Why Michael Eisner Failed

What a coincidence, as I am reading my ongoing tale of sturm und drang in the form of the rise of Disney and the subsequent creation of Dreamworks, a study comes out showing why Michael Eisner failed. It paints in raw, scientific language, the very impression that I think any person would take away from the Books Keys to the Kingdom and Disney War.

Both of those books showed a relationship between Michael Eisner and the late Frank Wells as one where Eisner would go off into a bout of mental and verbal diarrhea, and then Frank Wells would jump in, clean it all up, and get it ready for prime time, as it were. After Wells died, Eisner lost that binary partner that took his ideas and work and made them functional elements of a grand machine.

What this illustrates very well for me is that the high-powered people at the top of company are frequently, if not primarily, not important. What is important is the machine around them. This just makes me even angrier when you see the chief executives and presidents of major corporations earning tens of millions in salary while their average employee barely brings home $50k. They think, nay, they are convinced that they are critically important.

In defense of Eisner, and I think this a very important point since so much of Eisner's later tenure was defined by conflict with Jeffrey Katzenberg, is that he was correct not to give Katzenberg Frank Wells' job. Katzenberg is another high-powered, hard-charging executive type, and that would have likely either only amplified Eisner's problems, or caused so much internal conflict that it could have ripped Disney apart.

But again, in defense of Katzenberg, he appears to be more aware of this limitation than Eisner was. Katzenberg is famous in Hollywood for surrounding himself with powerful women -- a group that is more than slightly underrepresented in most studios. This drive to associate with those that are not simply more hard-charging white guys has undoubtedly played a large role in his ongoing success.

Large Layoffs Expected at DreamWorks

These events couldn't possibly be more of a co-ink-ee-dink for me. I recently finished Disney War and have since moved on to The Men Who Would Be King. Both were good and go well with each other. For those who aren't up on the history. Jeffrey Katzenberg (the K in DreamWorks SKG) was the head of Disney Studios from 1984 to 1994. After his falling out with Michael Eisner, he joined up with bosom chum David Geffen and (apparently) child-like airhead Steven Spielberg to form DreamWorks.

The studio was big on dreams and short on actual success for a long time. For every huge hit, they seemed to have a dozen films that didn't do very well. This situation came to a head in 2005, when the company sold itself to Paramount, but not before it spun off DreamWorks Animation in 2004.

DreamWorks Animation has tried its best to develop a solid financial foundation. The standard strategy to achieve this is to broaden the productive base outside of just movies. Most major studios rely on television shows to provide constant revenues, and DreamWorks on the whole hasn't been terribly successful with this.

Because of this, neither the studio nor its parent has ever been on terribly solid financial footing, thus triggering things like today's announcement. This is unfortunate, because frankly, we need another studio out there producing high quality animated films other than Disney. Every other studio has completely, freaking failed to do anything on the level of the two D's. Sony produces utter shit like Planet 51. Fox has Ice Age and that's about it. We have two bright spots in Illumination Entertainment -- makers of Despicable Moi -- and ILM's Rango, but other than that, nothing. Disney and DreamWorks are it.

I hope the dispossessed workers land on their feet. Even better, I hope that they pollinate out into the wider industry, triggering further evolution and development of not just the technologies and art, but of the business itself. Because one menacing shadow lurking behind the layoffs, and a point underlined in The Men Who Would Be King, is that the old business model isn't working as well as it once did. If companies don't act with foresight and innovation, the animation world of tomorrow will be dominated by names we've not yet heard of.

Come to think of it, perhaps that's not such a bad thing after all.

WATCH THIS: Paperman

Paperman premiered before Wreck-It Ralph. I liked it. The fusion of 2D style with 3D technology is something that CGI artists have been trying to do for years, but before this, the efforts have been... less than convincing. I like CGI, don't get me wrong, but even the best work of CGI animators pales in comparison to the lively, organic look of hand-drawn work. I am certain that the greatest animated CGI works are in the future, as the ability to merge the hand and the polygon becomes ever greater. Big kudos goes to the technical team who made this possible.

WATCH THIS: Salvador Dali & Disney's Destino

Animation is such a wonderful medium for art. Unlike film, which has a limited development life-span because actors age, production can start, stop, start, stop, and even let an animation project stagnate for decades before finishing. Perhaps the greatest example of this is The Thief and the Cobbler, but another project followed a similar path: Destino.

Destino was a pet project of Salvador Dali and Walt Disney Studios, specifically a single animator. Sadly, the studio faced difficult times post-World War II, and the project was dropped for over fifty years.

Roy Disney discovered the finished story boards and decided to complete the project, and we should all be thankful. While it's not as... yeah... as Un Chien Andalou, it is a visual tour de force in its own right. More to the point, it perfectly manifests Roy Disney's belief in art over commercialism — success follows artistic integrity. Sometimes this is true, other times not. But what's important is that legacies are built upon art, and this work helps to further cement the legacies of Dali, Disney, and "that idiot," Roy.


Walt Disney y Salvador Dali - Destino HD from Ivan Wenger on Vimeo.

WATCH THIS: Clone High

The late 90's and early 2000's saw a number of funny, inventive, more adult-oriented cartoons. Almost all of them failed, and without Adult Swim there to pick up the slack, they fell into obscurity. In some cases, this was a significant shame, as it is with Clone High. It aired for a single season on Teletoon in Canada and MTV in the US, and was then unable to secure further funding.

