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nemorathwaldThe following is from a conversation in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cathyr19355's thread about the latest installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Warning: her post contains SPOILERS. This post does not.
The trilogy was a delightful surprise. I expected nothing good from Pirates of the Caribbean, due solely to the awfulness of the film based on the Country Bear Jamboree attraction, and due to the mediocrity of the Haunted Mansion film, and especially due to Modern Disney's reputation for raping its own heritage for direct-to-video releases. When I saw the first PotC, I left the theater in a state of surprised bliss. The glorious music, the script, the acting, everything was in place for a movie of rare quality. The nostalgia of my childhood in Walt Disney World was the icing on the cake, as the movie is even funnier if you catch homage scenes from the ride.
The reason it is possible to make a good film based on a ride is that Walt Disney Imagineering created a whole new storytelling art form for its parks. Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Mansion were the earliest classics of this storytelling art form, and these immersive environmental experiences have accumulated countless fans over the decades.
A film about a ride provides an opportunity to discuss what we expect from Disney in either medium. The more important question is, why is it so improbable that this Disney film based on a Disney park attraction is as good as it is? Disney's Imagineering department and Feature Animation department both found themselves in a lamentable state during the Eisner era. While the historical arcs of the output from both departments do not perfectly match chronologically, the causes were similar.
Throughout the existence of the animation medium, most of the output of the industry in general has been self-imitating. The first style to have any success is immediately aped by an entire country, and the studio that pioneered it stops pioneering.
The first major artistic innovator to whom American animation studios willingly monopolized themselves was Walt Disney himself. After he was gone, the animated flops of the 80's (Black Cauldron, Fox & the Hound, Oliver & Co.) are so empty of innovation that it's an inexplicable miracle a half live-action, half animated chimera as weird as TRON ever received the studio's blessing during this period. Watching "The Making of TRON" documentary on the 25th anniversary DVD makes it clear how hidebound a company it had become, as the executives at Disney remember saying "What the heck are we funding for this Linsberger guy? What is it? I don't understand it at all. Well, at least the kids seem to like it."
As an aside, somehow this is the period in which Imagineering created the pinnacle of their acheivement in the original attractions of the Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow. So their downward trajectory began later than that of animation.
Unlike Imagineering, Feature Animation experienced the Jeffrey Katzenberg renaissance in the nineties. This immediately resulted in new self-imitation. This was the tolerance theme of an outcast man (Beast/Alladin/Hunchback/Tarzan) and the woman who accepts him, followed by their merchandisable animal sidekick and a comedian voice-over.
That leads to an important point: merchandising. Disney has a reputation as cloying, in both the early and late eras. This is partly due to studio pressure to create a film that's marketable as toy and clothing merchandise, because merchandise makes more money than box office.
Similarly, budgets were cut for theme park attraction quality and maintenance and the price of park tickets skyrocketed, in order to maximize short-term shareholder profit at the expense of the Disney park brand. An astonishingly large amount of remodeling in the parks took place to push -- guess what? -- merchandising. The exits to rides are now typically rerouted through gift shops.
Brad Bird, the brilliant director of The Incredibles, made one of the best and most overlooked animated features of all time in The Iron Giant for Warner Bros. This smart, painfully honest film about the Cold War was not cloying (who can forget the sarcastic "duck and cover" visual gag, in which a child is shown safe under his school desk, perched atop a pillar of miraculously preserved dirt in the middle of a nuclear blast crater?). Bird had to fight the studio the whole time because it was insufficiently merchandisable.
Japanese animation, by contrast, is sometimes unbearably cloying but not for a lack of honesty. It more often tends to deal with mature themes that America won't touch. Nevertheless, Japan imitates itself as well. Howl's Moving Castle was enjoyable, but only because it was every enjoyable film we had already seen from Studio Ghibli. For Howl, Miyazaki rehashed every popular element from his groundbreaking masterpieces such as Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away. I'm curious to see what his son has done with Ursula LeGuin's Tales From Earthsea when it is released for English-speaking audiences.
