Word: cg
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Like a dazed boxer who has been KO'd, the old-line Disney artists were slow to rise from their canvases. They kept making serioso dramas with soaring Broadwayesque scores, when the CG films were mopping up with brash, no-song comedies that appealed to young males as well as the family audience. New ideas were stifled. "It's kind of an irony," says Oscar-winning animator Eric Armstrong (The ChubbChubbs!), "because Walt was well known for being an innovative guy. A lot of people thought it was funny that Disney didn't want to try the same experimentation...
Gradually, Disney's box-office magic evaporated; Treasure Planet, in 2002, cost about $140 million yet cadged only $38 million at the domestic wickets. Worse, relations with Pixar soured--though the premier CG studio may sign up with Disney again. Last week Disney CFO Thomas Staggs said the film division expected a loss of more than $250 million for the year's fourth fiscal quarter...
...debate at the studio went beyond the commercial or even artistic implications of CG. Hand-drawn animation was the Disney religion. Stainton, while overseeing a reduction of the animation staff from 2,200 to 725, worked hard to win over the old boys. He argued that CG actually frees artists "to produce movies of extraordinarily different styles. There are limitations in hand drawn. In CG you can do things that are much more complicated." But some still thought the very notion of a change sacrilegious. To abandon the grand old style for 3-D would be like tearing down Chartres...
...veteran Glen Keane was expected to lead the rearguard battle. "Everybody," he says, "wanted me to really fight for hand drawn." When Keane looked for ways to work in the new world, he says, "many of the traditional artists thought that I had betrayed them. And many of the CG artists didn't trust me." In 2003 the two camps met for a retreat. "We realized there were a lot of things being done [at CG studios] that just aren...
...respected animators, like Andreas Deja (who drew the title characters in Hercules and Who Framed Roger Rabbit) and Eric Goldberg (mastermind of the Genie in Aladdin), resisted making the switch to CG. And Keane, when he sat down at a computer, was soon aware of its downside. "It tempts you with the easy choices. It says, 'You designed half that face. Push this button, we'll duplicate it, and the job's done. You've got symmetry--perfect!' But the key to beauty is strangeness, asymmetry...