Word: disneyized
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Theme parks may be better known for flume rides and cruise ships for bingo, but from Disney to Opryland to Hersheypark, they are becoming the summer theaters of the '90s: the places where growing numbers of tyro thespians, crooners and tap dancers get their first experience performing before live audiences...
...they do so on a scale unjustly obscured by Tilt-a-Whirl and Cinderella's castle. The giant Disney parks in Florida and California consider everyone who greets the public to be a performer; the ranks of honest-to-Goofy singers, dancers and actors reach into the hundreds and arguably thousands, even if ) some sport Mickey Mouse heads. Nashville's much smaller Opryland, which relies more on entertainment to sell itself than any other park, employs 400-plus performers -- comparable with the combined casts of all the musicals currently on Broadway -- in a dozen shows with a cumulative annual audience...
Cartoons have, moreover, simply got better. After the golden age in the 1940s and '50s, animation all but disappeared from movie theaters, while TV bastardized the genre with schlocky "limited animation." The current revival was sparked by Walt Disney Studios, which has more than tripled the size of its theatrical-animation unit since 1984 and ventured into TV cartoons for the first time. The busiest newcomer is Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, which has produced cartoon features like An American Tail and maintains an animation unit of more than 300 in London. Even Hanna-Barbera, the K mart of TV cartooning...
...work is shipped overseas, usually to the Far East. Artists there do most of the frame-by-frame drawings, working from character models and storyboards prepared in the U.S. Computer animation is also being used to provide more visual texture and fluid motion. With computers, for example, Disney's forthcoming The Rescuers Down Under was able to use a palette of several hundred colors, many times the number used in most animated features...
...cannot replace human craftsmanship. "It is really difficult to duplicate the character quirks that an artist puts into animation," says Jean MacCurdy, chief of animation at Warner Bros. With animation in eclipse for so many years, finding those artists was a challenge. "Great animators are like great actors," says Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg. "The talent pool is so small and so precious...