Bye bye cel

[sbisson]

Are we hearing the tolling of the death knell for the traditional hand-drawn animated movie? Disney is closing its Florida animation studio - the folk who gave us Lilo and Stitch, amongst many others.

The current Disney pipeline is now pretty much all CGI...

Comments

[scarlatti.livejournal.com]

*bows head in respectful moment of silence*

Probably sad ...

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

... but this was mentioned ages ago over on /. where we had an interesting discussion on which was the first Disney movie to use computer animation ... I think we agreed on Tron, but I was convinced that the first Disney *animated* movie to use computer graphics was actually The Black Cauldron (among other things, the dancing pots and pans) and it's become more and more accepted ... sometime around Little Mermaid you can spot when they switched to Digital Ink and Paint, because in early Disney animateds you see that the outlines of the characters are coloured ink, but from Cindarella onwards they got black outlines (cheaper and quicker) but around Little Mermaid they went back to coloured outlines as they were then scanning in the unpainted cels (still hand animated) and did the colouring in the computer ... I don't know if they were doing any of the inbetweening as well or not ... and of course digital effects and compositing ... and by the time you get to Beauty and the Beast (the cart, the ballroom, the dancing plates etc.) computer animation is all over the place (including the initial digital multiplane effect) and getting up to Atlantis and Treasure Planet (and the spaceships etc. in Lilo & Stitch) there was just so much happening in the computer that having hand-drawn *on paper/cel* animation is becoming a luxury. It's still possible (using tablets etc.) to do hand-drawn animation on a computer ... but Disney has lost its way. Lilo & Stitch has been a recent blip in an otherwise fairly unimpressive output (ok, Emperor's New Groove was good as well, but that was almost an accident as they scrapped the film they were going to make (remake of The Prince and The Pauper) and took it another way). The big successes have been their bought in anime (Miyazaki) and the Pixar stuff, and they have one more film with Pixar I believe (A Bug's Life, Toy Story, Monsters Inc and The Incredibles plus one more, or have I forgotten one? Toy Story 2 doesn't count as it was meant to be a straight to video so didn't count on the Pixar contract).

Re: Probably sad ...

[devilgate.livejournal.com]

You've forgotten Finding Nemo in the Pixar list.

Of course, the reason the Pixar movies are so much better than anything non-Pixar Disney released over the same few years (IMHO, of course) is not the CGI: it's the scripts. Every time my kids watch Toy Story now I'm amazed by a) how clunky the animation looks now, post Monsters Inc and Shrek; and b) the script-writing team.

Although, having just checked the IMDB, I find that things are not quite as I thought. Certainly the Joss Whedon on the credits is the real one; but I discovered that the other name that had me amazed is Joel Cohen, not Joel Coen. Oh well. It doesn't really affect my argument that it's the scripts.

Re: Probably sad ...

[tanais.livejournal.com]

when Disney produces something that equals the devastating emotional impact off Bambi's Mother's off camera death I'll come back to the fold. Until then I'll leave Disney to wallow in its slow death by accountancy...

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

As usual, nobody talks about firing the multiple layers of vice-presidents, MBAs, and other parasites at the top, but they'll go burn up the seed corn. As usual, it's that basic question: how many people can they lay off before entire company consists of nothing but (non-productive) upper management?