Hand-Drawn Animation Dead at Disney

[unprincess]

Drops from the rain, bugs, the wind moving the grass, a character just looking at the distance and breathing...there is not much going on there, but people respond to the passion of how well is recreated, even if they don't know anything about the animation process, they feel that some great skills are at work there, skills that are very rare.

I looove that type of stuff. Its the type of thing thats really missing from animated film these days. The studios are scared little details like this will bore kids. And its not something that needs to be exclusive to 2d. Theres no reason the pacing of cgi films cant be slowed down as well. But everything is aimed at 12 year olds these days so its gotta be joke, action, song, joke, action, joke, joke, song, action...

[Fflewduur]

I think 2D will stage some sort of resurgence sooner or later, if only because it will seem "new" again by virtue of being different from everything else going on, and yet still instantly recognizable as familiar…although 2D’s future is only going to become more inextricably bound with technology. For quite a while already it’s been far removed from the hand-drawn work of yesteryear.

And some of that work is pretty dated-looking, too, though not necessarily the films you'd expect. Pinocchio *feels* like it comes from a different era, but the features that relied heavily upon xerography really *look* it. I can still enjoy the films immensely, but it’s gotten to where the thick black outlines (and the sketchy lines that change weight or disappear entirely, that really call attention to the fact we're looking at illustration) just hit me the wrong way. By contrast, the look of Toy Story doesn’t bother me in the least—they were really pushing the boundaries with that film, but they also managed to play well within them; I think the look of the work matches well with the governing aesthetic and the world they were creating. Still, it’s nice to see increasing sophistication as the body of work has grown.

There’s a line that gets danced all around in CG animation that’s related to suspension of disbelief—trying to create something that can be accepted as real without becoming slavishly dedicated to naturalism. It’s tricky. I think it’s easier when you’re dealing with mostly nonhuman characters: I want my clownfish to look like a clownfish, but if it’s got to have expressive eyes and the power of human speech, I expect some obvious departures from reality in the rest of the world, too. (Oddly, that doesn’t necessarily apply to the *surroundings*—the water work Pixar accomplished in that film is pretty phenomenal, with a real sense of mass and scope and a vast array of looks based on a variety of micro-environments. It probably helps that most of us don’t spend a lot of time underwater, so the underside of the ocean is pretty fantastical anyway.) It gets a little stranger in films like Tangled and Frozen, I think, in which the characters are mostly human and there are limits on the anthropomorphics of the nonhuman characters: eyes are way too big, noses are too small…it’s not meant to represent the real world, but it’s at least an order of magnitude closer than, say, Wreck-It Ralph, and the expectations are for something closer to the real world. There comes a point when one wonders why they don’t just mo-cap the whole thing.) I’d say The Incredibles is my prime example of really getting it right; the characters are human, but the character design is exaggerated and specific and applied in such a way that it informs the appearance of everyone in the film: Bob's gargantuan upper body, Helen's tiny waits, Vi's huge eyes, Edna's & Gilbert Huph's micro-stature and impossibly out-of-scale heads...everyone seems to exist in the same world, a world that’s not my own, but one that I can buy into nonetheless.

Interesting that I’ve heard loads of complaints about CG supplanting 2D animation, but practically nothing about what it means for stop-motion…

Drops from the rain, bugs, the wind moving the grass, a character just looking at the distance and breathing...there is not much going on there, but people respond to the passion of how well is recreated, even if they don't know anything about the animation process, they feel that some great skills are at work there, skills that are very rare.

I looove that type of stuff. Its the type of thing thats really missing from animated film these days.

Not from Ghibli films. But the American major motion picture aesthetic has developed without much room for such stuff for quite some time...

[estefan]

Interesting that I’ve heard loads of complaints about CG supplanting 2D animation, but practically nothing about what it means for stop-motion…

Well, stop-motion animation is doing pretty well right now. Aardman and Laika are still making them and I'm sure if Tim Burton is inspired to make another one, he has the power to do so.

