All the big animation players are displaying their wares at Annecy. Where else would they show them this time of year?
Coming off the success of its Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, [Sony Pictures Animation] announced that China’s Tencent has boarded Jackie Chan’s Wish Dragon, and also revealed three projects in development – a reimagining of The Boondocks, horror series Hungry Ghosts, based on the Dark Horse Graphic Novel by the late Anthony Bourdain and Joel Rose, and comedy Superbago, a collabortion with Stoopid Buddy Stoodios – along with two new adult-skewing animated features from Genndy Tartakovsky. ...
There's more and more production of cartoons because:
A) The costs are low* and the profit margins are large.
B) Theatrical animation is, after super-heroes, the most profitable type of feature out there.
C) As streaming media becomes more ubiquitous, entertainment conglomerates have come to realize that animated content has to play a large role in what gets distributed because kids and adults both watch ... and kids in particular are a highly desirable market because they continue viewing habits with brands that plant their flag early (when children are 3-7).
Disney stock rose 4.4% Thursday, setting a record high closing price of $141.74, after a Wall Street analyst boosted his price target for the company on increased optimism about the company’s streaming prospects.
Benjamin Swinburne of Morgan Stanley, in a note to clients, said he is now forecasting that Disney will reach more than 130 million global subscribers by 2024 across its three streaming services, Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu. The analyst sees Disney+, which launches in November, accounting for 70 million of the total. ...
Animation, of course, is a large part of why Disney's future streaming business is supposed to be (per analysts) to potent ... and so profitable.
Since I woke up extra early after going to bed extra late, and the brain is fried, I decided it would be a good day to perform a mindless task like getting the bric-a-brac cluttering the office into boxes and properly stored. In the course of doing that, I found this old letter from December, 1985:
LEE BLAIR* -- 3465 Crestline Way - Soquel CA.
Dear Steve:
There are several stories that come to mind regarding your search for after-dinner memories 'from way back when'. ...
One involves the great strength of Roy Williams** who used to be a friend of mine's assistant. Hardie Gramatky told me about him dumping over Ward Kimball's little Ford restored touring car, all on a bet. Another one about Roy was his car with the I-beam bumpers and bopping the guys out in Boyle Heights who cut in on him.
There was also a legendary guy at Harmon-Ising named Thurston Harper. He had been a soldier of fortune in Central America and other places and took no s*** from nobody. He was walking down Santa Monica Blvd. near the studio wearing his new Palm Beach suit. Some yoo yoos came around a corner and through a rain puddle and splashed dirty water all over Thurston. He was enraged. He took off down the middle of Santa Monica Blvd. and caught up with them at a red light at Highland Ave. He yanks out the driver and rolls him over and over in the water running down the street's gutter, then stuffed him back in the car. Wow!
Another involves Frank Thomas getting spit in the face in the Buenos Aires Zoo by a Llama. Webb Smith and I were standing there and Webb observed that Syphilis came from South America via Piaarro, started by llamas. Frank tore out on his way to the hotel to WASH UP.
There are others,
Lee Blair
* And if you're wondering who all these folks were, Lee Blair was a Disney animator, brother of Preston Blair and husband of Mary Blair. Roy Williams was a longtime Disney story artist and "Roy, the big Mooskeketeer" in the 1950s version of "The Mickey Mouse Club", and Frank Thomas was one of Walt Disney's "Nine Old Men" and a long-time supervising animator at Walt Disney Feature Animation.
Thurston Harper, remarkably enough, was an animator on Walt Disney's "Alice In Cartoonland" series during the 1920s, and also an animator on the Fleischers' "Gulliver's Travels".
Amazon dropped a teaser trailer today for Undone, an animated series that aims for a mind-bending brand of adult sci-fi that ventures into a trippy head space that evokes the surreal pursuits of Philip K. Dick, Phillip Pullman, Inception, The Matrix, and Pink Floyd.
Undone will premiere later this year on Amazon Prime Video but the first two episodes of the Amazon Original series will get a big-screen audience this Saturday at the ATX TV Festival in Austin, Texas. ...
Undone is the first episodic television project to use rotoscoping animation, which has visual rhythms that are far removed from the mainstream CG aesthetic that dominates and largely defines contemporary Hollywood’s approach to animation. The best-know product of the rotoscoping approach to date is A Scanner Darkly ...
"Deadline" likes to reference A Scanner Darkly as a well-known "rotoscope" approach to filmmaking. I'm not disagreeing, but since I'm a geezer, you could also say Undone looks a lot like a Fleischer feature cartoon from 1939. And you wouldn't be wrong. The Fleischers were, after all, rotoscoping specialists going back to their Out of the Inkwell shorts in the 1920s. Rotos were a wee bit different technologically back then, but the underlying principle? Much the same.
