Talking or singing animals, or just personified animals, are almost required of an animated feature. Yes, I'm making an exaggeration, but now for the explanation. You see, animation is how animals with human emotions were made possible (brought to life in movies) in the first place. And within Disney, I think every single film had animals that acted rather fantastically, since they do animate impossible things in every film, but that could be chocked up to the fact that in animation, anything is possible, so it makes sense to choose animation when wanting to do impossible things. But anyway, personified animals are a tradition and staple of Disney almost as much as hand-drawn animation itself. Also, many fairy tales and stories that are good for adapting into animated films already have animals that act rather different from real life, with feelings or intelligence, or are simply understood by humans that can interpret what they're feeling and thinking.
Oh, and look at The Plague Dogs or Watership Town. Talking animals, but I think they would be quite up to your idea of mature and intelligent!
Now Broadway. We all know that starting with The Little Mermaid (though actually, Oliver & Company seems like it could have been too), actual Broadway songwriters penned the songs for Disney's animated features, and that made them grander or bigger in some ways than previous Disney films, and the public loved it.
And so, any film, especially the one that started it, that had such Broadway-type songs seems perfectly natural to be a stage production, especially when one of the songwriters, who wrote songs for Broadway and wrote the songs for a film, returns to write the songs for that film staged on Broadway!
It's just that Tarzan and The Little Mermaid happened to do the stage adaptations suckily. Not completely, but enough for them to either fail, or in Mermaid's case, actually have a good run the length of most new shows these days, but not have one of the longest Broadway runs in history.
Disney's Cousins - The New DisneyToon CGI Features
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You're not that far off as Howard Ashman did actually wrote the lyrics for the film's opening song, "Once Upon Upon a Time in New York City".Dusterian wrote:We all know that starting with The Little Mermaid (though actually, Oliver & Company seems like it could have been too), actual Broadway songwriters penned the songs for Disney's animated features
The problem is NOT talking animals per se...
It's just that every darn film features talking animals and for the most part there really isn't a lot of new things in these films!
That's true of any industry... Producers take what they see as a sure thing -- remember, they're risk-adverse and want to ensure their films are profitable -- and they duplicate it. Sometimes, you'll have several dozen of the same thing in theaters/on the newsstand at the same time!
This is nothing new. It's been going on for ages in about every entertainment medium you can think of.
Take for instance comics...
Before 1935/1936, there were no comics as we know them today. They just reprinted newspaper strips. Shortly after that, someone got the idea to do new material for comics and it caught on and started outselling reprints.
The big smash hit for comics didn't come until 1938. That was the year a strange visitor from another planet came to Earth with powers far beyond those of ordinary mortal men. The Last Son of Krypton inspired dozens of imitators and spin-offs like Batman, Captain Marvel, The Sub-Mariner, Captain America and so on. For a decade, superheroes ruled comics until they died off post-World War II and new genres of comics dominated the newsstands.
Superheroes eventually made their comeback in the mid-1950s starting with the revival of The Flash but sales were never as consistently good as they were during World War II. The situation with comics in the US has gotten particularly bad since the mid-1990s as diversity in product has shrunk. That's about when movie licensing started kicking in with companies and the last serious attempts at marketing comics to kids fizzled out with a whimper at the major publishers on top of a major reshuffling of the industry following a bad distribution war.
Companies like Marvel and DC who own large stables of their own characters don't want to innovate or license new properties when they have literally thousands of characters created under work-for-hire during the past 70 years. In the meantime, much smaller companies survive on licensed product (Dark Horse) or their own character universes (Jeff Smith's Bone) or reprint Japanese comics (Viz, Yen Press, Tokyopop, etc.). Marvel and DC still rule the roost with well over half the comic book market and they pretty much set the tone like it or not with their sales and privileged relationships with the sole comics distributor, Diamond.
A similar situation exists in the American feature animation industry with four different companies -- Disney/Pixar, DreamWorks, Fox/Blue Sky, and Sony/ImageWorks. They really don't innovate that much nor do they feel they have to as long as their marketing works and the audience seems to lap up the product they put out. Work is still for hire and the people who create characters for these companies still don't ultimately own the work they output. In many ways, it's worse than the situation with the comics. The little comics guy has a chance to mimeograph/print a small run of comics or bypass print altogether and publish a comic online. He gets to own and take total responsibility for his work as well as get all the spoils if there are any to be made.
