Here’s a man who doesn’t, I think, get nearly the respect he deserves, even among Disney animation buffs: Will Finn. Maybe because his career took him all over the place, and Disneyphilia tends to reward the lifers, like Glen Keane, Mark Henn, or Andreas Deja; Finn started out as one of Don Bluth’s kids, doing […]
Brother Bear is the platonic ideal of a completely vanilla animated children’s movie: the one Disney film that, whenever I mention that I’ve been working my way through the whole animated canon, I can guarantee that whomever I’m talking to forgot that it exists. Even I keep forgetting that it exists: when working on scheduling […]
Now, here is a situation that I do not understand whatsoever: after completing Aladdin in 1992 and witnessing as it became the highest-grossing animated film ever produced at that, and still one of only two traditionally-animated features to break $200 million at the U.S. box office, directors Ron Clements and John Musker tried for the […]
Of all the stories of Disney Feature Animation in the ’00s, one of the saddest to me is the fate of Chris Sanders – all the sadder because it is lacks drama or operatic tragedy, but is just a little example of the meanness and pettiness of corporate filmmaking. Sanders was a character designer on […]
Here are the facts: Peter Schneider, the President of Feature Animation at Walt Disney Pictures since 1985, and therefore the man who oversaw and to some extent engineered the successful execution of the one-film-per-year plan, was promoted to being president of the whole film division of the Walt Disney Company in 1999. At that time, […]
I’m skipping ahead. The actual entry at No. 39 in the Disney animation canon is the 2000 summer film Dinosaur, an ambitious and hugely expensive computer-generated imagery cartoon with live-action backgrounds that represents the studio’s first step into so-called 3-D animation that looked so awful to me back in the day that I still have […]
The official line is that the Disney Renaissance ended with Tarzan in the summer of 1999, for that film was the last outstanding financial success in string of hits; it was also the last $100 million Disney picture for a while; and it is implied often though not always stated outright that Tarzan was also […]
1999 was a rather special year for English-language cinema, an annus mirabilis in which every new weekend seemed to bring a new film that threatened to redefine the language of the art form or simply to perfect the language that already existed. Of course it wasn’t really that packed with revolution film masterpieces, but even […]
The Florida arm of Walt Disney Feature Animation opened in 1988, to provide additional support for the massive production of The Little Mermaid. But its true purpose was as a tourist attraction (it certainly didn’t make things more efficient to split the work load between the two coasts!), one of the centerpieces of the brand-spanking-new […]
Following the massive, then-unprecedented success of Aladdin, the writing-directing-producing team of Ron Clements and John Musker were probably as close as any directors ever have been at Disney to having a free hand. Who deserved more trust than they did? They were now three-for-three: The Great Mouse Detective (for which they served as half of […]
After completing Beauty and the Beast and establishing themselves as Disney’s premier artists for the serious, adult side of animation – at least, as serious and adult as it could be practiced at that particular studio – directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise managed, with the aid of Beauty and The Lion King producer Don […]
As hard as it is to fathom in retrospect, of the two Disney features put into development late in 1990, The Lion King was seen by most everybody at the studio as the runner-up, the less-prestigious, more kiddie-friendly picture; the one that you got stuck working on if you couldn’t nab a job over at […]
