Word: disneying
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They are indeed, to judge from the exclusive peek they offered TIME of their first four CG theatrical features. Disney surely has a winner in its debut effort, Mark Dindal's Chicken Little, which opens Nov. 4. It's one of the funniest, most charming and most exhilarating movies in years. And it's a genuine Disney cartoon, with a storytelling sense and graphic precision worthy of the old animation masters...
...been easy for the studio. Hand-drawn feature animation was an art form it created and then nurtured for six decades, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 through the '94 smash The Lion King. Who could imagine that the empire would crumble? And why, when Disney had a distribution pact with Pixar, should the parent studio pursue CG animation? The box office answered both questions briskly: of the 10 top-grossing animated films since 1995, when Toy Story became the first computerized cartoon feature, all but one (Disney's Tarzan...
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...