By the way, another American hand-drawn animated film that was theatrically released in the past ten years (and quite an underappreciated one, in my opinion) is Curious George. It was even produced by Ron Howard and quite a number of Disney animators worked on it, including Frans Vischer, John Pomeroy and Anthony de Rosa. It's a very charming and beautifully animated movie, if you haven't seen it. Only cost about $50 million, though it did about that much in the United States and I'm not sure Curious George is that well-known internationally for it to make that much of an impact elsewhere.

[Disney's Divinity]

According to your list, Frozen is behind Aladdin and The Lion King, which are the only 2D films that sit ahead of Frozen that are remotely viable comparisons of performance. You just can't compare it to films like Snow White or 101 Dalmatians, which are from an entirely different era. Fact is that Frozen sits among the company of Aladdin, The Lion King, Toy Story 3, Shrek 2, and Finding Nemo as some of the most popular animated films of the modern era.

They are very comparable when statements like the "best-selling animated film of all time" are made.

Also, it's worth pointing out that films like Tarzan, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Lilo & Stitch, and Pocahontas are all in close range to Tangled and Wreck-It Ralph (the only other moderately successful 3D films they've had at this point). It's yet-to-be-seen if Disney can have another 3D event like Frozen. Those are rare in any medium. Just like their 3D misfires (Meet the Robinsons, Bolt, Chicken Little) are down there with The Princess and the Frog, Atlantis, and Brother Bear.

In the same way, people respond better emotionally when the "camera" is moving while Ariel sings that "look at this trove, treasures untold" line, and you can see the hair moving, and her facial expressions work better than in the "let it go" sequence, even if, as a whole, it looks way better than "part of your world".

I don't think that's true at all.

And some of that work is pretty dated-looking, too, though not necessarily the films you'd expect. Pinocchio *feels* like it comes from a different era, but the features that relied heavily upon xerography really *look* it.

I think that's failed stretching in order to somehow compare to how 3D films' animation looks dated within a decade. While something like One Hundred and One Dalmatians may "feel" dated, just like any film of its time (Cinderella feels like the '50s, TLM feels like the '80s)--the animation never feels dated. The only hand-drawn animated film I could find that argument would work with is Snow White, because they were still working on making humans move/look right. But even Snow White doesn't look as dated 75 years later as Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Shrek, Monsters, Inc., and many other 3D films look right now.

[ce1ticmoon]

By the way, another American hand-drawn animated film that was theatrically released in the past ten years (and quite an underappreciated one, in my opinion) is Curious George. It was even produced by Ron Howard and quite a number of Disney animators worked on it, including Frans Vischer, John Pomeroy and Anthony de Rosa. It's a very charming and beautifully animated movie, if you haven't seen it. Only cost about $50 million, though it did about that much in the United States and I'm not sure Curious George is that well-known internationally for it to make that much of an impact elsewhere.

Oh, you mean that movie that was made as a commercial for a Jack Johnson album?

Haha, in all seriousness.... Good catch! I completely forgot about that one (and I've never seen it before). I actually did want to see it when it came out... But it had slipped my memory since then.

They are very comparable when statements like the "best-selling animated film of all time" are made.

Also, it's worth pointing out that films like Tarzan, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Lilo & Stitch, and Pocahontas are all in close range to Tangled and Wreck-It Ralph (the only other moderately successful 3D films they've had at this point). It's yet-to-be-seen if Disney can have another 3D event like Frozen. Those are rare in any medium. Just like their 3D misfires (Meet the Robinsons, Bolt, Chicken Little) are down there with The Princess and the Frog, Atlantis, and Brother Bear.

Well, as you can probably tell, I don't think such statements could or should be made lightly. The only distinction Frozen has is being the highest grossing animated film of all time, in pure dollars. I would in no way mistake that for being the best-selling, or the most popular of all time. Though I can understand that it is annoying when others do. (But it's just as annoying when people bring back the "adjusted for inflation" or "tickets sold" argument.) They're just not comparable across multiple eras, period, and Flewdurr did a great job at explaining why.

[Disney's Divinity]

I don't think bringing in facts is "annoying" at all. To me, Fflewdur didn't make any case with trying to discount looking at "adjusted for inflation" or "tickets sold," because the base $$$ only tells me that tickets cost more, not that the number of people who actually went to see the film was greater than past films. This is also ignoring the fact that our population is much larger now than it was in the '50s or the '40s or even the '90s and that the films are presented in two alternate formats (as normal or in 3D), which makes Frozen's "success" look more minimal in comparison.