With animation, it's very hard to be prolific with films on your own since it's 1,000 times more labor intensive, far more costly, and generally has to be done in teams of people to get out in a reasonable production time -- otherwise you can literally spend a lifetime creating just one film! An individual is never going to create a film as great as Snow White all on his own... That takes hundreds of people to produce.
It's just that every darn film features talking animals and for the most part there really isn't a lot of new things in these films!
That's true of any industry... Producers take what they see as a sure thing -- remember, they're risk-adverse and want to ensure their films are profitable -- and they duplicate it. Sometimes, you'll have several dozen of the same thing in theaters/on the newsstand at the same time!
This is nothing new. It's been going on for ages in about every entertainment medium you can think of.
Take for instance comics...
Before 1935/1936, there were no comics as we know them today. They just reprinted newspaper strips. Shortly after that, someone got the idea to do new material for comics and it caught on and started outselling reprints.
The big smash hit for comics didn't come until 1938. That was the year a strange visitor from another planet came to Earth with powers far beyond those of ordinary mortal men. The Last Son of Krypton inspired dozens of imitators and spin-offs like Batman, Captain Marvel, The Sub-Mariner, Captain America and so on. For a decade, superheroes ruled comics until they died off post-World War II and new genres of comics dominated the newsstands.
Superheroes eventually made their comeback in the mid-1950s starting with the revival of The Flash but sales were never as consistently good as they were during World War II. The situation with comics in the US has gotten particularly bad since the mid-1990s as diversity in product has shrunk. That's about when movie licensing started kicking in with companies and the last serious attempts at marketing comics to kids fizzled out with a whimper at the major publishers on top of a major reshuffling of the industry following a bad distribution war.
Companies like Marvel and DC who own large stables of their own characters don't want to innovate or license new properties when they have literally thousands of characters created under work-for-hire during the past 70 years. In the meantime, much smaller companies survive on licensed product (Dark Horse) or their own character universes (Jeff Smith's Bone) or reprint Japanese comics (Viz, Yen Press, Tokyopop, etc.). Marvel and DC still rule the roost with well over half the comic book market and they pretty much set the tone like it or not with their sales and privileged relationships with the sole comics distributor, Diamond.
A similar situation exists in the American feature animation industry with four different companies -- Disney/Pixar, DreamWorks, Fox/Blue Sky, and Sony/ImageWorks. They really don't innovate that much nor do they feel they have to as long as their marketing works and the audience seems to lap up the product they put out. Work is still for hire and the people who create characters for these companies still don't ultimately own the work they output. In many ways, it's worse than the situation with the comics. The little comics guy has a chance to mimeograph/print a small run of comics or bypass print altogether and publish a comic online. He gets to own and take total responsibility for his work as well as get all the spoils if there are any to be made.
With animation, it's very hard to be prolific with films on your own since it's 1,000 times more labor intensive, far more costly, and generally has to be done in teams of people to get out in a reasonable production time -- otherwise you can literally spend a lifetime creating just one film! An individual is never going to create a film as great as Snow White all on his own... That takes hundreds of people to produce.
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It's people out of touch enough try to flog 1970's anti-Ron Miller cliche's in 2009.GeorgeC wrote:The problem is NOT talking animals per se...
Oh, okay, you were talking about Dreamworks films--Sorry, got confused there for a sec.It's just that every darn film features talking animals and for the most part there really isn't a lot of new things in these films!
(He's just not comfortable in a thread without them, you see.)(more thought-scattered stuff about comics)
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Hm, well, I don't know much about comics...wait, I guess now I do!
Oh, and well, it's unfortunate but for, like, in the case of Disney, they did all sorts of films that were very creative (of course they're always creative) and different from what they had done in the past...but those didn't do very well!
And so, that is why they seem to be returning to doing three fairy tales. Rapunzel was always intended, and this was and still is to be very creative with new animation that combines hand-drawn, CGI, and old oil-paintings. Enchanted had been in production for a loooong time as well. But Princess and the Frog, well...I have to admit, it really was overdue for a black princess or a black heroine, but...I wish they actually did The Frog Prince, and used an African or completely original newly made fairy tale for their black princess.
Anyway, all these things were and will be very creative and still different from past Disney fairy tales. But I wanted to point that Disney did very, very different things with no talking animals or any singing at all, and those didn't do very well...so...yea.
Maybe each year they could make one movie that they feel will be very popular, and then one film that is more risk-taking, so they have a surefire hit to back up their risks each year...?
Oh, and well, it's unfortunate but for, like, in the case of Disney, they did all sorts of films that were very creative (of course they're always creative) and different from what they had done in the past...but those didn't do very well!
