Moana

[disneyprincess11]

Wow, dude! You're amazing!

[DisneyEra]

Coincidence, I think not!

[jazzflower92]

Coincidence, I think not!

And I could see Moana and Jim Hawkins being paired together because they are in canon single.

[DisneyEra]

Coincidence, I think not!

And I could see Moana and Jim Hawkins being paired together because they are in canon single.

You probably already know but this would of been Jim's girlfriend "Kate" if the sequel wasn't canned:

[jazzflower92]

And I could see Moana and Jim Hawkins being paired together because they are in canon single.

You probably already know but this would of been Jim's girlfriend "Kate" if the sequel wasn't canned:

Since the sequel didn't happen, she's technically not canon which makes Jim still a single man.

[Sotiris]

The Spring 2016 issue of Disney Twenty-Three will feature a sneak peek at Moana as well as a tribute to the Lasseter era of WDAS. The magazine is offered exclusively to D23 Gold and Gold Family Members as a benefit of their membership. The latest issue will begin arriving in late February.

In the 10 years since John Lasseter and Ed Catmull took over the reins of what is now Walt Disney Animation Studios, Disney has enjoyed incredible creative and box office success with such films as Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, Big Hero 6, and, of course, Frozen. The spring 2016 issue of Disney twenty-three looks at the creative talents—from writers and directors to producers and animators—who have driven this wave of superior filmmaking that has resulted in two Academy Awards® for Best Animated Feature for the studio.

Disney twenty-three includes exclusive interviews with Lasseter and Catmull, as well as the teams behind Walt Disney Animation Studios’ run of hits, discussing the secrets behind their work and how a Disney animated film goes from concept to creation. Plus, Disney twenty-three unveils rarely seen visual development art created for the Studio’s most recent films. There are also advance looks at the upcoming animated films Zootopia—including a revealing one-on-one with star Ginnifer Goodwin—and Moana.

Source: http://www.mouseinfo.com/new/2016/02/di ... 016-issue/

[DisneyEra]

To bad Jack & Inma didn't make the cover.

[disneyprincess11]

To bad Jack & Inma didn't make the cover.

It's still slightly too early for them. But, based on the early announcement for Dwayne in Moana, I'm guessing that the casting for Jack and maybe Imna (if they don't do the open call for Hispanic girls) will be announced a while before/after Moana is released.

[Disney's Divinity]

A new era of "storytelling"...

[Sotiris]

I'm really curious as to why Disney doesn't count "Meet the Robinsons" as a movie under the Lasseter regime. They're excluding it again from this D23 tribute as they did in the Wired spread in 2014.





"Meet the Robinsons" is as much a Lasseter project as any. It marked the first time Lasseter was credited as an executive producer on a WDAS feature. He's been the executive producer on every WDAS film since. MtR may have been put into production by the previous management but so was Bolt (then American Dog) as well as Tangled (then Rapunzel: Unbraided). Even DisneyToon Studios' Tinker Bell was in production before Lasseter came on board. Yet only MtR is not recognized as part of his legacy at the studio.

Interestingly, at the time of the movie's promotion Lasseter was heralded as the savior of the movie while his input on the film was constantly highlighted. The movie was heavily retooled under his supervision just like Bolt was.

A few months after production had ramped up, Disney had bought Pixar Animation Studios, and as a result, Disney Feature Animation had three new sets of eyes evaluating the film: Pixar’s John Lasseter, Ed Catmull, and Andrew Stanton.

“We were about 85 percent finished with animation when Pixar saw the movie,” says Anderson. “After we got the notes from the group, we had a six-hour note session. It was murder. But at the end of the day, John, Ed, and Andrew said, ‘You heard the notes. Now go away and figure out which ones will help you make the movie better.’ They put the control back in my hands, and all the clouds parted.”

One of the major changes was to make Doris, the Bowler Hat Guy’s hat, the real villain, but Pixar’s influence extended beyond that. “They helped us plus the story,” says Anderson. “We redid about 60 percent of the movie.”

