Word: disneyized
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...Disney is playing for high stakes. Japan is a nation of Mickey Mouse fans. Tokyo Disneyland is the world's most popular theme park, with 17 million visitors last year. Moreover, Japan is the world's second largest market for Hollywood films, and its moviegoers love action-packed adventures with romantic leads. They have contributed more than $200 million of Titanic's $1.8 billion global box office. But in Pearl Harbor, the villain isn't an iceberg--it's Japan. So Disney's marketing has had to be creative. "It's obviously a subject that must be approached with cultural...
...imagery in everything from live-action drama to animated comedy. Never before have so many movies owed so much to computer geeks. Take, for example, Shrek, its magical kingdom rendered entirely on computers with a richness, luminosity and texture that wouldn't have been possible two years ago, when Disney and Pixar sounded a death knell for antiquated hand-drawn cartoons with Toy Story 2. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, opening in July, stars a cast of disconcertingly realistic CGI humans. In Steven Spielberg's A.I., opening this week, a teddy bear comes to life, and Haley Joel Osment communes...
...cinematic forms, animated films are the purest. They don't copy our world by photographing it; they dream up--draw up--worlds we were too timid to imagine. From the early work of Walt Disney (a pen draws a cute mouse) to the computer stylings of Pixar's John Lasseter (a mouse draws a toy cowboy), a good animator is a true creator--almost the Creator--and animation is God's breath; it makes movies move. Kids knew this: their first film was often a Disney animated feature. In the dark cathedral they giggled, cried, were transported...
Animation in feature films was special in part because it was rare: a Disney epic every few years and not much else. Now Hollywood shovels out half a dozen animated features a year, from the studios of Disney and Pixar, DreamWorks, Nickelodeon. Still others that don't look animated are: great chunks of them, anyway (Pearl Harbor, Planet of the Apes). We won't even mention--it's too, too depressing--the great ruck of live-action movies, starring your son's favorite buffoons, the Schneiders and Sandlers and Greens. These slob comedies play like long, stupider versions of Itchy...
...miraculous has become mundane. Nothing new there: it is in the nature of pop culture to allow the vagrant innovation, then stretch it into a trend by pounding it into a formula. In the Disney cartoon "renaissance," the excitement of the first ones, from The Little Mermaid to The Lion King, ultimately faded, whether the studio stuck to the master plan (as in the 1997 Hercules) or tried to stretch it (as in the new Atlantis the Lost Empire...