And so, that is why they seem to be returning to doing three fairy tales. Rapunzel was always intended, and this was and still is to be very creative with new animation that combines hand-drawn, CGI, and old oil-paintings. Enchanted had been in production for a loooong time as well. But Princess and the Frog, well...I have to admit, it really was overdue for a black princess or a black heroine, but...I wish they actually did The Frog Prince, and used an African or completely original newly made fairy tale for their black princess.
Anyway, all these things were and will be very creative and still different from past Disney fairy tales. But I wanted to point that Disney did very, very different things with no talking animals or any singing at all, and those didn't do very well...so...yea.
Maybe each year they could make one movie that they feel will be very popular, and then one film that is more risk-taking, so they have a surefire hit to back up their risks each year...?
Dusterian,
There just isn't a Walt Disney and the circumstances that allowed Walt Disney Animation (pre-Features; that came AFTER 1937) to flourish and innnovate in the 1930s just don't exist today. While even then a lot of what Disney accomplished wasn't being done for the first time even (when you check the history) it was being done for the first time in a reproducible quality fashion and also on a large national scale!
Sound cartoons predated Steamboat Willie but the Mickey short had more character and the sound process used was more practical for future shorts...
Flowers and Trees probably wasn't the first full-color short but the four-strip Technicolor process was superior to others and Disney locked in exclusive rights to the process for a couple of years (3-4 maybe)...
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs wasn't the first feature-length animated film made but it was the first to be produced in full-color with sound and was so well-made that it still holds up as one of the greatest achievements in film-making and is still arguably one of the 10 best if not top 5 animated features ever made...
The quality of that product is what made Disney stand out so much. You look at most competing companies in the 1930s and they're not even in the same league as Disney for the most part.
The funny thing is that very often the bigger a company gets and the more money it's worth the more risk-adverse it gets to taking chances. There's just a lot more money and people at stake.
John Lasseter, bright guy that he is, isn't Walt Disney.
Of course, I've made the argument that the Disney history is more complicated than most people realize. Who knows how far he could have gone if he didn't have his brother Roy along to help with the financing of all the projects he wanted to do. As great as Walt's ideas were, they wouldn't have gone anywhere without another fellow to figure out how to construct the financing to get them done. Roy also arguably helped keep Walt in check until the company financial situation was better and even then he helped keep Walt from spending the company into oblivion!
There just isn't a Walt Disney and the circumstances that allowed Walt Disney Animation (pre-Features; that came AFTER 1937) to flourish and innnovate in the 1930s just don't exist today. While even then a lot of what Disney accomplished wasn't being done for the first time even (when you check the history) it was being done for the first time in a reproducible quality fashion and also on a large national scale!
Sound cartoons predated Steamboat Willie but the Mickey short had more character and the sound process used was more practical for future shorts...
Flowers and Trees probably wasn't the first full-color short but the four-strip Technicolor process was superior to others and Disney locked in exclusive rights to the process for a couple of years (3-4 maybe)...
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs wasn't the first feature-length animated film made but it was the first to be produced in full-color with sound and was so well-made that it still holds up as one of the greatest achievements in film-making and is still arguably one of the 10 best if not top 5 animated features ever made...
The quality of that product is what made Disney stand out so much. You look at most competing companies in the 1930s and they're not even in the same league as Disney for the most part.
The funny thing is that very often the bigger a company gets and the more money it's worth the more risk-adverse it gets to taking chances. There's just a lot more money and people at stake.
John Lasseter, bright guy that he is, isn't Walt Disney.
Of course, I've made the argument that the Disney history is more complicated than most people realize. Who knows how far he could have gone if he didn't have his brother Roy along to help with the financing of all the projects he wanted to do. As great as Walt's ideas were, they wouldn't have gone anywhere without another fellow to figure out how to construct the financing to get them done. Roy also arguably helped keep Walt in check until the company financial situation was better and even then he helped keep Walt from spending the company into oblivion!
(Eh.... Two-strip, three-strip, four-strip.
(I make one mistake and that's all he remembers!
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More about Technicolor here...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technicolor
Lots of technical information about how the process of how it works. I don't understand all of it and frankly most of it's only useful to archivists and film restoration technicians.
I like the look of Technicolor better for fantasy films like The Wizard of Oz and period films. Unlike what the wiki article says, it's really not realistic. Nothing in real life looks like that unless you really have weird eyes or are on psychelic drugs!
