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Killing what made Disney Disney?
Animation studio's closure bad for Disney; bitter blow for Orlando
by Roger Moore | Sentinel Movie Critic
Disney, the company that rode to glory on the colorful, animated backs of a mouse and seven dwarfs, took a giant step toward getting out of hand-drawn animation altogether Monday when it shut down Disney Feature Animation Florida, its Orlando studio.
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 layoRAB 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 altogether. 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 DreamWorks' Shrek to Finding Nemo 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, 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 water-colored Lilo & Stitch -- films that recalled the golden age of animation while reminding Disney that story and emotion is 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 water-color 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 money-maker -- 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 down-times, 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 out-sourced 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 knockoRAB 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.
Roger Moore can be reached at
[email protected] or 407-420-5369.
