That was the conceit behind Dinosaur, a bold, ambitious, and utterly boring experiment that was a production handled by both Walt Disney Animation Studios and The Secret Lab, a hybrid effects and animation house that Disney had set up in a state-of-the-art facility near the Burbank airport. If it turns out Jon Favreau's The Lion King remake uses live action plates that the animators will then superimpose hyper-realistic characters upon (and I can't get confirmation that this has been completely ruled out), just know that there's a precedent for this kind of thing. Thankfully there would be more traditionally animated movies released by Disney, so even its place in the historic Disney canon has been diluted. The only highlight (and a relatively dim one at that) is the villain's big musical number, "Yodel-Adle-Eedle-Idle-Oo," which at least sees them channeling some early Disney weirdness. It is, no joke, a huge waste of time – humorless, slack, and featuring unimaginative character designs and backgrounds. Home on the Range, originally envisioned as an ambitious supernatural western called Sweating Bullets (it went into production shortly after Hercules), soon mutated into a dinky musical comedy featuring three female cows ( Rosanne Barr, Judi Dench, and Jennifer Tilly) who attempt to stop a cattle rustler (played, in his waning days of sanity, by Randy Quaid). ![]() And if that had been true it would have been a truly inglorious demise. (And just imagine if they had gone through with a sequence involving game show staple Charo as a crane singing a song called "Scoobie-Doobie Doobie Doo, Let Your Body Turn Goo." Actually, maybe that would have been incredible.) Sure, it's cute, but can you really remember anything besides the bear attack sequence and Pearl Bailey singing "Best of Friends?" Didn't think so.įor a while it looked like Home on the Range would be the last traditionally animated movie Disney would ever release. You can feel a better movie trying to get out from under the cutesy, cloying façade of The Fox and the Hound, but sadly it never happens. Clearly, the creative tension between the old guard and the new crop of animators left its mark. Also of note was the fact that during production Don Bluth, one of the company's star animators and someone who many saw as the heir apparent to Walt Disney, staged a major defection with several other animators and left the studio, something that effectively waylaid the production (with 17% of the staff gone the release date was pushed from Christmas 1980 to summer 1981). It's somewhat historically important because it was the last movie to be worked on by some of Walt's legendary Nine Old Men, who then handed the animation duties off to a new generation of talented artists, many of whom would be responsible for shaping the next few generations of Disney animated features (among them: John Lasseter, Tim Burton, Ron Clements, John Musker, Mark Dindal and Brad Bird). This is probably the ugliest-looking Disney movie ever.ĭear lord this movie is boring. ( Okay.) Mark Dindal, who had previously directed the deeply brilliant The Emperor's New Groove, feels lost with the extra dimensionality and the animators, learning an entirely new methodology, aren't exactly on their game. Originally envisioned as a more unconventional story about a female Chicken Little and her relationship with her father, it transformed over the years into a kind of sci-fi comedy, with the "sky is falling" referring to an alien invasion. It has all but evaporated from the public consciousness and for good reason: it's really pretty bad. ![]() You don't see plushes of the characters in Disney Stores and you don't see them walking around Disneyland or Walt Disney World shaking peoples' hands. It was as messy and aimless as the animation studio had been since Walt died, and was marked with the same kind of creative and financial uncertainty. And in this chaotic time, WDAS was trying to reinvent itself as the fresh, edgy, computer-generated studio of tomorrow. There was even an attempt to produce sequels to Pixar films without their involvement, thanks to a loophole in their original arrangement that Michael Eisner wanted to exploit (there was even an additional animation studio – Circle 7 – set up in Glendale to handle the sequels). ![]() The mid-2000's were an interesting time for Walt Disney Animation Studios they had all but completely abandoned the traditional hand-drawn animation, with the satellite studios in Paris and Orlando quietly closing their doors as well (in 20 respectively).
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