The animators were hardest hit by the story tweaks. “We dropped from over 80 percent animated to about 30 percent,” says Belzer. “The characters and sets didn’t change, but a lot of things hit the editing floor.”

Source: http://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/200 ... rward.aspx

It wasn't the first time John Lasseter, the director of "Toy Story" and "Cars," had sat through the screening of a not-quite-ready animated film. But when he saw an early cut of Disney's "Meet the Robinsons" last March, he watched it with a new eye. He wasn't just a fellow director, and a founder of Pixar Animation Studios. This time he was the boss, the chief creative officer of animation for the Walt Disney Company, which had agreed to acquire Pixar two months before.

As he sat in a dark theater in Disney's animation studio here, something bothered him about the villain. Almost all of Pixar's animated movies had an evil foil. In "Toy Story" Buzz Lightyear and Woody escaped a cruel neighborhood bully. In "A Bug's Life" an ant saved his colony from a menacing grasshopper and his thuggish crew. By contrast the lanky villain in "Robinsons," the story of an orphan who builds a time machine in order to find his mother, was neither threatening enough nor scary.

After the screening, Lasseter and his colleagues from Pixar and Disney met with the director, Stephen Anderson, and told him so. For six hours.

Ten months later, Lasseter was back in the screening room, watching Anderson's new version of "Meet the Robinsons," which is set for release March 30. Nearly 60 percent of the original film had been cut. A diabolical sidekick had been added. And in one thrilling scene the orphan, Lewis, is chased by an oversize dinosaur. Later, when asked about the movie's ending, Lasseter's rubbery smile turned upside down and he pretended to cry.

"The audience is going to be sobbing," he said, dragging his index fingers down his cheeks. "It is really going to get them."

[...] Mr. Lasseter established a “story trust” at Disney, a mirror of the “brain trust” at Pixar where directors and story editors criticize a movie’s flaws more than any filmgoer might. “They are not back-patting sessions,” Mr. Catmull said. The six-hour meeting about “Meet the Robinsons” was one such session. Mr. Anderson later called it “one of the hardest days of my life.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/movies/04hols.html

"We did that, we got the emotional beat, we got through 85% of the film, and that's when Pixar was acquired", said animation supervisor Michael Belzer.

Indeed, that's when Lasseter, Ed Catmull and the rest of the Pixar brain trust re-evaluated Meet The Robinsons and decided to push back the release of the film last year for a great deal of fine-tuning. But Anderson did not dismay when reviewing the set of notes. "Luckily, we had the time to stop and pause and incorporate many of those ideas," he suggests. "How to make this funnier; new thoughts about Lewis' quest to find his birth mother. It simplified the process and made it more emotional. Without knowing it, they helped us return to an idea we had very early on for this particular moment [when he finds her], so it was interesting to come full-circle and take it a different way."

"John really responded to the story and what we were doing visually, "McKim adds. "They provided a set of fresh eyes. What is the relationship between Doris, the bowler hat, and Bowler Hat Guy? He's a villain, but he's really not that evil or bungling, which one are we going to choose? So the relationship between them became more of a mother and son where she's really the evil one. We were able to make the notes our own. We pushed the emotion and got a real sense of family with the Robinsons."

Belzer confirms that they took the changes in stride. "They came in, they gave us some notes, we addressed the notes and peeled back to 30% of the animation, which was a lot to redo. It could've been demoralizing, but since we were well into the film and knew these characters, we were prepared to beef up certain shots or redo certain sequences. What was really great was that the crew reacted to it positively: everyone wanted to make the film better. Watching how the crew handled that adversity was my proudest moment. Things were pulled out and put back in. Emotional beats such as the rooftop or the interplay between Mildred and Lewis at the orphanage wasn't previously there. Bowler Hat Guy's thread through the story was improved. Were able to play up Lewis' emotional journey and confidence. And build off of key moments."

Source: http://www.awn.com/animationworld/meet- ... ard-disney

Last year, Lasseter and former Pixar President Ed Catmull, who is now president of Disney Animation, delayed the Christmas release of Disney's Meet the Robinsons movie to rework it. Now it will be released in March.