3-strip Technicolor film really isn't used for film production anymore but the dye processes and techniques have been preserved for different uses other than just archives. One of its primary advantages over other film stock is stability. It holds up better over time and the colors don't fade anywhere near as rapidly as much of the film stock used after 1983.
There have been a lot of films including The Notorious Bettie Page that have faked the Technicolor look for a period look. Those segments in that film were among my favorites. I had no idea they'd ratcheted/saturated the color in the full-color sequences (without Technicolor) until I listened to the audio commentary track on the DVD!
Wonderful! I wish that was done in more films today. Sometimes a break from reality is needed and that seems to be a neat way to get some of that Technicolor look back...
(I make one mistake and that's all he remembers!
)More about Technicolor here...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technicolor
Lots of technical information about how the process of how it works. I don't understand all of it and frankly most of it's only useful to archivists and film restoration technicians.
I like the look of Technicolor better for fantasy films like The Wizard of Oz and period films. Unlike what the wiki article says, it's really not realistic. Nothing in real life looks like that unless you really have weird eyes or are on psychelic drugs!
3-strip Technicolor film really isn't used for film production anymore but the dye processes and techniques have been preserved for different uses other than just archives. One of its primary advantages over other film stock is stability. It holds up better over time and the colors don't fade anywhere near as rapidly as much of the film stock used after 1983.
There have been a lot of films including The Notorious Bettie Page that have faked the Technicolor look for a period look. Those segments in that film were among my favorites. I had no idea they'd ratcheted/saturated the color in the full-color sequences (without Technicolor) until I listened to the audio commentary track on the DVD!
Wonderful! I wish that was done in more films today. Sometimes a break from reality is needed and that seems to be a neat way to get some of that Technicolor look back...
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The Life And Death Of Peter Sellers and Down With Love are two other films that spring to mind that play with the Technicolor palette. Quiz Show was another one where the whole film was graded to look like it had been shot in the 1950s, and I remember The Aviator having several Technicolor-like sequences, in particular the golfing scene with Cate Blanchett as Katherine Hepburn.
An excellent resource is the Technicolor documentary made for TCM and the BBC, available on The Adventures Of Robin Hood deluxe DVD and Blu-ray.
I agree it's a hyper-real depiction of color (that's why they actually had color advisers on the sets) but it's also beautiful. The Technicolor resonance is also what we must remember when people complain about the retouching of the Disney classics...as well as being cleaner, the Technicolor would bring out colors we didn't ever know were there originally, even if those restoring the films do then over do it and saturate them further and clean them beyond recognition.
But Technicolor photography restoration - when it's done just right, as Warners seem to be able to do - is just gorgeous. In the right place and the right time, it is timeless itself.
An excellent resource is the Technicolor documentary made for TCM and the BBC, available on The Adventures Of Robin Hood deluxe DVD and Blu-ray.
I agree it's a hyper-real depiction of color (that's why they actually had color advisers on the sets) but it's also beautiful. The Technicolor resonance is also what we must remember when people complain about the retouching of the Disney classics...as well as being cleaner, the Technicolor would bring out colors we didn't ever know were there originally, even if those restoring the films do then over do it and saturate them further and clean them beyond recognition.
But Technicolor photography restoration - when it's done just right, as Warners seem to be able to do - is just gorgeous. In the right place and the right time, it is timeless itself.
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I actually knew that Snow White wasn't the first animated feature..although, they often call it the first "full-length" animated feature...according to the length of America's film association? Was it longer than Prince Achmed, the first animated film?
I also thought of Disney's recent restorations regarding technicolor. So Snow White was in Technicolor as well? I thought the 50's films were done differently than the 30's and 40's films...maybe it was the three-strip part.
But I do wonder if maybe whoever restores for Warner Brothers would have done better restoring Cinderella, Peter Pan, and other Disney films...actually, all of them! Do they keep in some of the grain?
I also thought of Disney's recent restorations regarding technicolor. So Snow White was in Technicolor as well? I thought the 50's films were done differently than the 30's and 40's films...maybe it was the three-strip part.
But I do wonder if maybe whoever restores for Warner Brothers would have done better restoring Cinderella, Peter Pan, and other Disney films...actually, all of them! Do they keep in some of the grain?
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Achmed was, I believe, just under the one-hour mark, perhaps even a bit less.
The grain on the hi-def restorations of Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio and Snow White is next to being non-existent. The ethos behind these remasterings seem to be "what would these look like if Walt and his crew had been able to photograph the cels directly to a hi-def digital source". Great results, but nothing retaining the feel of the medium and the era they were originally produced.
