-men is just starting to sink in). I promise you that most of those movies will be dreadful.
It’s this same sort of faulty logic and disrespect for stories that allows for the executives to think that Finding Nemo succeeded based on medium rather than content while Treasure Planet flopped for the same reasons. How, then, to explain the dismal crash-and-burn of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within? For that matter, how do Disney’s executives explain the massive success of anime? While the theatrical take for anime movies hasn’t been too great (mostly because they’ve not been marketed or distributed worth crap, IMO) anime DVDs have been selling really well. None of them are very obviously computer animated (even Spirited Away, which used computers extensively, didn’t look very CG) and yet they’re making a pretty good living for the people at places like ADV Films and Manga Entertainment.
[/rant]
Sigh.
Proof that state of the art technology still won’t necessarily buy you a great or even good film: Final Fantasy. Some good near-Lovecraftian alien monsters, but oy did it suck otherwise.
American movies stopped being good when the man in the pink cardigan started persecuting all your good writers.
That, and TV.
It really is upside down thinking. Pixar movies rock because the writing and the animation are equally beautiful (plus the use of color is exquisite), while Treasure Planet was an obvious piece of crap. Animation good, but the character design was banal—a problem Disney will face in any medium so long as it insists in pumping out dreck. (Do we really need a 101 Dalmations sequel?)
Maybe they would make smarter decisions if the company stopped trying to own the world.
Avram: Yup, Lilo & Stitch proved that there is a market for well-written, fresh 2-d animation. My guess is that doesn’t fit into the story that Disney execs are interested in seeing, so they just kinda ignore it…
PinkDP: Spirited Away was CGI? Really? I had no idea.
Used CGI extensively, but wasn’t exclusively CGI.
I’m not a big fan of Lilo and Stitch. Sure it was cute and had good stuff, but everything really clever in that movie was already pretty much done by Jhonen Vasquez with Invader Zim, and that includes using Kevin McDonald as the voice of an alien.
I really think, of the past 10 years or so, the only Disney animated movie worth it’s salt has been The Emperor’s New Groove. Besides that, pure schlock. They resort to the same formulae over and over. And frankly, I don’t think they showed any sign of ever reinvigorating their animation studio with anything resembling a soul.
So, here’s the eternal optimist in me speaking, maybe losing the studio is a good thing. Now that the soulless giant is out of the running, a more creative and cutting-edge animation studio can fill the void (maybe Dreamworks?).
On another subject though, PinkDreamPoppies, your post reminds me of a conversation I had with my father, an expert in cinema, where I asked him whatever happened to the Hollywood musical. His response was Sound of Music came out, which was a complete commercial and critical success, and the studios killed the genre by saturating movie theaters with musicals. The thing with Hollywood is many film executives jobs depend on knowing what sells, but you can’t really know if a movie sells until it’s actually distributed. So every executive wants the next big thing, but are scared to death of actually financing anything new.
And Larry, I don’t know if you were being tongue in cheek there, but if not, a lot of great, great American movies have come out post-blacklist. Too many to list. I mean, what about Kubrick?
The thing is, I think that any producer worth his or her salt knows that the next big thing has never resembled the last big thing.
My theory stands, though, that the best thing that movie studios can do is hire good talent (writer, director, actor, etc.), give said talent some money, and then go twiddle their thumbs for awhile. A simple history lesson would reveal that all of the big cinematic hits have been ones with which the studio had more of a hands-off approach.
Unfortunately though, the idea of letting the talent control the production, rather than the other way around, went out of favour in the late seventies and early eighties when a handful of auteurs managed to financially screw-over the big studios with bloated acts of pretension. So really, the studio-controlled movie is something of a reaction to epic flops like Caligula.
…
Now that I’ve stepped back from the whole idea of Disney’s traditional animation department falling apart, the less surprised I am by it. Still depressed, but not as surprised.
I think the first blow against traditional animation came with the release of Beauty and the Beast and Disney’s reaction to its success. I think there must have been someone in the executive echelons of Disney that decided that a significant proportion of the success of Beauty and the Beast had to do with the ballroom sequence, the first animated sequence in a Disney movie to use computer-rendered graphics. At the time, this sequence had a big “wow” factor with critics and became the clip by which the movie was identified (I believe it was the centrepiece of the Academy Award Best Picture clip, but my memory could be deceiving me). I think that all the executive saw was the buzz surrounding the use of computers, and nevermind that the sequence was elegantly directed and appeared in the middle of a well-made, well-written movie with good songs.