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/stories/200 ... ned-disney

Top Pixar creative font John Lasseter has remade Disney's stumbling animated studio, replacing the director for the upcoming American Dog and jumping in to overhaul the recent Meet the Robinsons. The latter flick is approaching $100 million, a rarity these days for Disney-made animated films.

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/stories/200 ... ial-advice

[DisneyFan09]

And of course this means that Lasseter will be portrayed as a flawless genius. As if he needed more praise! As if his ego needed to be increased!

Edit: I read the article which you've posted, Sotiris. Which claims Lasseter as a genuis and claims the films prior to his release as duds (when they didn't deserve it).

But let's hope this edition will have some new info about Moana. When will it be released?

[Sotiris]

Preview from the D23 issue.

"When we first put Moana up," director John Musker remembers about a story trust meeting, "John [Lasseter] was moved by the things we gleaned from South Pacific culture: how you only know who you are when you know where you come from, how wayfinding was a deep part of this culture, and respect for the ancestors. In the first version of our movie, some of that fell by the wayside, and John called us on it. In a meeting, Byron Howard asked, 'What if Moana, our lead character, had someone like a grandmother who really knew the world of the past and gave her a connection to the ancient wayfarers'. We started developing the grandmother character, who has really helped the story a lot".

Source: http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/02/18/ ... ore?page=2

[D82]

Thanks for the information, Sotiris. And, though there were things I already knew, I found the entire article very interesting.

I'm really curious as to why Disney doesn't count "Meet the Robinsons" as a movie under the Lasseter regime.

I think it's just because it didn't perform very well at the box office. They want to have the lesser number of failures on that list as they can, and they use the fact that it was already in production when Lasseter came to the studio as an excuse to exclude it. I don't know how they can explain Bolt is included and not Meet the Robinsons, but they would surely come up with something.

[Tangled]

Maybe because Meet the Robinsons was in production for a couple years before Lasseter got his promotion, so he had little control over its story. On the other hand, his leadership greatly influenced Bolt. From what I recall, he was the one who suggested many of the changes that altered Chris Sanders' original pitch (American Dog) to Bolt, forcing Sanders to leave Disney in pursuit of more creative control. Then, Bolt was basically written from scratch under Lasseter's reign.

[Sotiris]

There's a Moana Easter egg in Zootopia.

We always try to put a prop from the upcoming film in the current film. In Big Hero 6, Honey Lemon had a cellphone case that looked like Nick Wilde, the fox. So, we've included something from Moana that's in the film.

Source: http://www.cinepremiere.com.mx/57769-en ... topia.html

[bruno_wbt]

There's a Moana Easter egg in Zootopia.

We always try to put a prop from the upcoming film in the current film. In Big Hero 6, Honey Lemon had a cellphone case that looked like Nick Wilde, the fox. So, we've included something from Moana that's in the film.

Source: http://www.cinepremiere.com.mx/57769-en ... topia.html

There's also a Gigantic Easter egg in Zootopia! (well, and lots of other WDAS movies like Tangled, Frozen and more)

[disneyprincess11]

There's a Moana Easter egg in Zootopia.
Source: http://www.cinepremiere.com.mx/57769-en ... topia.html

There's also a Gigantic Easter egg in Zootopia! (well, and lots of other WDAS movies like Tangled, Frozen and more)

Oh! Where?

[bruno_wbt]

Oh! Where?

Spoiler Alert!

There's a scene where an animal is selling fake Disney DVDs in the street, and you can see altered posters of some Disney movies.

And they also say: "Look, he even has the movies that haven’t been released yet!" [Pointing out the Gigantic DVD]

[DisneyFan09]

So Disney is taking the Pixar approach now?

[DisneyEra]

Oh! Where?

Spoiler Alert!

There's a scene where an animal is selling fake Disney DVDs in the street, and you can see altered posters of some Disney movies.

And they also say: "Look, he even has the movies that haven’t been released yet!" [Pointing out the Gigantic DVD]

https://40.media.tumblr.com/5eab000b26c ... 1_1280.png
https://41.media.tumblr.com/790b1d08f6b ... 2_1280.png

Giraffic