Brother Bear Conspiracy

[raidermatt]

...funny statement from a company that shut down the Secret Lab,

What's funny, to me anyway, is that I started to put something in my post about Disney's foray into CGI, and subsequent abandonment of the medium. But I didn't have time to make the point, so I left it out.

But again, I really don't think there was any intentional sabotage. Apathy? Yeah. Failure to read where the industry was going? Yeah. Desire to blame the environment rather than an inability to tell a good story? Definitely.

 

[raidermatt]

Above the Rim, while I agree with your end conclusion that Disney has screwed things up royally when it comes to their internal animation, I can't agree with the idea that its becaue they have strayed from their formula of hand-drawn musicals.

I believe its John Lasseter who tells the story of how they presented the Toy Story outline to Disney, and the Disney representatives asked where the "7 songs would be". Pixar didn't feel the movie lent itself to a musical format, and this simply baffled Disney at the time. It wasn't the "right formula".

But Pixar was focused on stories, not formulas.

The opposite has been true with Disney. They've morphed into a company that views animation as just another product to be manufactured. They try to find the elements that make a successful film and then put them together to equal a successful film.

The problem is, we are talking about art here, not an assembly line. No, when I say art, I don't mean high brow drinking your wine with the pinky extended art. I simply mean its a creatiive endeavor, and the best art is not created consistently with formulas.

But Disney still thinks it is, and CGI is just one of the elements on the assembly line to them.

 

[DancingBear]

My best guess is that Walt would have looked at the stories he wanted to tell and made a decision about which medium was the best to tell them in. If it came up all CGI, he would have went that way. No hesitation. If he thought some would have been better told "hand-drawn", he would have kept it open.

ITA with Matt.

 

[Above_the_Rim]

Above the Rim, while I agree with your end conclusion that Disney has screwed things up royally when it comes to their internal animation, I can't agree with the idea that its becaue they have strayed from their formula of hand-drawn musicals.

I believe its John Lasseter who tells the story of how they presented the Toy Story outline to Disney, and the Disney representatives asked where the "7 songs would be". Pixar didn't feel the movie lent itself to a musical format, and this simply baffled Disney at the time. It wasn't the "right formula".

But Pixar was focused on stories, not formulas.

The opposite has been true with Disney. They've morphed into a company that views animation as just another product to be manufactured. They try to find the elements that make a successful film and then put them together to equal a successful film.

The problem is, we are talking about art here, not an assembly line. No, when I say art, I don't mean high brow drinking your wine with the pinky extended art. I simply mean its a creatiive endeavor, and the best art is not created consistently with formulas.

But Disney still thinks it is, and CGI is just one of the elements on the assembly line to them.

I agree, I do think that the company started using music too much as a product instead of really realizing it's worth. But Walt Disney did lay out a formula that people love, and you can do so many different new stories with the same formula. I want Disney to be Disney and make Disney movies, music adds so much to movies when done correctly. Walt Disney knew not to use it as just a product though, with Bambi he decided that it wasn't the type of movie to be a musical, but he still used music to help the movie. For the majority of stories that Disney does songs can help, and that's something unique to Disney that makes their identity, just as hand drawn animation was. (but I completely agree that Eisner turned it into nothing but a product.)