Is Disney still gonna make new hand-drawn animated movies?

Why do people mention him so much. Does he pay you?

Because Doug Walker is a famous online reviewer and creator of Nostalgia Critic.

Does that mean you need to shove him down our throat every change you get?

I'm going to interject before this turns into a Disney Bashing thread and change the subject.

Does anyone know the reason why even though 3D movies are now the norm, traditional animation trumps televised Western Animation. I mean, besides a few select shows (Mickey Clubhouse and Star Wars) most are hand drawn or flash or something. What's the secret? Is hand drawn just less costly for TV?

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I never watched Tangled, but i remember a lot of people hating the marketing. Dreamworks faces, attitude, cringe-worthy catchphrases, etc. You know, the typical way to advertise movies lol

Best move ever, man. No way was I gonna get into an argument with him.

TV Animation hasn't been as popular as Animated Movie, so 2D could thrive on TV while 3D CGI is more successful for movies.

Actually now that I think about it: As good as Shrek was, it did some damage to animation. Like no one would take fairy tales seriously after Shrek, almost every single 3D Animated Movie (sans Pixar and later Disneys) became comedies, and 2D Movie Animation died after Shrek 1.

edited 15th Sep '14 6:51:32 PM by powerpuffbats

Flash animation is very cheap, and Friendship is Magic has proved it can reach huge audiences and be accepted by large portions of animated fandom now, while before it was almost universally despised.

Flash animation... If you asked me five years ago if I thought it would be a viable medium outside Web bids I would have scoffed. But it's actually surprising how much it improved. Fosters for the longest time I thought was toon boom just because how fluid it felt.

Cause the Adobe Flash/ Toon Boom animation (as well as actual drawn animation outsourced to some Asian country) can be done on a small enough budget for cable companies to handle.

edited 15th Sep '14 9:35:17 PM by kyun

And cgi.....can't?

If you ask me, Disney ruined 2D by releasing a mass of Direct-To-Video sequels, some of them even got a theatrical release, thus destroying the brand which up to this point stood for high family entertainment. They did some really good movies in the early 2000s...Lilo and Stich, Treasure Planet, The Emporer's New Groove, Fantasia 2000 are certainly not bad entries in canon. Not at all. But they kind of got lost between the more lacklustre entries and Peter Pan 2 as well as Jungle Book 2, both getting a limited theatrical release.

I'm probably talking completely out of my ass here, but I think that CGI animation has certain upfront costs that can't be easily reduced, unlike 2D animation with Flash. So 2D starts cheaper but scales poorly into the cinematic end, while 3D starts more expensive but scales better. Of course, it's probably not much of a difference once you get to top-level titles like Pixar and Disney. I don't know, just throwing ideas around.

With 2D flash, you can get away with not giving objects texture, just color. If you do that with CGI it ends up looking like a 90s screensaver.

Theoretically CGI should be cheaper on the long run, because once you have your models and textures you can use it again and again. I bet that the Dream Works Dragonriders series was very cost efficient, because they already had the textures they needed. But I guess it takes some time to reach the break even point, and there is no way to predict if a TV show will last so long. Flash animation should be the cheapest option. And with Traditional animation, it depends on the level of quality. One thing for sure, you have more possibilities to take short cuts by limiting the animation, reusing it, and you don't have to make it "deep". Just look at Robin Hood and you look at the bible of how far you can cut down the costs for an animated movie while still getting a decent result. With CGI, you either make it good or not at all.

CGI can..... but it won't look nearly as good.

Flash and Toon Boom shows also reuse models. .... that usually move as cut-outs, and redrawn for different perspectives of the character.

edited 16th Sep '14 7:41:54 AM by kyun

Let's look back to the early 2000s. Fantasia 2000 flopped, and so did Emperors (I am ignoring Dinosaur because it was not in the canon at the time, and either way, it is CGI), and Atlantis flopped the following year after. Lilo and Stitch made some change, but it was not a whole lot, and Trwasure Planet speaks for itself. I don't blame Pocahontas for the demise of 2D animation (which many think killed it) because it was released before Toy Story, and if you compare the Pixar and the WDAS films in the late 90s, they were making roughly around the same in box office.

Shrek definitely did some damage to WDAS not only with the fact of 2D animation, but the fairytale aspect of it as well, but Shrek has aged, and no one really remembers it as much as the hype was back in the 2000s.

WDAS started tanking, and other companies had hit CGI films. That is what killed traditional animation. I also do not get why people blame Home on the Range for killing traditional animation when they closed the 2D department when Treasure Planet was in theatres.

So bringing this point up from what I saw in the thread this was redirected from, I don't see Hullabaloo's supposed success meaning anything unless the movie's actually successful outside of Kickstarter.

Kickstarter may be a unique way of getting funding for people who would have trouble getting it through traditional means or judging the potential popularity of projects with an established audience, but I'm hard-pressed to believe the site is really capable of giving a true indication of a projects popularity with the general public by itself.

If Hullabaloo actually gets completed, and actually sees a wide public release in movie theaters, and manages to make serious money when competing against other movies in cinemas, then I think you might have people taking notice and seriously considering the idea of other big-budget 2D animated movies.

Otherwise, Hullabaloo's never going to be anything more than niche project.

Also, it's amusing to look at what people said in this thread about Big Hero 6 releasing at the same time as Interstellar after both have come out and seeing that, what do you know, BH 6 actually beat out Interstellar.

Don Hall said at NYCC this year that 2D animation is still alive at Disney. It just depends on whether the director of a certain project wants to do so or not. Plus, artists like Mark Henn and Eric Goldberg make pencil tests of characters for 3D features to give the 3D animators reference to how they should move their models. As much as I hate to say it, WDAS latest 2D projects were throwbacks to the style (PatF to the renaissance, Pooh to the 1960s featurettes, and Get a Horse to black-and-white shorts). What I think 2D needs is an original concept with elements that attack audience appeal.

And as much as I want to see Hulabaloo, from the way James Lopez talk about saving the "dying art", I can tell he didn't take the layoffs well. His statement just felt a little immature.

"Who do they think they are? I gave the best years of my life to this place and they think they can just fire me like that? Like trash? I don't think so!"

edited 6th Dec '14 9:29:24 PM by HellKillUsAll

You don't know what happened behind the scenes. I mean, the Hullaballo project is great. What if he suggested it to Disney originally and they said no?

Did you know that when Mary Blair started to work for Disney, she didn't really feel like this was the right thing? Mostly because the first two projects she worked on weren't realized. She actually left the studio, but Disney convinced her to come back and go on the South American tour.

Things like projects which never get realized (or shifted to CGI) can be very frustrating for an artist.

I can't help but feel like Don Hall is saying that to please the audience. :( Okay, hand-drawn animation is living there but BARELY. They only have 2 hand-drawn animators he can name?? 2?? Is it a COINCIDENCE that we only had our last hand-drawn film from them 3 (soon to be 4) years ago even though it's really "whatever the director feels works best for the movie"?