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...Lilo & Stitch, must make a bundle--or Hollywood could hear a death knell for the traditional animated feature. Disney's beleaguered boss, Michael Eisner, has to hope there is still profit in the hand-drawn cartoons that made Disney's name and fortune but have faded as computer-generated (CG) films have flourished...
Animators draw figures; movie execs read them. So consider these numbers, just from Disney product. The studio's four CG features (Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc.), produced by John Lasseter and his cyber-Merlins at Pixar, earned an average of $214 million; the last two averaged $250 million. As for Disney's once mighty traditional animated films, the last four (Mulan, Tarzan, The Emperor's New Groove and Atlantis: The Lost Empire) grossed, on average, just $116 million, and the last two didn't make it to $90 million. Pixar films were originally...
Thanks to Lucas and his brilliant team, special effects became the prettiest new tool in the movie paint box. "Star Wars convinced filmmakers that you can do anything bigger and better to enhance the shot," says Jason Barlow, lead CG animator for the effects company RIOT. "Now, with digital technology, real magic can happen." The movie even changed the way films are financed. Notes cultural critic John Seabrook: "Because of its huge box office, it interested Wall Street people who had previously seen Hollywood as small potatoes. The Star Wars numbers brought a new variety of investor and financial manager...
...bought tickets to Ice Age at the cineplex in order to sneak into the new R-rated horror flick Resident Evil. But the vast majority were like Pond--from a computer-literate generation that responds viscerally to the look of Ice Age's computer-generated (also referred to as CG or 3-D) animation. The proof is in the ticket sales. While traditional (or 2-D) animation has been waning at the box office, last year saw two CG blockbusters: DreamWorks/PDI's Shrek, which made $268 million domestically, and Disney/Pixar's Monsters, Inc., which has pulled in $253 million...
Apart from featuring high-tech design, these hits have also primed audiences to assume that "there's stuff in [CG animation] for teens and adults," says Fox marketing executive Jeffrey Godsick, "and that's why you see a willingness in them to go to these movies on their own." Shrek, with its bathroom humor (you don't put Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers in a movie and get a Sunday school lesson) and inside jokes about rival studio Disney, made the genre seem cool to teens. Ice Age, directed by Chris Wedge and produced through Fox's digital arm, Blue...