The grain on the hi-def restorations of Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio and Snow White is next to being non-existent. The ethos behind these remasterings seem to be "what would these look like if Walt and his crew had been able to photograph the cels directly to a hi-def digital source". Great results, but nothing retaining the feel of the medium and the era they were originally produced.
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High-def Snow White, did you see that yet? Or did you mean the old 2001 Snow White DVD? I thought that actually had some grain, not that I would know, I can tell a little bit but I usually read what experts say.
What you said about what these restorers seem to think is extremely worrying. These were meant to look like films, moving paintings as well, but still have the look of being on film stock! Which grain is apart of.
In the interview with Sleeping Beauty's 2008 restorer's, they said they remove the grain because it "just looks like noise". Yea, um, well no one would really complain if there was some grain like how they had for how many years before on laserdisc. But I did hear that Pinocchio's restoration manages to keep fine image detail, even when removing all grain, which is what I'm most concerned about. I just hope we get all the image detail, all that we are supposed to see, in future releases of all the films.
What you said about what these restorers seem to think is extremely worrying. These were meant to look like films, moving paintings as well, but still have the look of being on film stock! Which grain is apart of.
In the interview with Sleeping Beauty's 2008 restorer's, they said they remove the grain because it "just looks like noise". Yea, um, well no one would really complain if there was some grain like how they had for how many years before on laserdisc. But I did hear that Pinocchio's restoration manages to keep fine image detail, even when removing all grain, which is what I'm most concerned about. I just hope we get all the image detail, all that we are supposed to see, in future releases of all the films.
Snow White hasn't been released on Blu ray yet...
All the classic antimated Disney films released on BD have had digital scrubbings to remove grain.
I didn't like it on the original Snow White DVD release, not crazy about hearing it done for the other films released so far, too.
The original Snow White DVD ended up looking like a direct-to-video OVA at times... Compare and contrast that to the earlier laserdisc edition which was based on the early 1990s restoration of the film. At least in the earlier restoration they left the grain on.
The grain situation isn't leaving the hi-def concern any time soon. I don't know why some people in the home video companies feel grain has to be taken off. There's no reason 70-year-old films should look like they were shot today.
The other big boon-doggle is the altering of aspect ratios for hi-def broadcast. Unfortunately, films ARE being cropped and stretch to fit 16:9 field! Videophiles are calling companies on this but they just aren't listening yet.
The third situation is that companies are still releasing earlier/early rev-spec hi-def transfers on BD. Gladiator's a good example. They're using a 2000 DVD transfer for the recent BD release and it's just not the best presentation for the film...
(More and more I'm convincing myself to stick to the low-end Book set edition of the Snow White BD. I can't justify the higher-end editions when I have 2-3 books about the film already with reproductions of so much of the development and production art! There's no way I'm spending $150 for the premium set.... Just can't justify it and certainly didn't do that for Nightmare Before Christmas. Wish Nightmare had the steelcase for BD, though!
(At least Best Buy is selling pre-order steelcases for Snow White. You have to put down $7.50 for those, though...)
All the classic antimated Disney films released on BD have had digital scrubbings to remove grain.
I didn't like it on the original Snow White DVD release, not crazy about hearing it done for the other films released so far, too.
The original Snow White DVD ended up looking like a direct-to-video OVA at times... Compare and contrast that to the earlier laserdisc edition which was based on the early 1990s restoration of the film. At least in the earlier restoration they left the grain on.
The grain situation isn't leaving the hi-def concern any time soon. I don't know why some people in the home video companies feel grain has to be taken off. There's no reason 70-year-old films should look like they were shot today.
The other big boon-doggle is the altering of aspect ratios for hi-def broadcast. Unfortunately, films ARE being cropped and stretch to fit 16:9 field! Videophiles are calling companies on this but they just aren't listening yet.
The third situation is that companies are still releasing earlier/early rev-spec hi-def transfers on BD. Gladiator's a good example. They're using a 2000 DVD transfer for the recent BD release and it's just not the best presentation for the film...
(More and more I'm convincing myself to stick to the low-end Book set edition of the Snow White BD. I can't justify the higher-end editions when I have 2-3 books about the film already with reproductions of so much of the development and production art! There's no way I'm spending $150 for the premium set.... Just can't justify it and certainly didn't do that for Nightmare Before Christmas. Wish Nightmare had the steelcase for BD, though!
(At least Best Buy is selling pre-order steelcases for Snow White. You have to put down $7.50 for those, though...)