Disney Closing Blue Sky Studios Down

[Daniel]

Sad, but not totally surprising. Heartbreaking for all involved. A few too many Ice Ages perhaps, but there were some real gems. The look alone was almost always impressive. The Peanuts Movie would likely be my favorite of their output. It got so much right.

[Dacey]

Well nuts.

I've loved Blue Sky since the first Ice Age (and Scrat is probably the closest we will ever get to a modern Chuck Jones character), and in addition to The Peanuts Movie, they also made wonderful films like Robots, Spies in Disguise, and the truly marvelous Horton. It's a shame that they got saddled with making so many sequels (though I liked Ice Age 3 as the commercial summer blockbuster that it was), but them closing down is an absolute shame, and their animation was always top notch, providing a unique-"Disney" quality before the Mouse House found their computer animation identity with Tangled.

Not sure if COVID is to blame for this either. Once Disney bought them, they probably felt they had no use for them, and though Spies pulled in respectable numbers, it was ultimately drowned out by Disney's own Star Wars movie from that holiday season.

It's a terrible thing. Even when they weren't necessarily releasing a great movie the studio still had a "little engine that could" aspect to them that none of the other mainstream animation companies can claim because they can't be considered underdogs.

[Ben]

Totally agree. Can’t see why Disney doesn’t keep them around if only to make slightly lower budget direct-to-D+ fare.

I dint think you can "blame" them for too many Ice Ages, though: it’s no more an "offence" than multiple Shreks, Toy Stories or Cars. Every studio needs their franchise, and the Ages were consistently popular enough to warrant more, so they made them, mixing it in with truly original other movies.

What a sad, if not a surprising, shame, especially given that Disney said they were going to keep them around. Perhaps Covid does play a part: Disney needs to make layoffs somewhere, and now that major animated movies are going to streaming, maybe there just isn’t a place for Blue Sky to become the Studio's in-house quality direct-to-streaming producer.

My only hope is that they hold on to the Blue Sky library and don’t pull some more Miramax crud by selling off those films to whoever might look at saving Blue Sky. Their films, particularly the character of Scat, deserve better than that:

As always, it’s Scrat that steals the show and although, much as I like the Ice Age films, I must admit they are not as sophisticated as some others, there’s no question that Scrat is one of the CG revolution’s great triumphs. He’s that rare thing: an authentic example of pure cinema, brilliantly brought to life through the ultimate medium of animation. Even outside of the Ice Age films, Scrat is credibly the purest CG character to emerge from any studio. In fact, in a rare occurrence of reversing perceived wisdom, I couldn’t imagine Scrat created in any other way than by computer modelling and animation; certainly that itchy, scratchy, fidgety personality wouldn’t work as well hand drawn or quite as dynamically in stop-motion.

— from my Dawn Of The Dinosaurs review.

[EricJ]

And even then, the Peanuts movie was an "artificial" injection of talent, with the Schulz family, like DreamWorks with the Dragon movies--The one lucky excuse for fans to say "But they did good ones, too!"

I dint think you can "blame" them for too many Ice Ages, though: it’s no more an "offence" than multiple Shreks, Toy Stories or Cars. Every studio needs their franchise, and the Ages were consistently popular enough to warrant more, so they made them, mixing it in with truly original other movies.

Yes, you can:
Like DreamWorks beating Madagascar into bloody horse pulp, most of the non-Disney/Pixar CGI industry was being driven by Europe and China's non-English-speaking foreign market that liked Easily Translatable Wacky Critters, and by the fourth Ice Age, it became a question of why they were bothering to release them over here at all. Y'know, sort of like with China and the Transformers sequels.
As even your own review underlines, most fans didn't even know or care about the other characters beside the Cult of the Holy Squirrel, and BlueSky would have done better to go Pixar's Toy Story route and just turn him into a series of Wile E. Coyote shorts, period.
Even for those who did like the first one or Horton on its own merit, much of the creative talent had defected to Illumination to create the Despicable Me movies, leaving BS to run on its own fumes trying to duplicate DreamWorks' warmed-over nerd-triumphant formula for the two Rio movies as the would-be house brand.

Another studio scooping up Fox would have tried to artificially revive Ice Age like Universal with the Shrek series, but Disney didn't needn't "Spies in Disguise" to tell them BlueSky was expendable.

[Randall]

Yeah, I think the writing was on the wall once Disney bought Fox. The animation market has become very crowded, and Disney didn't need to be competing with itself. And if they had any thought of maybe keeping Blue Sky around, at least to first see how things went with their now-shuttered newest release, those thoughts were killed by the pandemic. Too much redundancy cannot survive tough times. Yet another unfortunate casualty of 2020/2021.

And it is a real shame. I wasn't a big fan of the Ice Age and Rio films, necessarily, but Blue Sky was capable of superior work. While the terrific Peanuts film had a (largely) Schulz family script, new animation technology was developed for the film which was truly groundbreaking. I also enjoyed their other efforts, and thought they filled a nice niche.

And, of course, any business closure - particularly a sudden one like this - means folks out of work, and some dreams have ended. Very sad.

[EricJ]

And before we get more "B-but...the Peanuts Movie!" as the lone HTTYD of BlueSky, frankly, I wasn't impressed.
Oh, it was OKAY, and wasn't heretical to Peanuts fans, but it was more like those artificially revived series now airing on AppleTV: The Schulz family can play the notes of Charlie Brown and Snoopy's running character gags, and create all the funny trademark situations, but they couldn't play the music of Charles Schulz's own button-down sense of absurdity, his Sunday-school background that made Linus the spiritual compass of the group, or his personal philosophic/neurotic mix of beaten optimism that became Charlie Brown's, and made the Bill Melendez holiday specials so memorable.