A quick survey of Disney’s movies after that point shows a continued dependence on CG and, if my memory of their promotional materials is correct, an emphasis on said CG to hype the movies. I remember watching a number of specials about Disney movies of the era, specifically Aladdin and The Lion King, that elaborated extensively on the computer-generated aspects of those movies while mentioning little else.
Then there was Toy Story and the rest, I think, was just a matter of the CG animated movies doing substantially better than the subpar traditionally animated ones. Two things contributed to this, I believe. The first is that Disney significantly embraced a different style of animation than it had used in many of its previous movies, moving to a more angular surrealistic style that didn’t go over well with any of the viewers of even film critics that I talked to. The second contributing factor, I think, had to do with the amount of care and attention put into the CG productions simply because they cost substantially more money. If you’re going to invest a lot of money in a thing, then that thing ought to be of the best quality possible. Disney then began to treat its traditionally animated features as cheaper knock-offs undeserving of attention and hype, a meme that the public picked up.
Really, though, is there that much that Disney could do to bring back the credibility of its traditional animation department? I know a lot of people who won’t touch a trad. Disney movie with a ten-foot pole precisely because the last dozen or so have been so dreadful. I don’t think anything short of a total reinvention of the department, its goals, and its product would have been able to win people back into the theatre.
I don’t know, PDP and Raznor – it seems to me that your real problem is, you both dislike modern Disney animated movies. In the last decade or so – or of the last dozen or so Disneys – Disney has produced Aladdin, The Lion King, Pocohantas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mulan, The Emperor’s New Groove and Lilo and Stich. If you really think that all of those movies are worthless (or, in Raznor’s case, think all but Emperor’s New Groove was worthless), then I think the truth is probably that you just don’t like Disney movies very much.
In most people’s view, the most recent revival of Disney’s creative juices began with The Little Mermaid in 1989. Here’s what Disney has done since then:
Although there are individual exceptions, it seems to me that unless you just dislike the entire form, it’d be hard to argue that the first half of this list isn’t an amazing run of Disneys. In fact, in the entire history of Disney, only the first few years (Snow White,Pinocchio,Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi) and their hot streak in the 1950s (Cinderella, Alice In Wonderland, Peter Pan, Lady And The Tramp, Sleeping Beauty, and 101 Dalmations) are at all comparable to what Disney produced in the 1990s.
What’s happened recently – say, from Tarzan on – is movies that are mediocre-at-best, plus two movies (Emperor’s New Groove and Lilo) which were sweet-natured and well-done but also somehow… unambitious. Compared to the Disneys of the 1990s, the 00s Disneys are both mediocre and have a very limited sense of vision.
Oh, well.
PDP, I think Disney could very easily win back an audience for traditional animated movies. All they have to do is produce a string of ambitious, well-written 2-d animated movies, as good as the Disneys produced from 1989-1998 or so. I don’t think people (other than weirdos like us) think “well, the last several Disney productions have been mediocre, so they don’t have much credibility as a studio any more”; if a movie is fun and well-written and gets good word of mouth and reviews, people will attend.
The situation at Disney now is no more hopeless than it was in 1988 – or than it was in 1949, for that matter. Or at least, it doesn’t have to be that hopeless… but closing the studio down does make it hopeless.
Okay, I guess I’ll have to grant my view on this is skewed by the fact I like darkness in movies, and prefer animation of the likes of the better Anime or Ralph Bakshi over kid’s stuff as far as animation. But whether Disney should or shouldn’t have eliminated its animation studio (and eliminating it has to be one of the stupidest things they could have done) this does open itself up for another studio to fill the void, which could be a very good thing for animated movies on the whole. IMO the recent stream of Dreamworks films have shown quite a lot of innovation, but suffer from trying to “be Disney” which they can’t be since only Disney can be Disney, and anything else is merely imitation. Perhaps, though, with Disney dropping out, Dreamworks can seize the oppurtunity and try to develop its own style. Then, as a longer shot but a possibility, executives at 20th Century Fox could take the oppurtunity to refinance its animation studio, and we’d have two “new” major animation studios to compete for the best stuff.
