i kind of didn't mind it either when it was first done in 04, but Disney chose to redesign it. as someone here said a few posts ago "Aslan" . there was no way we could have produced 1500 shots at an Aslan level. ya know.
we were approached to do The Wild and needed to find a facility that was established and could be super-sized to handle a big picture. Tippett was a natural decision seeing as though we got the Wild based on the Blockbuster stuff, but, Tippett was really on their own path and this production would have doninated the whole place. Core had a pretty good established record; i knew the guys there and alot of animators wanted to return to TO. building a Vancouver joint was an earlier idea seeing as though it was closer to SF, but, there were'nt any places around long enough to partner with. we were still putting up dry wall at Core when we started to pound out animation dailies in Nov. 03. it was very insane.
there's no current relationship between the "Mouse-In-The-Lamp" and Core. Core is persuing other projects to feed their pipeline. it's fairly obvious that Disney has found what they were looking for , and subsequently so has Pixar.
it seems it's always been this way. i remember long ago at a time when 90% of this industrys work force was skate boarding and watching Porky's movies, we were animating the pseudopod for the Abyss (18 shots , 72 seconds) at the Joint(ILM). we thought we were working on a unique idea. before the film was released in Jul. 89, 2 other "deep sea lab's invaded by serpenty creatures" popped up , Leviathan and Deep Star 6. the author of the original idea of course was Jim Cameron. he probably shopped it around at different studios , and they said they were'nt interested. at least weren't interested in not ripping him off and creating their own version. the same is true of Antz and Bugs Life. it's like a race for a patent. Edison versus Tesla. i personally had been working on "the Wild" for 2 years before i'd ever heard the name Madagaskar. Hollywood is a very odd dynamic of creativity, greed, imprisonment. you do the best you can under disfunctional circumstances.