Dream Team of Teddy Ruxpin Animators

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I've been thinking a lot about what could be in store for Teddy Ruxpin in the future and if they do an animated feature film, I'd want the animators who did last year's Winnie the Pooh movie at Disney. Or the original animators who did the Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin show in '87.

The reason for the Winnie the Pooh animators, is, not only are they the top Disney animators, most of them having worked at Disney since the Nine Old Men (Disney's handpicked team of animators) handed the studio's work over to them, but they returned Winnie the Pooh to what Walt Disney conceptualized Winnie the Pooh to be back in the '60s. And I think they'd do the same for a feature film version of Teddy.

And of course, the animators who animated the Teddy tv show in '86, and '87 who did such a great job through all 65 episodes. They should do it, if Teddy comes back as a television series, instead of a movie. What do you guys think?

[TRO Admin]

As long as my friend Jeff Wilson is on board - I'm down with whatever I'm not well versed in the names behind the scenes - not nearly as much as I should be in Animation. Very interesting topic though, looking forward to seeing discussion on this. Don't remember it ever being discussed before.

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Actually, it was Mr. Wilson who came to mind when I was writing the post. For the original Teddy animators of course. I know the names of only a few of the Disney animators, like Glenn Keane, Andreas Deja and Don Hahn. They've done all of the best Disney films of the '90s, and Andreas Deja was part of the animation team that worked on the recent Winnie the Pooh film.

For that movie, they animated it by hand, like they did in the '60s on the original Winnie the Pooh shorts. Which is why they'd be so perfect for the task of doing a traditional animated Teddy film. It takes a bit longer, but at least the result is good.

As for a tv version of Teddy, the guys who worked on the original show, are really the only ones who have experience with animating Teddy, his friends, and their world, besides the illustrators for the books. In my opinion, it's that expertise that's needed to carry Teddy forward into the future.

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Mar 2, 2012 22:49:29 GMT -7 @monkeyboy5185 said:

For that movie, they animated it by hand, like they did in the '60s on the original Winnie the Pooh shorts. Which is why they'd be so perfect for the task of doing a traditional animated Teddy film. It takes a bit longer, but at least the result is good.

It's also well worth noting that the budget for traditionally-animated films can be an awful lot lower than that of CGI movies. The Pooh movie in question here had a budget of only $30 million, which was a lot less than some of the CGI movies that were released at around the same time.

As for who I'd like to see as a dream-team for a new animated Teddy Ruxpin production, I'm actually not sure... I'll have to think about that a bit!

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That's true. Pure CGI movies still can't be made as cheap as traditional animation can. Though Disney/Pixar could probably front the money for the production of a Teddy Ruxpin feature film no problem, with the number of films they produce a year.

I don't know of many television animators, but companies like DIC could do it, as long as the animators on the original Teddy Ruxpin show were involved.

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Funnily enough, $30 million was actually the budget of the first Toy Story! It seems that CGI budgets have climbed upwards alongside the complexity of the technology used in them, and to create them, I guess. The budget for The Princess and the Frog (the traditionally-animated movie that Disney produced prior to the recent Winnie The Pooh one) was something like $120 million. I guess a lot of it comes down to good management, in the end, as I don't think that the animation of that was as engaging as Pooh's!

As far as DiC goes, I'm pretty sure that the company was absorbed into another some years ago - I think they're now part of "Cookie Jar Entertainment", if my memory serves me correctly - but I'm pretty sure that the studio remains in the same field, rather than just being milked for its licenses (like Inspector Gadget and so on).

Having thought about it some more, I wonder how a Teddy Ruxpin production handled by some of the animators who worked on Don Bluth's movies in the 80s and 90s would look? I must admit that I sometimes found some of the over-exaggerated movements in these a tad annoying (every so often, it occurs in facial expressions in Bluth's movies - it's quite noticeable near to the start of Anastasia, for example, when Anya leaves the orphanage and waves goodbye), but at other times (probably the majority) they came off looking quite full of life, and it's that aspect that I'd be interested in seeing. That's still not my dream team - just something that came to mind.

I think, ultimately, I'd like to see the animators from Atkinson Film Arts back, too, but with a suitably higher budget! ;D (They did great work on TV animation budgets, so I'd love to see what they could do with something on the order of the budgets of Disney's more recent stuff.)

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Television budgets are always smaller than film budgets, as they go by episode and usually produce between 22 and 26 episodes per season. So, even if Teddy returns to the small screen, the show's budget still won't be as big as it would for a Teddy feature film. I don't know what the budgets are for current Disney shows, but I'm willing to bet they aren't as big as the studio's animated feature films are.

I second that. Having the old Atkinson crew back together would be awesome. Too bad the studio itself is shut down now and has been for over twenty years.