For more information about the Imagineering art form and the hopes for its rebirth, see the Re-Imagineering and Epcot Central blogs.
cathyr19355's thread about the latest installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Warning: her post contains SPOILERS. This post does not.The trilogy was a delightful surprise. I expected nothing good from Pirates of the Caribbean, due solely to the awfulness of the film based on the Country Bear Jamboree attraction, and due to the mediocrity of the Haunted Mansion film, and especially due to Modern Disney's reputation for raping its own heritage for direct-to-video releases. When I saw the first PotC, I left the theater in a state of surprised bliss. The glorious music, the script, the acting, everything was in place for a movie of rare quality. The nostalgia of my childhood in Walt Disney World was the icing on the cake, as the movie is even funnier if you catch homage scenes from the ride.
The reason it is possible to make a good film based on a ride is that Walt Disney Imagineering created a whole new storytelling art form for its parks. Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Mansion were the earliest classics of this storytelling art form, and these immersive environmental experiences have accumulated countless fans over the decades.
A film about a ride provides an opportunity to discuss what we expect from Disney in either medium. The more important question is, why is it so improbable that this Disney film based on a Disney park attraction is as good as it is? Disney's Imagineering department and Feature Animation department both found themselves in a lamentable state during the Eisner era. While the historical arcs of the output from both departments do not perfectly match chronologically, the causes were similar.
Throughout the existence of the animation medium, most of the output of the industry in general has been self-imitating. The first style to have any success is immediately aped by an entire country, and the studio that pioneered it stops pioneering.
The first major artistic innovator to whom American animation studios willingly monopolized themselves was Walt Disney himself. After he was gone, the animated flops of the 80's (Black Cauldron, Fox & the Hound, Oliver & Co.) are so empty of innovation that it's an inexplicable miracle a half live-action, half animated chimera as weird as TRON ever received the studio's blessing during this period. Watching "The Making of TRON" documentary on the 25th anniversary DVD makes it clear how hidebound a company it had become, as the executives at Disney remember saying "What the heck are we funding for this Linsberger guy? What is it? I don't understand it at all. Well, at least the kids seem to like it."
As an aside, somehow this is the period in which Imagineering created the pinnacle of their acheivement in the original attractions of the Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow. So their downward trajectory began later than that of animation.
Unlike Imagineering, Feature Animation experienced the Jeffrey Katzenberg renaissance in the nineties. This immediately resulted in new self-imitation. This was the tolerance theme of an outcast man (Beast/Alladin/Hunchback/Tarzan) and the woman who accepts him, followed by their merchandisable animal sidekick and a comedian voice-over.
That leads to an important point: merchandising. Disney has a reputation as cloying, in both the early and late eras. This is partly due to studio pressure to create a film that's marketable as toy and clothing merchandise, because merchandise makes more money than box office.
Similarly, budgets were cut for theme park attraction quality and maintenance and the price of park tickets skyrocketed, in order to maximize short-term shareholder profit at the expense of the Disney park brand. An astonishingly large amount of remodeling in the parks took place to push -- guess what? -- merchandising. The exits to rides are now typically rerouted through gift shops.
Brad Bird, the brilliant director of The Incredibles, made one of the best and most overlooked animated features of all time in The Iron Giant for Warner Bros. This smart, painfully honest film about the Cold War was not cloying (who can forget the sarcastic "duck and cover" visual gag, in which a child is shown safe under his school desk, perched atop a pillar of miraculously preserved dirt in the middle of a nuclear blast crater?). Bird had to fight the studio the whole time because it was insufficiently merchandisable.
Japanese animation, by contrast, is sometimes unbearably cloying but not for a lack of honesty. It more often tends to deal with mature themes that America won't touch. Nevertheless, Japan imitates itself as well. Howl's Moving Castle was enjoyable, but only because it was every enjoyable film we had already seen from Studio Ghibli. For Howl, Miyazaki rehashed every popular element from his groundbreaking masterpieces such as Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away. I'm curious to see what his son has done with Ursula LeGuin's Tales From Earthsea when it is released for English-speaking audiences.
For more information about the Imagineering art form and the hopes for its rebirth, see the Re-Imagineering and Epcot Central blogs.