Like DW and Dragons, it would have been nice to see BS import some "ringers" of outside talent to shake up the faux-DW-formula monotony, but if Disney could do that, we know where the talent would go.

[droosan]

[Bill1978]

Such a shame that the Fox purchase has resulted in another competitor for Disney disappearing. I thought this would happen with the sale. Why keep the competitor alive? I like that their are rivals for Disney's animation crown, it keeps them on their toes, pushes them to continually to be great instead of mediocre.

I pretty much enjoyed all the movies they made, except for perhaps the last 2 Ice Ages but I'll admit that's probably because I kept being disappointed that the studio forgot that humans existed in the first movie. I was always hoping for a cameo from a grown baby. Or at least the occasional appearance of something human like.

[Farerb]

I can't really say that I'm sad over this, I never much cared for their films, including Ice Age, and I remember that my nephew made me endure Ferdinand at theaters ugh...

There's a reason why they can get away with this with Blue Sky, but could never with Pixar and WDAS. I never thought of them as real competitors for Disney anyway. The only real competition Disney had to endure over the years were Don Bluth and Dreamworks and even Dreamworks is barely in it now.
I keep hearing that Disney did try to sell it but no one wanted it, don't know how true that is though.

[EricJ]

Such a shame that the Fox purchase has resulted in another competitor for Disney disappearing. I thought this would happen with the sale. Why keep the competitor alive? I like that their are rivals for Disney's animation crown, it keeps them on their toes, pushes them to continually to be great instead of mediocre.

I'm no Disney fanboy who wants to see all rivals crushed, but I do believe in "Cobbler, stick to your last"--And that the only people, like Pixar or Marvel, who start a trend start it because they were originally the only ones DOING it in their own little hollow tree before it became a Thing, to be artificially analyzed and copied for its knockoff ingredients.
I'd like to have seen good competing brands, just like we got too hopeful about Iron Giant in the 90's Disney-knockoff days and defended Warner Animation to the death--There are some defenders of Quest for Camelot to this day who haven't given up and moved on, and even I was hoping the animated King & I would lead someone else to try again with a better director.

Basically, the reason we HAVE a glut of Disney/Pixar rivals, apart from every studio needing a House Brand, was that Shrek made it look "too easy" back in '01, when we barely knew CGI at all, and "Humor adults can enjoy along with their kids!" (ie. "Obnoxious sitcom humor") was still a mind-blowing concept. When Shrek won the first Best Animated Oscar, it was up against Jimmy Neutron...'Nuff said.
As a result, all we got was five studios studying How to Make a Shrek (or Ice Age) Sequel, and the product became so homogenized, we couldn't tell WHICH studio's House Brand it was anymore, or care. By the time Rio 2 and Ferdinand came out, they were just symptoms of a disease.

[Daniel]

Monsters, Inc. was also nominated Best Animated Feature.

[Ben]

Yeah, but that's rubbish!

To be fair, Blue Sky were, what, the third company to be doing feature CG, after DWA and Pixar, and also grew out of an already established animation company, Fox Animation, so they weren’t exactly knocking anything off.

I don’t think anyone "got hopeful" about Iron Giant. Sure, all us fanboys loved it, but by then Warners' toon division was already shuttered.

King And I was an external independent production that Warners only distributed through their deal with Morgan Creek, same as some of the Bluth films. They didn’t make them.

Shrek didn’t "result" in anything to do with Blue Sky. Once again, animated films take so long to make that Ice Age was in production in the late 90s.

If anything Blue Sky did actually have the most identity of the other studios. Their films were top class, but without the spite and crude or "random" humor that pepper DWA, Sony and other studios' films, and looks to have even seeped into Disney's, with Raya.

One could always rely on a Blue Sky to come up with something that was maybe more akin to a 40s Disney movie: simple, sweet, safe and, as a result, enjoyable. Ferdinand for a start is an amazingly good family movie, aimed towards younger kids. Ice Age was naturally their Toy Story franchise, but I equate Rio with Cars in being a not-so loved series, but still have too-notch production values. There’s still some stuff in both Rios that hasn’t been touched elsewhere.

End of the day, Blue Sky will be missed and it’s a shame they’ve gone.

[Farerb]

I don't think Monsters Inc is rubbish.

I don't think Blue Sky tried to be Dreamworks, they were obviously their own thing, it's just that their thing wasn't really my thing. I can say the same about Dreamworks, Illumination, Sony, etc... They don't make films that I care about.

That spite and crude or "random" humor already started with Tangled, and might have even before that with some of the late 2000's films. I still don't understand why it suddenly started getting attention with Raya, it has been there for a while.

[Ben]

Well that awful "jumpy thing" is something that would pop up in a Lionsgate film (!), not a Disney feature. It just feels old already.

[EricJ]

Monsters, Inc. was also nominated Best Animated Feature

And the fact that Shrek beat that one too, since grownup Pixar fans hadn't really come out of the Toy Story 2 closet yet, we thought was a "compliment"--It was all those HIP, CONTEMPORARY jokes making fun of mean ol' Disney, and Michael Eisner must be hiding under his desk at its success!
(And then Jeffrey Katzenberg went on his seventeen-year Ahab quest to get another one...)

There’s still some stuff in both Rios that hasn’t been touched elsewhere.

Although most of it HAS, since Rio seemed to go studiously out of its way to DNA-replicate the DreamWorks "hero", a pathetic nerd whom we are supposed to sympathize with for no other reason than "he's picked on", especially when the script seems to be doing most of the picking in the first place.

The wild imagination of Horton defected to Illumination, and all of a sudden it was the Despicable Me movies that suddenly had breakout dialogue-free humor with the Minions, and psychotically cute toddlers with fluffy-unicorn obsessions.
And all BlueSky was left with was a past reputation to live up to.