[Sotiris]

The personnel and infrastructure for 2D production at Disney doesn’t exist anymore—restarting 2D would mean building from the ground up, and in pursuit of something that shows no signs of mass popularity or good return on investment.

Not really. They could follow the model they developed for The Princess and the Frog. As Catmull explained it:

We green-lighted The Princess and the Frog and began reassembling a crew that had been dispersed to the winds. We asked our team at Disney to propose three scenarios for rebuilding the hand-drawn production effort. Their first was to reestablish the old system exactly as it existed before we arrived, which we rejected as too expensive. The second scenario was to farm out the production work—subcontracting it to cheaper animation houses overseas—which we rejected for fear that it would diminish the film’s quality. The third scenario, however, felt just right—a combination of hiring key talent inside the studio while outsourcing certain parts of the process that wouldn’t affect quality. The number of staffers we’d need to make this happen, I was told, was 192. To which I replied: Done. But they couldn’t go over that number.

[ce1ticmoon]

I don't think bringing in facts is "annoying" at all. To me, Fflewdur didn't make any case with trying to discount looking at "adjusted for inflation" or "tickets sold," because the base $$$ only tells me that tickets cost more, not that the number of people who actually went to see the film was greater than past films. This is also ignoring the fact that our population is much larger now than it was in the '50s or the '40s or even the '90s and that the films are presented in two alternate formats (as normal or in 3D), which makes Frozen's "success" look more minimal in comparison.

It's "annoying" because I feel that people who use the "adjusted for inflation" or "tickets sold" argument are still not looking at the whole picture, just like people who use the "it made the most money, so thus it is the most popular!!!" argument. None of them take into account the way that culture and consumption habits change over time. Correct me if I am misinterpreting, but it seems to me that you are using "the number of people who actually went to see the film" as the measure for popularity or success. I'm simply saying that popularity is relative, and has to be taken in context.

Yes, the population is much bigger now. But there are also more movies at any given time vying for our attention. Theatrical runs are much shorter. Many people opt to wait for video (they have that option now, whereas they didn't have that option pre-80s). And one of the biggest issues is that movie ticket prices have inflated at a MUCH higher rate than inflation in general. We have to use a much higher percentage of our income to see a movie now than we had to 20-30 years ago, let alone 50, 60, or 70 years ago. These are all points that Fflewdur made. And I think they are all very valid. (And for the record, I in no way interpreted Fflewdur's post as using unadjusted box office gross as a measure of popularity or success for films across multiple time periods.)

In general, the most popular movies today do not sell as many tickets as the most popular movies from decades ago. So if after knowing all of that, you think Snow White, The Lion King, and Frozen somehow stand on equal grounds for comparison, well, then that's that. The only argument I'm making is that they can't be compared, not that there is some definite measure to say that Frozen is more popular than [insert popular Disney film title here], or vice versa.

[tweeb²]

I looove that type of stuff. Its the type of thing thats really missing from animated film these days. The studios are scared little details like this will bore kids. And its not something that needs to be exclusive to 2d. Theres no reason the pacing of cgi films cant be slowed down as well. But everything is aimed at 12 year olds these days so its gotta be joke, action, song, joke, action, joke, joke, song, action...

I think kids do feel the same way, but maybe they are not as conscious as adults about it. I saw Totoro on TV when I was six or something like that, maybe a little older.

It was not like Lion King where I saw it a billion times and knew all the dialogue.... 15 years later some college classmates said a line from the movie, where the little sister asks about the Catbus and it triggered something, I suddenly remembered the scene where they wait at the bus stop!! How they showed the details of the drops falling...and I only saw that movie once! And yet I recalled precise moments of that scene, 15 years later, without watching it again.

