When animator Don Bluth worked for Disney in the 1970s, he was struck by the fact that much about the studio’s 30s/40s hot streak had already been forgotten. It wasn’t just the spirit of those old movies that was missing, even basic techniques were falling through the sands of time.
The Nine Old Men were going gray. Walt himself had been dead for half a decade. Nobody was preserving the hard-won knowledge and craft of the studio’s RKO years. He would ask questions like “how did you do the rippling water in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves?” and be astonished that nobody could tell him. In some cases, even the technique’s inventors had forgotten!
Ever since the failure of Sleeping Beauty, Disney had been fighting a war against budget overruns. Animators were urged to cut costs, to reuse footage, to do more with less. The result was that old knowledge and techniques atrophied because there wasn’t the money to apply them. What doesn’t get used gets forgotten: and soon you’re doing less with less. Bluth had arrived in a dying place: its animators the caretakers of an ancient language they could no longer read. Almost like Plasmo himself, trying to reach the sky with old scraps of the past.
Disney is, of course, huger than huge. As a business, that is. They've certainly got a great number of revenue streams. At the same time, their cultural impact has been hollowed out. The movies and TV shows they release and that get any kind of attention are from acquired properties (Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, etc.) Did you know that they still make a "canon" animated feature every year? Maybe, maybe not, but if you're anything like me you'd be hard pressed to name a recent one. Did you know that they've spent the last decade or so making diminishing returns live action remakes of their classics from yesteryear? Yeah, that gets attention, but not necessarily the kind you want.
Apparently the downfall was a long time coming. When Bluth worked there, replacing all cel animation with CGI wasn't a plausible option. That doesn't mean that no one was thinking along those lines already. They finally made that move in the 21st century, after an anomalous traditional animation renaissance that lasted through much of the 80s and 90s.
The larger point is true, of course. Collectively, it's easier to forget old methods of creation than it is to bring them back. Or to come up with new ones, for that matter. Something to keep in mind with the current push to stop doing pretty much everything.
The post where I got the above, by the way, is the first time I've ever heard of Plasmo. Apparently it's just an Aussie thing. His cartoons sound charming, though.
2 comments:
One of those traditional 2D animation movies, The Great Mouse Detective, released in the mid-80s sounds like a good one even though their new boss Michael Eisner cut the film's development budget from $24 million to $10 million. That would become the new standard for the company - not right away but the creative department at Disney was eventually replaced by a boardroom full of old men whose only exposure to storytelling is the PowerPoint presentations at shareholder meetings. More focused on squeezing every last dollar out of existing IP than creating anything new saw the hollowing out of Disney's famous creativity. Interestingly, the animation team for the movie featured Eric Larson, the last of Disney's Nine Old Men.
The very old movies like Pinocchio, Lady and the Tramp, Snow White, Dumbo, and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad weren't afraid to use intimidating characters and frightening situations. The characters were far better as was the music and stories.
From what I've seen it was budget cutting that did the main artistic damage to the studio and the traditions simply weren't kept up. Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli artists managed to develop 2D animations to a very high degree all while Disney was making more and more money and losing their creative soul. One of my older bookmarks is this one:
https://floobynooby.blogspot.com/search/label/Ghibli
I did watch Plasmo and the Moon Tower this afternoon. You're right that the show does have charm.
I haven't seen The Great Mouse Detective but it does look pretty gorgeous in stills and clips. Also it's got Vincent Price as the villain. It probably was a bad omen when its development budget got slashed. PowerPoint presentations are a kind of storytelling, I guess, but if you want to get creative with them, take it to an art gallery or something. The board at Disney doesn't want to hear about it. Maybe the replacement of creatives with bean counters was an inevitable result of the company's runaway growth, at least when that started happening. Eric Larson had quite the career. He was with Walt for several years before they broke into feature length animation with Snow White. And John Musker, the director of Great Mouse, had come through his apprenticeship program.
The older movies represent a kind of otherworldly art. It is just familiar enough for the audience to feel at home, or at least fully comprehend things. But it's an elevated kind of storytelling and presentation too. At a certain point they seem to have decided they didn't need to do any of this anymore.
The budget cutting smacks of damning indifference. They thought they were secure enough in the animation realm that they could divert their attention to more immediately profitable ventures. And just as importantly, that no one would notice. Studio Ghibli certainly had a better attitude and constructive approach, which shows in their work.
Yeah, Plasmo is a very affecting character. I like his surrogate siter Parsty as well.
Post a Comment