Ooh, another debate.
On the subject of 2D animation having exited the spotlight like B&W films have, I wouldn't say so just yet. Even with the supposedly tepid business it did make, the takings of
The Princess and the Frog would have seemed a miracle back in 2003/4, and enough in the way of merchandise got sold for DCP to be happy. And I would say that now the glut of 2D animation originating in the 90s is over and there's less of a novelty when it comes to CG films, a lot more people seem more receptive to traditional animation. And each medium of animation has enough in the way of advantages and disadvantages for one never really dying out or fading from the spotlight altogether.
And now, onto the subject of identity crisis. I personally think that there are two reasons for the spot of bother and identity crisis that Disney is in at the moment. One is due to corporate decisions of the past ten to fifteen years. Cheapquels are my main culprit (as singerguy said, they really went overboard circa 2001-6, and most people don't have a wide-enough knowledge to know the exact same studio that makes the proper features isn't making these films), and I also want to target sterile merchandising of older entities in one group (read: Princesses). Equally as important is Disney becoming a victim of own success.
Beauty and the Beast and
The Little Mermaid were unprecedented box office triumphs, and have become beloved classics even though only two decades old. Equally, the older Walt-era fairy tales have remained just as popular. There have been so many people who have come to expect more princess fun, that Disney is expected to give in to their nostalgia and do just that; I did really like
The Princess and the Frog, but it didn't really update the pretty princess formula at all for new audiences in the same way that
The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and
Beauty and the Beast did. And the fact that Disney chose perhaps a completely wrong audience when trying to diversify in the early 2000s (teenage boys, who didn't exactly flock to
Treasure Planet or
Atlantis) seems to justify on a corporate level the idea for producing "what they know best". Of course, the Princess line has made everybody more than ever think of a film involving princesses and the like as an excuse for merchandise or a vehicle for the colour pink, and we end up with
Rapunzel controversially being renamed
Tangled after a film called
The Princess and the Frog didn't get as enthusiastic response as hoped, and with plans for more "fairy tale" films (read: THE SNOW QUEEEEEEEN) being scrapped.
I'm not so much against making films based on fairy tales and fantasy stories, but I do think that Disney should not focus on doing princess-based fairy tales if they want to keep that particular genre alive while guaranteeing box-office success, as there's the potential of retreading the same ground too much too soon. Make films based on contemporary fantasy novels, or traditional stories that don't involve princess protagonists (interestingly,
The Snow Queen is one such story, at least in Andersen's original). After
Snow White, Walt made two more films dabbling in the faerie -
Pinocchio and
Fantasia - but they hardly retread the same ground; the former is based on an original fantasy novel inspired in part by folklore, while the latter is a series of animated tone poems, some of which happen to be based on fantasy and folklore. It would take quite some time before
Cinderella and
Sleeping Beauty came out, and for quite a long time,
Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and even
The Wind in the Willows got greater priority than
Cinderella on the schedule based on the grounds that they wouldn't be a retread of the whole Grimms' Fairy Tale formula (and for the record, I think that
Cinderella and
Sleeping Beauty take enough different approaches to not feel like remakes of
Snow White, and
The Little Mermaid etc updated the pretty princess formula well enough for their own era). And of course, any type of film is welcome as long as it is well made and doesn't go for too narrow an audience (one who may be too fickle for Disney animation anyway);
101 Dalmatians is an entirely different type of film both visually, musically and plot-wise compared to
Sleeping Beauty, just as
Bambi and
Dumbo are to
Snow White and
Pinocchio and
Lady and the Tramp is to
Peter Pan and
Cinderella. But all of them work, because they're well made. I don't understand why people hate
Lilo and Stitch and see it as such a travesty to the Disney name. It certainly aims itself at general audiences (as opposed to niche markets like with
Atlantis and
Treasure Planet), and I don't think that the overall end product looks un-Disney (it's all round the typical Disney style with a slight flair of something else).
And I'll say it again about
Joe Jump/Reboot Ralph. Though I think that it seems a thin concept for a whole animated feature on paper, I won't write it off just yet. And Walt not approving of video games? Well, they weren't even around when he was alive, so we can't judge. And perhaps he'd be a fan of Mario Kart.
