Quote:
Originally Posted by C.A.
Just want to talk about a few points regarding Disney as a corporate and animation studio, do not mix the two of them together.
Firstly, Walt Disney himself was never an animator, he had always been a producer, he pays animators, writers and directors to make animation.
The Disney corporate has indeed become a greedy entertainment business over the years, no longer the truly great animation studio it was. Anyone can bash its business methods anyhow, but not the animation itself.
In the Disney studios were geniuses of animation, with traditional hand drawn animation that is unrivaled even now. The Nine Old Men, basically created modern animation, set up all the fundamentals and techniques. They were magicians with the pencil and paper, granting life to anything that can be drawn.
Disney only started to lose money after the grand project of Fantasia, where they brought animation to such a high level of art that they blew their budget. They had to make money with lesser quality, 'family themed' productions after that. before that, Disney was all sorts of crazy, Mickey Mouse was a jerk and way more dynamic and interesting. In some ways, Disney became the money grabbing corporate it is now because they invested too much in the art of animation. |
Indeed. Just watch a clip from Snow White, and you can see that the quality of their work is unrivalled, even today. Really fluid and lively. It's a quality that's very rare even in more modern productions.
Check it out. Don't forget that Snow White was the first movie of it's kind, fully animated feature film and in colour (this was in 1937!).
Though I have to correct the assertion that Disney wasn't an animator and only a producer, he did a fair amount of animation himself (particularly early in his career) but he delegated more of it as he got older. But he was still the head of the studio, and responsible for many aspects of the animation process, and many of the innovations Disney Studios created. It was Roy Disney who was the main businessman and was uninvolved in any of the animation operation.