Jim Hill Article on Feature Animation

[lrodk]

Jim Hill recently contributed a piece to AICN regarding the future of Disney Feature Animation. There's an interesting mention about the CG animation that will be featured in Mickey's Philharmagic next year. Here's the link:

http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=11595

 

[Buzz2001]

Thanks again Irodk

 

[OnWithTheShow]

Wow, I had no idea anyone but me still had this positive of an image for feature animation.

 

[Another Voice]

Read the article carefully. Besides clips and trailers from ‘Lilo’ and ‘Treasure’ (which have been out for almost a year now), there was nothing from Theatrical Animation shown. The CGI Mickey was for the theme park attraction. At least they confirmed the plan to clone to attraction to Anaheim and Paris within a year of its WDW opening.

The Mickey movie is being done by the TV department (and in a rare I told you so, I told you they’d bring out the Mickey feature again). If it’s good, they’re put it in theaters. Otherwise, it’s straight onto the racks at WalMart. That’s the new strategy for all animation.

‘Chicken Little’ has all the earmarks (sorry) of a shot across the bow of Pixar. And a good grazing angle at Dreamworks won’t be bad either. I’ll let everyone know if this project ever proceeds past designing the title cards.

There will still be animation released in theaters. But almost certainly now it will use the same process that created ‘Peter Pan 2’ and ‘Cinderella 2’. A theatrical release is nothing but a marketing ploy when The Company thinks it can generate some good word of mouth from the film. With ‘Pan’ they could, with ‘Cindy’ they knew they had a sticker on their hands. What you won’t see (unless ‘Lilo’ and ‘Treasure’ are mega-hits) are the big budget films that are years in development. You won’t get the films where artists pour their souls into the project.

Read the review for ‘Lilo and Stitch’ on AICN to see what we’ll be missing when returns matter more than effort.

 

[Another Voice]

There’s development and then there’s development.

From the rumors I’ve heard, ‘Brother Bear’ [working title] has it storyboards boards and some test animation complete, but Burbank doesn’t like the story (too dark and not enough merchandise) and doesn’t want to spend the money to keep either the film or the Florida animation group going. ‘Sweating Bullets’ has some vocal tracks, some animation no one likes and a storyline too close to both ‘The Country Bears’ and Dreamworks’ ‘Tusker’.

The others exist as ideas and as sketches. The question is how these films are going to be made – the budget for the movie, further development of the scripts, will the animation be done in house or shipped overseas? It’s all a matter of budget an how much these films will get – the cheap ‘Cindy 2’ budget or the big ‘Peter 2’ budget.

Of course, by your examples you’ve shown that big budgets and lots of time don’t guarantee a hit. And by the same logic it’s been shown that demographic marketing, slim budgets and rushed productions didn’t produce stunning hits in ‘Oliver & Company’ and ‘Hercules’ either. There’s still a place for talent and drive in the movie industry.

Frankly, I’d rather watch a failed attempt like ‘Basil of Baker Street’ than a movie where no one tried at all like ‘101 Dalmatians 2: The Animated Sequel’.

 

[larworth]

Forgetting philosophy and standards for a moment and thinking only about the business impact, these sequels appear to be great opportunities to print money. When you can earn in excess of $100 million on video sales for a product that costs $10-15 million to make, whew. From the number I've seen most of these sequels seem to have no problem topping the $100 million mark.

Was there ever any thought of a business model where Feature Animation's main purpose is to just create strong story affinity/viewership. These yearly big budget works of art would only be expected to break-even on their own, with the return coming from the direct to video sequels that could be made?

I might be a little happier if they were milking something they created instead of dipping into the vault so much. Seems that this well will run dry (probably after Mike is in retirement) somewhere down the road.

 

[raidermatt]

I might be a little happier if they were milking something they created instead of dipping into the vault so much. Seems that this well will run dry(probably after Mike is in retirement) somewhere down the road.

The well running dry is really my only direct concern with the sequels. We saw Peter Pan and were happy with it. We bought Mermaid II and were not. I picked up Cinderella 2 yesterday, but if it disappoints, I'm not likely to pick the next direct-to-video feature.

My non-insider view is that it would be unrealistic to only ask that the new features break even, but its also unrealistic to expect them to match the sequels return percentage-wise. Unlike a film, the budget for an animated sequel can easily be much lower than the original. But to your point, Larworth, in the big picture, if there are no original blockbusters, the sequel well will eventually run dry.

I really think it will happen faster than many think, and for two reasons:

1- More of them coming to market.

2- Franchises tend to lose their marketability with subsequent sequels, and many of Disney's hits have now already had sequels (Lion King, Aladdin, Beauty, Pan, Cinderella, Mermaid, Tramp).

I'm not saying they won't make money, but the cash printing machine will not run forever unless its gets new paper.

 

[lrodk]

Raidermatt makes a good point in that what Disney is currently doing is merely a short term fix. It's the easy way for them to exploit their film library and it's somthing that the Eisner regime is all too familiar with. If you remember when Eisner/Wells took over Disney in the early 80s, one of the first directives they came up with to try and turn things around was to dig into the film vault and re-release the classics on VHS, something that rarely happened under previous management. That strategy worked magic for their bottom line and they rode that horse until they couldn't any longer. It reached a saturation point where consumers were no longer buying these films because they either had them already, were tired of watching them, or took them for granted because they knew that they would always be on store shelves. The result was a return to the limited release strategy that saw these films come out once every few years.

If they put out enough poor quality sequels I suspect that consumers will have their fill of these direct-to-video products as well and simply stop buying them. By that time Disney will have cashed in big time, as they did during troubled waters in the early 80s, on the notoriety of the original films, and then simply move on to something else. This is nothing more than a quick fix, exploiting what they have simply because they have no other choice. With Disney's stock price sagging and take-over rumors circulating, Disney will go down any avenue that leads them to robust profits in the shortest period of time. Once they get back into the comfort zone, at least financially, I think this squezze cycle will have run it's course. Pehaps then we'll see them put more time/effort into developing original stories, most of which take a long time to bring to market. I think that the time factor and how it ties into profits is what's driving all of these lesser quality projects more than anything else.