Animated train wreck....
Killing what made Disney Disney?
Animation studio's closure bad for Disney; bitter blow for Orlando
By Roger Moore | Sentinel Movie Critic
Posted January 13, 2004
Disney, the company that rode to glory on the colorful,
animated backs of a mouse and seven dwarfs, took a
giant step getting out of hand-drawn animation
altogether Monday when it shut down Disney Feature
Animation Florida, its Orlando studio.
It's a "cost-cutting" move from a company that isn't so
much soul-searching as selling its soul -- and selling
short. This follows years of overseas studio closures
as well as recent layoffs here and at the studio's
flagship animation operation in Burbank. Disney has
even been selling off the animation gear, down to the
desks the animators used to do their scribbling.
Disney isn't getting out of animation entirely. But the
company is abandoning a way of making films that has
connected with audiences for more than 70 years, an
expensive, labor-intensive and painstaking style of
animation that always had been worth the expense --
up to now.
That means that the Orlando-made Brother Bear and
next April's computer-and-hand-animated Home on
the Range will be the last Disney cartoons animated
by artists sketching and painting and making the
characters move. They will be the last films that Walt
himself could have picked up a pencil and pitched in
on, were he thawed out from that freezer where urban
legend has long ensconced him.
No more Fantasia hippos in tutus, dancing with caped
alligators, given their fluid, comic dimension by
painstaking, cell-by-cell drawing and painting.
No more little elephants who can fly or little Hawaiian
girls who go their own way, breaking our hearts
because feelings transmit better when they go straight
from hand to page, without a silicon chip in between.
Computer-animated movies from Toy Story and
Finding Nemo to DreamWorks' Shrek have boasted
of the increasing "realism" of the forms and motion.
But nobody goes to a cartoon for the realism. We want the abstract, the whimsy,
the personality and humanity that rendering figures by hand, frame by frame,
gives us. Disney, the studio that invented and perfected the "classic" hand-drawn
animated feature film with 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1941's
Dumbo and 1967's The Jungle Book, will never win a best-animated-feature
Oscar for the sort of handcrafted films that made the studio famous. That's ironic,
given that this is an Oscar category pretty much invented to honor films such as
Beauty and the Beast (1991), The Lion King (1994) and Tarzan (1999).
Sure, all those films had a bit of computer assistance, here and there. And
Disney expects to share in Pixar's computer-animated 3-D glory if Finding
Nemo cops the animation Oscar this year. But already the buzz is building for
the eccentric and personal -- and decidedly hand-drawn -- French cartoon The
Triplets of Belleville. Disney doesn't make them like that anymore. (And if you
believe the Disney spin that it has two more traditionally animated features "in
development," I have some Florida swamp land I'd like to show you -- right next
to the multimillion-dollar animation headquarters being abandoned at Walt Disney
World.
For Orlando, this is a bitter blow, and not just for the more than 250 animators
who will either be uprooted or have to change careers. While Burbank was
frittering away millions on ideas bad (Hercules, Atlantis: The Lost Empire,
The Emperor's New Groove) and badly executed (Treasure Planet), the
Orlando operation was Disney's home of the hits.
The little studio that started as a walk-through attraction at the Disney-MGM
Studios theme park earned its stripes by making Roger Rabbit shorts. It later
became home to much of the animation division's best work -- the Eastern-art
inspired Mulan, the retro watercolored Lilo & Stitch -- films that recalled the
golden age of animation while reminding Disney that story and emotion are what
brings cartoons to life.
Disney's historic difficulties in wrestling with stories that weren't the whitest of
white bread disappeared when the work was done far from the eyes of the big
bosses in California. The Chinese folk tale Mulan, a dazzlingly stylish telling of
the African-American Legend of John Henry, the watercolor Hawaiians of Lilo &
Stitch and the American Indians of Brother Bear all rolled out of Orlando.
If Brother Bear -- the weakest of the Orlando-made cartoons but still a
moneymaker -- suffered from the same story and character problems that have
troubled the Burbank factory of late, it may be because of neglect. The front
office stopped sweating the details on these films years ago. It has long been
more concerned with renewing its contract with Pixar, slashing costs and
replicating the fluky box-office bonanza of The Lion King, the hand-drawn
megahit that made the accountants salivate and the studio overextend.
After the success of Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and finally The Lion King,
the rare and doted-on animation "events" that came every few years -- roughly
once in a childhood -- became something the studio wanted to count on a couple
of times a year. Films that might have gone direct to video earlier now found their
way into theaters. Worst of all, those cut-rate films, from 2000's The Tigger
Movie to 2001's Recess, cost less than producing a classic -- and earned
money.
The pricey "event" films became devalued -- compromised, formulaic, or attached
too strongly to a single clever notion (Gerald Scarfe's distinct animation style in
1997's Hercules, for instance).
But that's happened before. Disney has weathered dry spells, when the ideas
and the animators got stale and the management crotchety; the whole Robin
Hood (1973) through Oliver & Company (1988) era was the most recent. Other
animation houses either outsourced their hand-drawn animation overseas, or got
out of it altogether.
But there was always somebody at Disney -- some credit Disney nephew Roy
Disney, who just quit the board in a struggle over power and vision -- who
wouldn't let the bean counters kill off Walt's animation division.
It took Jeffrey Katzenberg to micromanage animation back to life. Now he's the K
in DreamWorks SKG, making "tradigital" Disney knockoffs such as Spirit:
Stallion of the Cimarron and Sinbad.
Maybe the staggering success of the computer-animated Toy Story, Finding
Nemo and Shrek has truly rendered hand-drawing characters "old-fashioned"
or impractical. Maybe spotting a common Florida lizard and being inspired to
make an alien named Stitch skitter rather than walk, as Orlando animator Alex
Kuperschmidt did, can be done better with fewer animators playing with a
computer -- in Burbank.
But take away Nemo's 3-D novelty. Give its story and jokes to men and women
with pens and ink. It wouldn't have been the same movie. The folks who drew
Beauty and the Beast or Mulan might have made it even better.
Disney's current leadership can sputter all they want about the nature of
animation evolving, about how they're not "killing" anything, about the need to
slash costs to boost a deflated stock price. But the House that Walt Built may
never be the same.
Disney boss Michael Eisner is at an age where he should start thinking about his
Disney legacy. Killing the thing that made Disney Disney is not the way he
should want to be remembered. |
