Jon-C

No more hand-drawn films for DISNEY?

Found this article today.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/Movi...eut/index.html

Ray H

Bad movie on Eisner's part to shut down their traditional animation studios. It's what the company was built upon!

Walt would be rolling in his grave.

This is probably discussed already in some "Disney sucks!" or whatever thread.

This makes me wonder what'll happen to the familiar faces we know from all those DVD extras.

chris winters

this is a tuff subject. I dont think 2D traditional animation is dead per say, but it definately out of vogue at the moment. There was a lot of fat within Disney, with top animators making millions, and storylines and creative impulses crushed by corporate focus groups and marketing concerns. Does anyone really care wether 2d continued to exist at disney just so they could pull a lever and crank out anouther brother bear, or treasure planet. If nothing else it may at least alow new blood and risk taking within the company. I guess its like they say, somtimes you have to hit rock bottom before turning it all around. I do feel for all the talented artists pushed out of work possible unnessisarily, however. I have a feeling their first couple CG features will suffer from the same problem all their recent product has, and will do substantially less buissiness then pixar or even dreamworks stuff.

Movies are like books, except you can\'t set your\' drink on them, well.. unless its a DVD...oh nevermind

Ben_@

it is rather sad, but I have a feeling that hand drawn animation may not be gone forever from Disney (if Roy has anything to say about it). And saying that Disney won't be strong in animated films without Pixar is probably not an accurate prediction either, IMO. After all, Disney has had a flair for story and character without them.

The Animation Show is proof that hand drawn 2D animation is not dead! It is worth checking out (DVD is coming soon). Lots of very good independant animated shorts. the website is animationshow.com

Richard Paul

There is reason to believe that 3D animation may replace 2D animation for the majority of future animated films. 3D animation has a sense of realism that not even the best 2D animation could ever attain. It may seem a negative statement for 2D animation, but not all films need to be realistic.

Disney may be seriously underestimating how hard it will be to change from 2D to 3D. It may take years and several movies before Disney becomes equal to established 3D studios such as Pixar and PDI. Changing to 3D may not be a bad idea, but firing your 2D animators and closing down entire 2D animation studios wasn't smart. A gradual change would have been far better than a sudden and complete change to 3D animation.

Damin J Toell

Has it been 3D's realism that has propelled it to its current revered state? Have the popular 3D animated feature films really been particularly realistic-looking? Do fish really look like they do in Finding Nemo? Is Shrek a particularly convincing replication of reality?

3D technology surely has the potential to heighten realism, but it doesn't seem to me that that has been much of a contributing factor in its success in the field of animated features thus far.

DJ

Ernest Rister

It's funny...prior to the last few years, no one referred to traditional hand-drawn animation as "2-D" animation. I still don't. If I have to make a distinction, I always say "hand-drawn", not "2-D". Calling hand-drawn animation "2-D animation" makes it seem like it's missing something, like a tricycle with only two wheels. Can you imagine Walt Disney introducing Pinocchio as "our second 2-D animated film, Pinocchio"? Pixar makes five movies, now everyone on the net is referring to hand-drawn animation as "2-D"...and that verbage is spilling over into the quality commentators. Roger Ebert used it last week in his review for Home on the Range.

"There is reason to believe that 3D animation may replace 2D animation for the majority of future animated films. 3D animation has a sense of realism that not even the best 2D animation could ever attain."

Hand-drawn animated films are *inherently* unreal, that's part of their magic and their charm. They have always been unreal. They are representational of the real world, they do not attempt to replicate it -- that's what live-action cameras are for. Final Fantasy is probably the height of visual realism within an animated context, and the film bombed. At the end of the day, it's not the medium, it's the story and the screenplay, and Disney has been sucking wind in the both of those categories for a while now. Pixar, on the other hand, has had two of their films nominated for screenwriting Oscars (Toy Story and Finding Nemo). THAT'S why their films are doing so well and why Disney's films are struggling. Disney's Dinosaur was CGI, and it, too, was a disaster in the screenwriting department, and it, too, was a disappointment at the box office.

"I have a feeling their first couple CG features will suffer from the same problem all their recent product has, and will do substantially less business then pixar or even dreamworks stuff."

I agree completely, 100%, especially since the trailer for Chicken Little on the Brother Bear DVD is flat-out repellant.

Jon Mahoney

This is such a horrible idea. As stated above, Disney's problem isn't hand drawn vs computer generated cartoons, it's that their stories suck. They've used up a lot of the easy fairy tales and have simply run out of ideas. The other thing I've heard is that even if one of the screenwriters/artists have a good idea, it's usually shot down by someone on the marketing/corporate side. Pixar films and Shrek have had great stories that make them appealing, not just that they're done on a computer.


Eisner's days at Disney are numbered anyways, he's already been stripped of one of his titles. He's majorly screwed up the Pixar deal. Instead of giving Pixar what they want, which is more of the profits and Disney still distributing them, Disney now has nothing. Instead of a smaller profit on each Pixar release, Disney will get $0. Other studios seem to be willing to give in to Pixar and give them a fair deal, considering that Pixar makes everything themselves and just needs it distributed. One last thing, Disney sucks for putting Toy Story in their "vault" for the next 10 years, it's not even their movie!

Michael St. Clair

Would 'Finding Nemo' have flopped if it were 2D?

Would 'Brother Bear' be a hit in CGI?

Jason Seaver

I don't know that they would have gone to the other extreme, but I think that (a) the use of different tools from the outset would have resulted in different movies being made from the same stories, and that (b) the general audience does have a real preference for digital animation over hand-drawn. Adults I talk to will go to a Pixar movie or the likes of Shrek or Ice Age, but pay no attention whatsoever to hand-drawn movies, no matter how much I tell them that The Iron Giant is the best animated movie in years, that Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis is perfect, that The Triplets of Belleville is brilliant, or that Treasure Planet is utterly beautiful. They seem to have it in their head that the digital stuff looks more "real" and that a movie looking "realistic" is what animation should aspire to.

I don't think the digital-vs-ink issue is the only one; switching animation methods for those two movies would have simply closed the gap some. But to pretend it isn't a real factor in what audiences that are neither kids nor animation enthusiasts go to see is mistaken.

Are you sure Disney doesn't finance Pixar's movies, at the very least?

Also, it's kind of disingenuous to say Toy Story isn't even Disney's movie. By the same logic, The Matrix isn't Warner's and E.T. isn't Universal's. It may have been produced by another company, but Disney paid for the production and retains the copyright. That Pixar is looking to own their own films makes them exceptional, putting them in the same category as a scant few large-scale filmmakers (basically, Lucas and Spielberg, and maybe Francis Coppola).