I dunno, that particular situation does seem a bit far fetched. But I still think that there’ll something to fill the void. Ignoring Disney, for better and for worse, we’ve seen recently a reinvigoration of American animation on television, starting with the success of the Simpsons in the early ’90s, and continuing with incredibly innovative animated shows of recent years, like Family Guy and Samurai Jack which remain quite popular. I don’t think it’s too much to think that this innovation can make the jump into feature length animation through some major studio in the near future.
But then, what Disney is doing highlights the unfortunately unenlightened attitudes toward animation in this country. I mean, look at the Oscars last year. Of the five nominated animated shorts, only Mt Head wasn’t computer animated. And then the cute but unambitious Chubb Chubbs wins over the absolutely brilliant, brilliant, Das Rad. I mean, really.
Sorry if this seems a bit incoherent, by the way. I’m a bit tired. But, dammit, I’m posting anyway!
I think they finally watched a Miyazaki movie and realized that trying to compete was hopeless ;)
Ampersand, as you know a common theory is that Eisner’s victory over Katzenberg was an aesthetic disaster for Disney. Factor Katzenberg into your list of post-1989 Disney hits and the picture changes: indeed, you rightly stress the first half of your list. My feeling is that there was a Disney renaissance in the early 1990s (as you note), then Katzenberg left and Eisner’s vision gradually won. Yes, there are echoes of the past afterward (Hercules, Mulan have them). Revolutions don’t happen overnight. I find this the more painful in moving from the Katzenberg-led renaissance to Treasure Planet, perfect Eisner.
IIRC The Emperor’s New Groove was semi-independent. It certainly plays with Hanna & Barbara techniques quite alien to Disney. Wonderful movie. Evidently Pixar is now loosening its ties to Disney.
Samizdata has a superb overview up of the mechanics of summer blockbusters. He explains for instance why Hollywood plunged into big-money sequels, and why they’re pulling out (we’ll see that around 2005).
Spirited Away took my breath away. People say Princess Mononoke is better, which is hard to imagine.
John – I haven’t had a chance yet to see the second half of Spirited Away but I really liked what I saw. On the other hand, I found Princess Mononoke to be soulless (although I’d like to read a translation of the script that wasn’t done by Neil Gaiman; I’m convinced that that man sucks the soul out of everything he touches).
Amp – In your list you forgot a few other animated movies that got released into theatres: namely, A Goofy Movie (1995), Doug’s 1st Movie (1999), The Tigger Movie (2000), Return to Never Land (2002), The Jungle Book 2 (2003), and Piglet’s Big Movie (2003). There was also The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and James and the Giant Peach (1996) although these were both stop-motion animation rather than traditional animation.
That said, I can see that the bulk of bad Disney movies released to theatres has been since about 1999 or so. So no, I don’t think that Disney’s doomed a needs a reinvention, although I do think that they need to take some time to sit down and reevaluate their movie-making method.
On a related note, though, I did think that pretty much all of those movies on your list (Disney’s “classic” list, actually) after and including Pocahontas were all that great, and frankly, I never met a kid who did, either. Perhaps I’ve just been meeting all the wrong kids, but I don’t remember having met anyone under the age of twelve who liked those movies.
…
I think that if Disney is going to reestablish itself, though, then they’re going to have to make a darn good traditionally animated movie and market the hell out of it. I think that right now parents are a bit wary of seeing Disney movies (traditionally animated ones, at least) because of the recent glut of bad ones.
…
In the interest of full disclosure, I probably should say that: no, I don’t like Disney movies. I find the gross majority of them to be half-baked and homogenous. They’re well-made and spectacularly animated, but I think that, as a whole, Disney doesn’t make good movies because their scripts are rather dreadful.
Two great Tim Burton movies: I didn’t know about their Disney link.
Thanks for the Mononoke take, PDP. I guess I’ll see it one day. Do see the second half of Spirited Away. There’s a wonderful train ride.
Upon thought, I think I should revise what I said above, not because I didn’t say what I mean, but what I meant doesn’t really reflect what I think. I don’t dislike light, happy animation per se, I dislike that that’s the only thing that’s feature length coming out in America. The advent of computer animation is a great step forward to animation in general, but recently studios have used it in disregard of traditional animation which I find exceedingly annoying.
