Saturday, October 24, 2009

In Anticipation Of...

I am seriously looking forward to The Princess and the Frog. It's a beautiful throwback to classic Disney musical production. Also great is that the animation is a throwback. Disney was producing some great-looking stuff throughout the 80's, and had one of the most inventively drawn bad guys in history with Ursula, whom I still consider a high water mark in bad guy animation.

Disney started falling off of a cliff by Pocahontas, which was stunningly rigid, bland, and lacking any semblance of character. Even the "cute" sidekicks sucked. The Hunchback of Notre Dame was better, but not by much. And Mulan was abysmal! Who the hell did they think they were? Genndy Tartakovsky?

Again, the "animate by focus group" mentality remained strong in Atlantis and Treasure Planet, both of which bombed in the box office. Home on the Range was better, but still played and looked like an overgrown TV show pilot, which, frankly, I suspect it was. Disney never misses a chance to drive a property into the dirt.

Of course, after grinding out pieces of shit for a decade, Disney declares that CGI has "killed" traditional animation. Don't you just love how company executives think? "We've been failing repeatedly. It's obviously the market and not me, because I have an MBA."

But the guys from Pixar are real movie guys. They know animation, they know story, and they know business. They know that all the MBAs in the world are only icing on the cake. You have to start with quality.

Toy Story 2 was good in spite of Disney executives, who just wanted to push anything out the door. They fired John Lasseter in the 80's, only to return to him as savior. They marginalized CGI, then reaped the rewards years later.

That's why I have such high hopes for The Princess and the Frog. Almost exactly twenty years after Disney was saved with a good, old-fashioned musical, so it stands to do it again.

2 comments:

  1. pocohuntas was populer at the time most people dont class pocohuntas with disneys falling

    i cant remember anything from then, last i remember was Hercules,Mulan,Pocohuntas

    then after them cartoons, i cant remember anything but then they starting making remakes of certain cartoons and the animation just didnt look the same

    becuse i was watching alladin today on the disney channel, it was a second movie called the return of jafar

    and the animation looked Terrible!
    i dont remember the original looking that awful


    well the princess and the frog,
    she is going to be the first african american disney princess

    they sure are taking long, to relase it, seems it is to be released in 2010 which seems to take forever to come


    i wont watch it at the cinemas, i will wait for it to come on dvd

    im sure it will be populer, i see she already has dolls of herself released

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  2. Oh you are not KIDDING. Disney is gearing up hard to turn Tiana into another Disney Princess. Gotta' get those little girls buying over-priced Disney crap! Hoo yah!

    Yeah. Return of Jafar was considered a throwaway film in Disney, then the movie sold millions of copies. Disney was caught off-guard, so the next Aladdin film, King of Thieves, had a much bigger budget and somewhat better animation.

    It was still nothing compared to the original Aladdin. I don't even think that they used the CAPS system in the development of either sequel.

    ReplyDelete

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