The Fool Speaks True

[acroyear]

The real question, however, is whether stripping down animation might not threaten the rest of the company. It might. Everything from theme parks to merchandising relies on a stream of fresh characters to cash in on. If Disney finds itself in a shoot out and someone yells, "Draw," the company may find one of its holsters empty.

-- The Motley Fool

Which makes the current backwards state of the Disney films (make a movie about the rides, rather than the other way around) all the more interesting...they'll run out of story-based rides sooner.

Comments

[cozit.livejournal.com]

I knew they'd closed the Florida studios... but didn't realize that they'd been stupid enough to kill off all but the computer animation stuff :-(

Stinks. period.

Starting to really hate a certain CEO about now...

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

yeah, that's what they did.

some animators accepted the offer to learn CGI (Glen Keane, of Beast/Tarzan/Silver is among them). Others left, though not giving a strong "this is what i'm doing" statement the way that Legacy Animation chose to down in florida.

the main group it killed off was the clean-up crew. some of the other teams in burbank (story, layout, the CGI-based effects team (including Deep Canvas backgrounds)) are generally intact, though it may hurt them a bit anyways.

the burbank teams have been responsible for more of the flops (Atlantis, Treasure Planet; mind you i liked them both, but they were financial flops), while the orlando crew was responsible for some very good "modest" successes like Bear, Mulan, and Lilo. the movies are still based on the work of their story/editing teams and so that may get reflected in losing the financially stable (if not blockbuster-making) side of things.