I still stand by what I said about this possibly being a good thing, though. I think we’re in a time where innovative animation studios are ready to start up, and once you take the 500 lb gorilla out of the ring (ahhh mixed metaphor) we could have a sudden rise in new animators. I guess, though, we’ll have to wait a few years before we see what ultimately happens.
I think that the 2-d movies and cartoons are better. That is the way that they started cartoons out and that is the way that they should forever be.I am a young artist with a fait of being a great artist as Walt Disney was. I love trying to draw the 2-d cartoons that were once created by Walt Disney, and the cartoons that i was watching as a kid. I do not think that they should get rid of the 2-d cartoons, but that is just my opinion. If all of the cartoons are going to start being created on a computer than the artist out there like me will not ever get to full-fill their dream.Just think about it for a minute, look at all of the great movies that the kids watched. The Lion King, Lilo and Sticth, Pocahontas, The Fox and the Hound, The Little Mermaid, and Mulan. Those were all great created peices of art.
Thank You,
Michael Tucker
points of note: “CG” and “polygonal” are not mutually inclusive terms. Spirited Away was, in fact, almost entirely CG. rather than hand draw and ink every cel, using a stylus to draw, ink, and color by computer reduces actual cost of production while improving perceived quality.
personally, I think Disney could do wonders by simply branching out. rather than forcing a movie out based loosely on some myth, legend, or literature, they could make an earnest attempt to woo some of the sharper writers and creators from Japan (or anywhere for that matter) with fresh ideas. I bet most mangakan would jump at the chance to work with a 20 million dollar budget.
after all, it’s not like disney attempts to avoid an anime-esque appearance in it’s films.
of course, I’m also not entirely sure why Disney never went aggressive in the domestic release anime department anyway. it’s not like they don’t own subsidiaries that release non-kiddie movies.
so far, all they’ve purchased are miyazaki movies. with their backroll, they could easily push out a whole anime series once or twice a year.
oh well, one more of those “things that’ll be different when I’m in charge”
I really think that Disney 2-d animation is great!
i under stand that they have been going down hill. i think thier problem is that they are makng the same mistake i make. i can tell that they are not putting much thought thier writing.im 14 and i have a big mind. i thought of sequals for dinsney movies. i would do any thing to play my caractars. thats why im going to become an actress so i can. but i hate to say now that rap has come along. not many kids/teenagers are into this stuff. they give bad examples for outher kids telling what they should do wacth and see. wich i am agianst all rap nonscence. so i tought of a great teenage movie that all teenagers would whach it’s a PG movie not 2-d animation. this is a Cool movie for teenagers so far half of my friends thier freinds and so on injoyed it. the turth i like 2-d animation more than 3-D. 3-D dose not inspier me as much cuase it really dosent have a big effect on me but 2-D it juist takes me away! so i think that they should keep doing 2d animation.my favorite and always favorite 2D animation is Treasure Planet. my favoirte 3D animation is Finding Nemo!
this just in. i hate to say iv finally have come to a conclusion. for get some of the other information i have wrote. ecept the parts of me likeing 2-d animation. i allways will. heres whats makeing Disney 2-D animation go down hill! it’s thier sequals! even i write better sequals then they do! when they make a sequal it’s never really good. the only good sequals they ever really wrote was for pocahantis,and Lion king. they were the best seqauls theymade me want to whach it over and over agian.
nobody wants to wach something that’s not ganna make them want to whach it over agian. thats why they make movies for pepole to whact that movie over and over agian. and if thier sequals stink! nobody gonna by the movie cuase they dont want to wach it agian! take the sequal for lio and stich. that won stank. they used the same music. you know how the other experments are his cusins. i was waching the seires the epesode with angel well thiers a BIG PROBLEM! he cant fall in love with her! because she is his cousin! so he can’t be love with her! thats the most stupiedist mistake they have ever made!
anyway… i bet if they take my advise for what im going to say right now i bet they will be better of if they want to keep doing thier 2-D animation. i perfer they use the writers who wrote the sequals for lion king and pocahantes.
if you agree with me that thier sequals are whats makeing their 2-D animation boaring write me a letter at giggelsapprocott@yahoo.com make shure you right it as shown! no capital letters!
Please can i wach a spider man 2 movie please.
pocket bike
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