When animation guru John Lasseter was ousted from his post at Pixar last year, trailed by a series of allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct, it seemed like a wake-up call for an animation industry that was slowly coming around to its own #MeToo moment. Yet Lasseter’s controversial hiring by Skydance Animation just months later highlighted the challenges of reshaping an industry that many women say has systematically worked against them. ...
Women hold just 27% of creative leadership roles in the animation biz, according to Women in Animation. In the past two decades, just two studio animated features have been helmed by female directors. ...
Twenty-seven percent is an improvement over where women were a doen years ago. Then, they were in t he 15% range.
As in live-action, women have long drawn short straws when it came to key creative positions. In the thirties, to be a woman in animation meant they were cell painters, inkers, maybe checkers. Walt Disney Productions sent out form letters informing aspiring female artists not to bother going after an animation, storyboard or layout position, because WDP would only consider them for a job in ink-and-paint.
Way it was.
And over the years, the culture didn't change very much. Women made up half the Animation Guild's membership, but the jobs they filled were inking, painting, and checking positions. In the 1970s and 1980s, a huge amount of ink-and-paint work was shipped overseas, and the percentage of women union members plunged.
In the 21st century, more women fought their way into creative positions, but it was a long, slow battle. Disney Television Animation was sometimes known to have questionable "Gag" cartoons posted in hallways. The culture, Neanderthal since the thirties, continued that way. (One animation exec half-jokingly told a male director: "You're a lawsuit waitning to happen.")
The culture began to change five years ago. Women pushed back against harassment and busy hands. Directors and executives who had been involnerable for years found themselves unemployed -- Les Moonves at CBS was pushed overboard, Weinstein lost his company. John Lasseter, whose bad behavior was an open secret for years, was cut loose by Disney. Various TV animation directors with records of abuse, found themselves unemployed.
Now, of course, John Lasseter has been named head of animation at Skydance, and his hiring hasn't been met with rapturous applause, especially among women. Some of the walls around the animation boys' club have come down, but parts of the ramparts still remain.
* Variety highlighted the current thinking and culture in animation a couple of weeks ago.
Add On: And now, Disney has contributed to a new Women in Animation global parity program. ...
Aladdin dropped slightly more than 50% week-to-week. Globally, the flick has earned $449,850,077
The Mouse's live-action reboot of Dumbo is all but gone from domestic theaters. In the U.S. and Canada it can be found on 230 screens, having taken in $113 million during 66 days of release. Worldwide, it's earned $350,102,657.
As for other animated titles still on the box office list: Uglydolls has long-since slipped into a coma, grossing $19 million domestically and $21,208,805 worldwide. (Yikes!) And How To Train Your Dragon: the Hidden World has all but concluded its stateside run, collecting just under $16 million, while earning $519,430,770 worldwide.
The second part of the making of the 1992 Disney animated feature, from "Mouse In Orbit" ...
As the script and storyboards for Aladdin were put together, another problem cropped up. The First Gulf War happened as the picture's continuity was rounding its last lap, and a young street thief having adventures in and around ancient Baghdad suddenly seemed less commercially enticing. So the city of Baghdad got its name changed to Agrabah.
Animators started coming off Beauty and the Beast in large numbers and getting assigned to various characters. Supervising animator Andreas Deja, who had been an artistic force at Disney since stepping off a plane from his native Germany in 1980, knew that the villain of the piece presented challenges:
"I was confused early on about how to play Jafar [the Sultan's court advisor]. Is he more of a cartoony, eccentric character with big gestures? Or is he somebody who holds back, and shown as scheming?
"I asked Ron and John that [question] and they said, 'We don't know yet. Look at the storyboards.' ... Because there [were] boards where [Jafar] is digging in the sand, trying to find the lamp, and others where he's standing in the corner scheming.
"The more scenes I animated, the more I found out that the character works best by holding him back: small gestures, little things like that. He would rub his finger on his cheek, rather than being extravagant in gestures. And the more I held him back, the scarier he got and the more he contrasted with the other characters, who were more bouncy and animated.
"I thought, 'How can Jafar even compete with the Genie? Eric Goldberg [the Genie's supervising animator] was on fire with the character, his stuff was amazing. And there I was with my little Jafar, trying to represent evil.
Nik Ranieri had been a supervising animator on Beauty and the Beast and was hoping for a plum spot on the new feature:
"I wanted to keep going [as a supervisor], and I remember going to John [Musker], saying to him, 'I could take a minor character [the peddler] there at the beginning.' John says, 'Ah no, Duncan [Marjoribanks] is going to do that.' And I say, 'I thought Duncan was going to do Abu.' 'Ah, well, he's going to do that, too.' 'So what about Jafar as the beggar?' 'No, we're going to get Kathy [Zielinski] to do that.'
