Word: studioful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...cartoon revival was dramatic on the big screen as well. Disney, which slumped after Walt Disney's death in 1966, regained its touch in the mid-'80s under the urging of Jeffrey Katzenberg, the new studio boss, and Walt's nephew Roy Disney, who godfathered a new generation of animators. The Little Mermaid (1989) not only proved that joy could again be a component of movie craftsmanship, it earned $84 million in its North American theatrical release. Last year's Beauty and the Beast outgrossed Mermaid by $50 million and was the first cartoon feature nominated for an Oscar...
...just over half the take of Beauty and the Beast. It all proves the difficulty of matching either Disney's financial commitment to animation (about $40 million a feature, compared with $12 million to $20 million for the others) or its artists' mastery of a storytelling form that the studio invented, misplaced and then, spectacularly, rediscovered. Walt meets Mickey; Disney loses touch; Katzenberg & Co. find Aladdin's lamp...
...studio was just regaining its animation stride in 1989 when lyricist Howard Ashman (who with Menken wrote the songs for The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast before dying of AIDS last year) suggested a Disney cartoon musical of the Aladdin story. After he wrote six songs and a story treatment, Musker and Clements (The Adventures of the Great Mouse Detective, The Little Mermaid) took over. But something was wrong with the story. "It just wasn't compelling," Katzenberg says. "Aladdin's journey didn't engage." At first, the hero had a mother with a personality forceful enough...
...album, a best-selling videocassette, a Genie cookie jar, a new ride to lure the customers to the Disney parks. He also knows that cartoon characters, and the folks who animate them, don't get gross profit points in the dozen theatrical rereleases and possible sequels. Last year the studio exhumed its 1961 feature One Hundred and One Dalmatians for theaters and took in $60 million -- most of it clear profit...
...Katzenberg is also a moviemaker, justly proud of his studio's work in reviving the American cinema's unique contribution to 20th century art. Aladdin, with its headlong, death-snubbing herobatics, is a cartoon Raiders of the Lost Ark. Today's best animators, excavating and restoring the medium of Walt, Tex and Chuck, are triumphant raiders of the lost...