Also Disney Divinity, I think the POYW sequence in Little Mermaid works better in the character level and emotional level, but the backgrounds and stuff are less impressive, maybe because it was designed o be that way, more intimate, it is, after all her grotto full of secret stuff, while Elsa is very happy when she builds her snow castle and thus, the design is more "out there", and I do think CGI handles the background details much better, we must remember that even Disney used CGI effects in Lion King or Hunchback for backgrounds and crowds even they gave them a "painterly" feel, same goes with Ghibli's Princess Mononoke, they used some CGI even if they didn't want it to "feel" CGI.

[Sotiris]

Q: In your book, you talk about your efforts to bring back hand-drawn animation at Disney. Is that still part of your agenda? Are there plans for Disney Animation to produce any more 2D-animated features or does the studio focus solely on CG films now?

Ed Catmull: Hand-drawn animation had basically been shut down at Disney when we arrived so we worked hard to bring back hand-drawn animation and we created The Princess and the Frog which was critically very well reviewed. The difficulty we have is that most of the directors now want to work in 3D and while John and I deeply love hand-drawn animation, we have to respect the desires of our current diretors because we're not trying to impose a particular style on them. So, it's just recognising currently what their artistic desires are! We continue to make some shorts because we have some remarkably talented people within hand-drawn animation and it is our hope to keep the artform alive. We don't have any feature-length projects planned at this time.

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/culture-prof ... t-34651877

[disneyprincess11]

So, there we have it. It's not John Lassenter. It's the directors like Nathan and Bryce and the executives (who are making John and Rob do 3D)

[DisneyJedi]

So, there we have it. It's not John Lassenter. It's the directors like Nathan and Bryce and the executives (who are making John and Rob do 3D)

Okay, that's clearly not fair. Shouldn't John or the directors of the projects be pulling the shots?

[Fflewduur]

I’d forgotten about Curious George. A bit limited in appeal by its subject matter and design, but a quite charming film. (My kids were big fans for a while—I haven’t seen it in a few years now, but I’ve seen it more than a couple times.)

I wonder about stop-motion because CG seems a most unusual melange—it’s supplanting hand-drawn animation, but in many ways its execution is more similar to the effects of stop-motion in terms of dimensionality and depth. There really aren’t many folks working in stop-motion, either. I’m a big fan of Aardman in general, but my Aardman favorite feature film by far was their first. Somehow Wallace and Gromit didn’t translate well to the big screen for me, though it may have more to do with the story than anything else; the W&G shorts are certainly among my all-time favorites. (I’m probably one of the few who really got a kick out of Flushed Away, but I’m still not entirely certain why they went the CG route for that.) I thought Burton’s Gorey-esque Corpse Bride was underrated, and Selick’s Coraline was bizarre and fascinating. Since stop-motion can be made more cheaply and can be judged as successful with considerably smaller grosses than required for computer animation, I suspect we may see some sparks of creativity coming from that quarter…

From boxofficemojo:

Adjusting for ticket price inflation is not an exact science and should be used to give you a general idea of what a movie might have made if released in a different year, assuming it sold the same number of tickets.
Since these figures are based on average ticket prices they cannot take into effect other factors that may affect a movie's overall popularity and success. Such factors include but are not limited to: increases or decreases in the population, the total number of movies in the marketplace at a given time, economic conditions that may help or hurt the entertainment industry as a whole (e.g., war), the relative price of a movie ticket to other commodities in a given year, competition with other related medium such as the invention and advancements of Television, VHS, DVD, the Internet, etc…

So, yes: Snow White, 101 Dalmatians, TLK, Fantasia, The Jungle Book, Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio, Bambi, The Lady & the Tramp, and Aladdin all have better grosses adjusted for inflation. Of course those figures are all *domestic*, so they certainly don’t represent the entire picture (worldwide distribution being far more far-reaching and representing a more significant percentage of returns today than for most of those films, representing about 2/3 of Frozen’s total gross). Most of them—and this is where Disney films *really* muddy the water—have also benefited from being re-released over and over and over again: the Fairest of Them All, #10 on the all-time adjusted list, has had no fewer than 8 return engagements. There’s just no way that the adjusted figures alone provide the most accurate picture of a film’s popularity.