The animation is abysmal, but everything has sufficient character. It's the ridiculous scenarios and voice-overs that bring the show over the top. It's a long-lost gem and you should watch the entire season.



And just for fun, here's a great take on the cast from The Atrix over at DeviantArt. My favorite is easily the Principal.

Men-Ups: Pin-ups With Men

I don't know how I missed this, because this is awesome. The entire series of photos is available on Flickr.

As many of you know, I am both the author of this website -- which is, or at least was, predicated on the objectification of women -- and am also a rabid feminist. I live in a state of constant cognitive dissonance. So something that is both pin-up oriented, while also illustrating the ridiculous portrayal and objectification that takes place, fits neatly in between both viewpoints.

It reminds me of the fan-freaking-tastic fan art of The Avengers, all posed like they are constantly posing Black Widow: the booty shot.

Image by Kevin Bolk.

The only way this would have been better is if they had taken the photographs and had a digital painter do the full Elvgren treatment, thus allowing for the hilariously exaggerated facial expressions common to pin-ups.

An important point of discussion is how this posing is assumed to be silly by those making the images, but the posing of the women is not. Obviously, that's the point that they are making, but it is still worth emphasizing that we have had our perceptions of women so wildly sexualized, that utterly stupid portrayals of them are not only normalized, but visually appealing.

This again comes back to something that I have dealt with for years: the non-sexualization of men. The idea of a strongly sexualized male in imagery is almost exclusively associated with homosexuality. And while I would never claim that this particular arrangement has been harder on men than women, it has done damage to us. I have spent my entire life convinced, on some level, that I am unattractive. One of the causes of this is because me, a male, is never portrayed as visually arresting, or sexy. I could never be an object of desire. (I have since overcome the majority of these issues and generally feel alright about myself.)

Oh sure, some men are portrayed as attractive, but it has more to do with their wrapping than their physical form. Their jacket is cut just so. Their car is expensive. Look at GQ or Esquire magazines' covers. The body is not attractive, it is the clothing, the watch, the style that is important. The body is ugly.

Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that the photographer who created these images is himself a homosexual. He must be keenly aware of the dichotomy of male and female portrayals in the media, and that straight men are always portrayed in a particular way.

Obviously, things are changing. Since the 1980's, we've seen an increasing number of media portrayals of the male body as specifically attractive, even though they are not specifically sexualized. Today, we live in an odd mish-mash of media portrayals. We have advertisements that, at least initially, seem to sexualize men but are actually sexualizing women -- advertisements like BOD. In them, the men are still doing something, usually sports, and are not simply out on display, and the message of the ads is identical to those of AXE or any other male-aimed advertisements from the past: get laid by hot women.

We also have Dolce & Gabbana advertisements and their ilk that literally drip with homoeroticism.

I look forward to the day when males are sexualized to the same degree as females. Objectification is fine, because for all of our wondrous humanity, we are also objects to one another. Unfortunately for women in our society, that objectification is concomitant with ignoring of their humanity -- they are reduced to nothing but an object.

There was a time when the male form was seen as a glorious object: Classical Greece. This was replaced with the adoration of the female form in Hellenistic Greece, which has unfortunately remained ever since. I want a return to the recognition of the male form as an object it its own right.

New Trailer For Dreamworks' "Turbo" Is Actually Really Good

I don't think that I have bashed Dreamworks Animation trailers enough recently. So, once more with feeling, they suck. Badly. To be fair, they haven't been sucking quite as much with more recent movies — certainly nowhere near the colossal mountain of suck that were trailers for The Road to El Dorado and Over The Hedge. And I absolutely give them some benefit of doubt, what with the trailers to Madagascar 3 being an absolute eye-sore to me but apparently being very popular.

But in the main, their trailers fail to do anything more than make the movies seem far more juvenile than they actually are.

Trailers must have structure just as any movie must, because the trailer should an essence be a mini-movie. I frequently joke that the best trailer that I have ever seen was for the movie Bratz, where quite literally the entire movie happens in the trailer. It's a masterpiece.



The theoretically ideal trailer has an exposition where the basic characters and plot are introduced, conflict is introduced as the action rises, the climax, as it were, of the trailer is usually music and a montage of clips meant to give an overview of how the movie is going to feel, and the trailer will sometimes stop suddenly, thus not giving the satisfaction of a completed story, thus forming the desire to see the film. Always leave them wanting more, is how it goes.

This trailer for Turbo is a teaser trailer, and teaser trailers are in many ways both easier and harder to make. One, the company making the trailer is usually working with a smaller pile of completed scenes, and movies frequently don't achieve their final form until right before release. Two, the point of a teaser trailer is to do just that, tease. The question of what element of the film is going to be the biggest tease thus needs to be decided upon. This is easier in high-concept films, like Turbo obviously is, but then you have the problem of not wanting to reveal too much of the concept for fear of giving it away.

I think that this trailer gets the balance just right. It has the comedy, the music, the visual impact, the dramatic impact. It is the best teaser trailer that Dreamworks Animation has made. And, unlike shockingly awful concepts like Rise of the Guardians, this concept actually seems like a cute enough idea to really drive characters and humor. Thumbs up, Dreamworks. Thumbs up.