I looked at John and said, 'You don't want me to supervise, do you?' And John said, 'Not really.'"
Director John Musker, of course, was only familiar with Ranieri's less than sterling work on Mermaid, and gun shy. So Nik went and talked to supervising animator Andreas Deja, who was heading up the Jafar unit.
Nik recalled:
"I really wanted to go on the Genie, but Eric [Goldberg's] work was so intimidating, I was afraid I'd fail. I didn't want to approach Eric. Since I had worked on Ursula on Mermaid, I was familiar with the villain types. The great thing about working with Andreas was a lot of people he had on his unit were really solid and so we would get sequences. And he gave me the sequence where Jafar was introduced to Prince Ali. And that was great, I could go from 'This is Jafar' ... all the way to 'Prince Ali Bwa Bwa.'
"Basically the way I work is, I like to go straight ahead and work out all the concepts and ideas. ... I have to see things in real time. How high does he jump? How fast does he jump? All those questions aren't answered in thumbnails, so what I start doing is blocking it, doing a scribble pass, not worrying about how the characters look. Just straight ahead animation, all the way through.
"Every production I worked on with Ron and John, I would bring them these scribble passes, and they would be ugly. Every film, as far up as The Princess and the Frog, John would say, 'Well, that's good, but ... this scene, it's going to be drawn better, right?'"
Animator Kathy Zielinski, one of the first women to come out of the Cal Arts animation program and one of Disney's few female animators, didn't suffer the slings and arrows that struck Mr. Ranieri. She has only fond memories of Aladdin:
"I had a fantastic time on that film. Getting to do the beggar was really fun. A key scene: he does this huge smile and drool is coming out of his mouth. I looked back at that scene not too long ago and said, 'Oh my God. That's so cartoony!' When I was doing hand-drawn animated features at DreamWorks [Prince of Egypt, Road to El Dorado, etc.] we never went that broad, ever. Everybody was concerned about being "realistic".
As with many hand-drawn features, the crew shot live-action reference material for the animators. Actors were filming scenes for Jasmine and Aladdin at nearby Disney Imagineering, and Nik Ranieri was asked to participate: "They said, 'Why don't you be Jafar? You've got the height, you've got the beard, you're skinny.' So I played Jafar. And Ron Clements stood in for the Sultan."
Like Beauty and the Beast before it, Aladdin used an increasing amount of computer generated images alongside the hand-drawn work. The magic carpet, initially planned as a computer-animated character, was given to Disney veteran Randy Cartwright because he had a background of working with computers. But Randy explained:
"Tina Price [a Disney computer specialist] had done tests on the carpet, and systems were just not available to give you the full animation you wanted. So I animated the whole thing on paper as a regular character, and then Tina would bring it into the computer system and lay down a grid on top of it and tweak the grid to match the drawing. And then the computer would print the design on it, so it was a hybrid of the two systems.
"When I got the first scene on storyboard, [the carpet] was introduced as a dog, panting and all that. And I thought there was a more interesting way to do the character as opposed to just a dog following people around. So I asked John [Musker] if I could take a crack at reworking it and he said, 'Sure, go ahead.'
"I went through and thought up the whole opening of the monkey and the hat and the carpet, and thought of the carpet as more of a human character, as an innocent, cute character that had been there [in the cave] for three thousand years, and now all these strange creatures are coming through and 'What the heck is this?!'
"What I really wanted to do was have the carpet completely entranced with the monkey, thinking it's the coolest thing in the world. And the monkey [Abu] hates the creepy thing. I thought it would be a great relationship to play: the monkey wanting to get away and the carpet wanting to touch the monkey. There were other sequences we wanted to really push it, but because of time we didn't have a chance to play with it much more."
Despite the strenuous schedule, the story problems, and the wrestling match with CGI, Aladdin came out when Disney and Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted it to: November 1992. Critics were rhapsodic over the Arabian tale, and the feature stayed near the top of the domestic and foreign box office lists for months. (At the crew party, a beaming Michael Eisner, proud of the studio's latest animated hit, praised the picture to the skies.)
Aladdin went on to win Academy Awards, Annie Awards, Saturn Awards, and a basketful of Grammies for its music, songs and soundtrack. Its world box office take was north of $504 million, a new record for the division.
Disney Feature Animation had become more than just a well-performing part of the Walt Disney Company. It was thundering down a four-lane highway, breaking commercial records as it gobbled up greenbacks and awards. The Disney Renaissance.