For example: 101 Dalmatians. It ranks #11 on the all-time list, one spot below Snow White and ahead of all those other Disney features referenced in the last paragraph. Does that sound right, for a film that was the tenth-highest grossing film of 1961? It ranks #11 all-time adjusted because it’s a film from a different era, because it took 30 years to hit home media instead of six months, because it had four subsequent return theatrical runs—the last of which, a year before its release on VHS, made it the twentieth-highest-domestic-grossing film of 1991. If we don’t take these things into consideration, if we accept the all-time adjusted list as the be-all end-all indicator of a film’s popularity, we must also accept that Dalmatians is a more popular film than Mary Poppins, The Godfather, The Empire Strikes Back, and Raiders of the Lost Ark…call me crazy, but for me that strains credulity.

(There’s clearly some wonky fuzzy math at work in the adjustments anyway. On the all-time adjusted list, Iron Man 3 loses $20 million and Frozen loses $10 million, presumably in diluting the impact of the higher per-ticket price for 3D sales; the upshot is that IM3 earned $10 million more domestically than Frozen in the real world—based on today’s numbers, anyway—but ranks 2 slots lower than Frozen on the all-time adjusted list—and these are fresh numbers from last year’s releases.)

There are so many factors that matter for which adjustments cannot account. Most of the Disney features that outrank Frozen on the all-time adjusted list had zero competition head-to-head or even in their entire calendar years of release—Frozen has had both. And people just don’t attend the cinema today the same way they did in 1937, or 1961, or even 1994. I’ll speak anecdotally for a minute—one can extrapolate however one wishes. Yesterday I took my kids to see Muppets Most Wanted and it cost $40 for three tickets and a large popcorn-large drink-one candy combo. That’s more than the full MSRP for a film on BD we can watch at home whenever we want, and in a generally better viewing environment because I’ve made a nominal investment in a BD player, HDTV, and a 7.1 receiver and speakers—I don’t have a huge TV so we’re not really getting the full cinematic viewing experience, but the audio is far better than I’ve gotten my last few trips to the theatre. The snacks are hella-cheaper, nobody misses anything if a bathroom break is needed, the floor isn’t sticky and gross, and we don’t have to put up with people who talk loudly or text or take phone calls. That $40 also represents a substantial chunk of my cable & internet bill, which gives me a couple hundred channels of regularly-broadcast entertainment options, plus hundreds of titles available streaming or on demand from HBO, Cinemax, Netflix, etc. The only times I bother with the movie theatre are if it’s for something for which I just *can’t* wait six months, or I’m making a conscious decision to support a film in its theatrical run…and that only happens once or twice a year for the past few years. I don’t even make a point of going to Disney releases like I used to because those are the only films I’m likely to bother purchasing for the collection. I’m just one consumer in a nation of millions, but I’m willing to bet my position is not uncommon. The fact that Frozen has gotten enough people out of the house to go see the movie and hit these economic benchmarks in today's economic and entertainment contexts is no mean feat.

I’m not saying Frozen is the greatest thing to happen to the company since Lillian told Walt that Mortimer was a lousy name for a mouse, but its reception has been well above and beyond what the studio could have reasonably hoped. It’s joined the ranks of billion dollar babies, it’s the third-highest-grossing film for its release year, and it’s a pretty good film.

[TsWade2]

Hey Ed! Come here. Closer. Come on now, closer. That's it, perfect. HIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIYA!

[Sotiris]

So, there we have it. It's not John Lasseter. It's the directors like Nathan and Byron and the executives (who are making John and Ron do 3D)

Don't tell me you actually believe him. He's only saying that to place the blame on the filmmakers instead of the management. While I don't doubt there are directors who prefer CG, there are still people like Clements & Musker who prefer 2D and are being forced into CG. Catmull saying that he "respect(s) the desires of our current directors" and that he doesn't want to "impose a particular style on them" are blatant lies. And it's not just Ron & John, I believe there are others who would want to do a 2D picture given the opportunity.

Do you recall this? That doesn't sound to me like respecting the desires of their filmmakers.

When we do pitch, it's made clear to us that the stories aren't necessarily for a hand-drawn project. When we've brought it up with John Lasseter, he's shied away from committing to a hand-drawn feature.

