Barbossa wrote:I've been wondering too what happened to all the new shorts. All we got so far was the new Goofy cartoon. I thought there would be something attached to The Princess and The Frog but there wasn't.
The shorts department didn't get hit by layoffs too did it?
What is so crazy is The Ballad of Nessie and Glago's Guest were announced at the same time as How to Hook Up Your Home Theater (along with two other shorts being worked on), said to all have been completed consecutively, yet we've seen nothing of them. How to Hook Up Your Home Theater was attached to National Treasure 2 (originally it was going with Enchanted), Glago's Guest was planned to be attached to Bolt (the other project Chris Williams worked on that year but dropped at the last minute and banished to only bee seen in film-festivals; Tokyo Mater was attached to the 3D showings of Bolt a few weeks in), and The Ballad of Nessie has just been a mystery outside of Deters and Wermers directing with Baer, Deja and Henn animating (supposedly The Princess and the Frog stole their 2D animators, due to them being in short supply). When How to Hook Up Your Home Theater and the shorts program was first announced in 2007,
CLICK HERE, they mentioned The Ballad of Nessie being halfway though production (I'm guessing that when the animators were taken, Deters and Wermers put it on hold, and moved onto Prep and Landing).
As for layoffs, I don't really think Disney's shorts program can have layoffs, as it just reuses Disney directors and animators in-between films. Since its a proving ground for the artists already there (Disney Feature Animation) it doesn't really have a set of talent devoted just to it to even have cutbacks. It has even been extended into the "Shorts Club," in which anyone in animation can pitch a short and make it on their own if they can get volunteers to help out (so its not just limited to Disney's current talent). That said, (besides Tick Tock Tale) there have been no announcements of new shorts since Lasseter's original announcement of the shorts program,
CLICK HERE, and the five projects that were currently in production (The Ballad of Nessie, Glago's Guest, How to Hook Up Your Home Theater, [when still a short] Prep and Landing, and a spin-off of Meet the Robinsons). We know Tick Tock Tale was a new computer animated short, delayed when The Princess and the Frog and the other traditionally animated films needed more artists to finish on time, and we unfortunately don't know if/when it will ever be completed.