Mark August 2005 on your calenders because it is truly the end of an era that last a little less than a century:
In the 1960s, Walt Disney joked that one day he’d replace his elite corps of animators, known as the “Nine Old Men,” and their slow, expensive way of making hand-drawn movies, with Audio-Animatronic figures.
At the end of last month, Walt’s joke came true. The studio bearing his name announced that, due to a “changing creative climate and economic environment,” it will be shutting DisneyToon Studios Australia next year. The studio, which turned out sequels (such as “Tarzan II,” “The Lion King II” and “Bambi II”) was the company’s last remaining facility creating hand-drawn (or 2-D) traditional animation. To compete in the 3-D computer-generated imagery (or CGI) arena, the house that a hand-drawn mouse built will become a pixels, rather than a paper-and-pencils, place.
As the old animators often asked themselves, “What would Walt think?”
The decision was not entirely unexpected. In the past few years, Disney 2-D facilities in Florida, France, Canada and Japan have been closed, and 3-D computers have replaced all the traditional animation drawing tables at the studio’s home base in Burbank, Calif.
In this excellent piece, John Canemaker, director of the animation program at New York University Tisch School of the Arts and the author of “Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men and the Art of Animation,” gives a ton of excellent info about the history of animation. Then he writes:
What would Walt have made of all this? Considering the fact that the then-new technology of movie soundtracks put his studio on the map, and that he constantly sought out and exploited innovations such as three-color Technicolor, the Multiplane Camera, stereophonic sound, television, Audio-Animatronics and lasers, I feel sure he would have embraced CGI animation. “Our business has grown with and by technical achievements,” he said in 1941.
But somehow I doubt he would have thrown the baby out with the bath water by abandoning hand-drawn animation. Walt was known to spend years trying to find the best way to deploy the talents of certain of his artists, and perhaps he would have found new ways to use the unique qualities of the hand-made moving image–its inherent warmth; the happy accidents of the human touch; the immediate intuitive link between brain, hand and drawing instrument; the special flexibility and style that is so different from the dimensionality, essential coolness and realistic imagery of CGI.
Ultimately, Walt–an instinctive showman–knew that audiences are attracted not by technology alone, but by engaging stories and appealing characters. The Disney studio’s recent string of expensive hand-drawn feature failures, such as “Treasure Planet,” “Brother Bear” and “Home on the Range,” were the result of poor story choices and corporate meddling in the creative process, not the wrong kind of animation.
As Disney’s great admirer Steven Spielberg recently said, “If storytelling becomes a byproduct of the digital revolution, then the medium itself is corrupted.”
He hits the nail on the head:
There’s little mercy in show biz for things that don’t work or seem on the decline as new technologies or venues come in. Just look at: the death of vaudeville; the death of silent films, the explosion and death of old time radio; the growth of television and its battle to retain its audience amind stiff challenges from cable television and the internet; the decision of Kodak to basically shift to digital cameras and eliminate black and white film.
Yes, the marketplace does respond and set the agenda. But part of what the marketplace will respond to is the quality of the product it’s being offered. If some recent Disney hand-drawn cartoons weren’t stellar, it didn’t help the art as it was being scrutinized amid more popular computer animation.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.