Source: http://animationguildblog.blogspot.com/ ... isney.html

[DisneyJedi]

You know what's really aggravating about all this? It's the EXECUTIVES' fault and yet they blame the MEDIUM/ANIMATORS when a 2D project doesn't do Lion King numbers! Not only that, they lay off the 2D animators and/or waste their talent/potential for stupid pencil tests for CG movies!!

[SWillie!]

Very strange comments from Catmull. Can't believe he's blatently placing the blame on the filmmakers. Obviously that isn't the case - I certainly don't doubt that there ARE directors that prefer CG, but to say there aren't any that want to do a traditional film is just silly. Especially when there have been comments already made that are literally the opposite, like you posted Sotiris.

I really don't understand why they can't just *be honest.* There's nothing wrong with the truth. Sure, it's unfortunate, but wouldn't most of us here agree that we'd prefer for them to just tell it like it is and stop this silly merry-go-round? Something like this:

"Of course we all love traditional animation. Unfortunately it's simply not a business decision we can make right now, for a multitude of reasons. If money wasn't involved in the filmmaking industry, I'm sure we would be doing all kinds of amazing things, both traditionally and digitally. But the harsh reality is that money *is* part of the industry, and so right now we're focused on CG films. We certainly don't want to say 'Disney is done with traditional animation forever' - that's why we still have a small team of really great traditional animators at the studio that we try to fit in working on other projects - but for right now we don't have any feature films planned. Who knows when that tide could turn again though, who knows what the future holds."

Sure, that would be unfortunate, but at least it's the *truth*. The half truths and run-around answers are definitely getting old.

[Sotiris]

I agree with everything you've said, SWillie!. From this whole 2D animation debacle, it's Disney's attitude about it that bothers me most. The constant tip-toeing around the issue, the condescending PR responses, the blatant lies.

[Fflewduur]

I agree with everything you've said, SWillie!. From this whole 2D animation debacle, it's Disney's attitude about it that bothers me most. The constant tip-toeing around the issue, the condescending PR responses, the blatant lies.

Yeah, well--that's showbiz all over. Such behavior is hardly limited to Disney and hand-drawn animation. The only arena with less transparency and straight talk is politics.

[unprincess]

"Of course we all love traditional animation. Unfortunately it's simply not a business decision we can make right now, for a multitude of reasons. If money wasn't involved in the filmmaking industry, I'm sure we would be doing all kinds of amazing things, both traditionally and digitally. But the harsh reality is that money *is* part of the industry, and so right now we're focused on CG films. We certainly don't want to say 'Disney is done with traditional animation forever' - that's why we still have a small team of really great traditional animators at the studio that we try to fit in working on other projects - but for right now we don't have any feature films planned. Who knows when that tide could turn again though, who knows what the future holds."

yes yes yes! agree to all that! if theyre gonna not do 2d anymore, be honest about it! Id much rather have an answer like this b/c it shows respects to the fans, instead of the stupid tiptoeing around the truth as if we're dumb enough to believe it.

Don't tell me you actually believe him. He's only saying that to place the blame on the filmmakers instead of the management. While I don't doubt there are directors who prefer CG, there are still people like Clements & Musker who prefer 2D and are being forced into CG. Catmull saying that he "respect(s) the desires of our current directors" and that he doesn't want to "impose a particular style on them" are blatant lies. And it's not just Ron & John, I believe there are others who would want to do a 2D picture given the opportunity.

yes! another thing: didnt they bring in a lot of guys from the Secret Lab CGI studio into Disney Animation studios after they closed it down? so suddenly they had an influx of CGI animators/directors who were gonna want to keep doing CGI & more importantly wanted to insure that they and their freinds were gonna be employed for the forceable future. I beleive this may have played a huge part in why we have the situation at the studio right now. I think there was a whole gruop of CGI guys who were determined to make Disney an all CGI studio & ended up having enough clout(probably due to their age & the fact that CGI was making more money than 2d at the BO) to convince the heads that dumping 2d was best for the studio. So yes in a way its the directors who were choosing CGI but thats because the majority of them werent really 2d animators in the first pace(b/c the 2d guys got kicked out!)