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Post by Deleted on Oct 5, 2012 14:27:56 GMT -7
I don't remember my first Disney VHS...although I still have them all.
My first movie in the theater was "Oliver and Company" (a film largely noted for being out-grossed by Don Bluth's "The Land Before Time" of the same year). Being that I was 2 years old, I remember nothing of this experience, though I'm told I fell asleep during the opening trailers.
My first full memory of a theatrical Disney movie was "Aladdin", and that film simply blew my mind. It is still my favorite Disney film to this day.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 6, 2012 14:46:59 GMT -7
With the exception of The Jungle Book, The Lion King, Mulan, and Tangled, I've only seen Disney Movies on VHS, DVD or because I downloaded them. My parents didn't take my siblings and I to the movies that often, so we usually had to wait to see the latest Disney movie when it came out on video. And any I didn't have, I usually saw it at my grandparents' house, on tv (thanks to The Wonderful World of Disney) or during one of my frequent stays in the hospital.
My whole family are Disney fans, and we saw most of the animated series Disney put out in the late '80s and early '90s, some of the live-action series like Boy Meets World and some of the others like it. And of course, in January 1993 my family and I were in L.A. for a week, as my wish from the Starlite Wish Foundation was to go to Paramount Studios to visit the set and meet the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and on the 27th we went to Disneyland, which was only three days after Mickey's Toontown opened there.
As a result, there has never been a time where Disney hasn't been in my life in some form. Though not so much the animated movies from 2000-2009, as my parents didn't buy us the new Disney movies, only those classic Disney movies that we liked the most when they came out on DVD.
Aladdin is one of my favourites too. Mainly because of the humour in it, with the Genie, and Iago the Parrot. But, now that I have all 51 movies in the Disney Animation Canon on my computer, I've been watching all of them from Snow White onward, and I'm going to be watching The Aristocats tonight. With Jungle Book being watched last night, I was in heaven.
Anyway, like I said, I'm a Disney person through and through. And with the exception of one person on this forum, I'm thinking we all are to an extent. Am I right?
Before I go, I have a question for those of you who may know. Why were there only three animated feature films released by Disney in the '60s? Was it just because Walt was focused mainly on the live-action films, specifically Mary Poppins, or was it because the movies took a while to make so by the time each was released, several years had gone by?
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Post by Deleted on Oct 6, 2012 16:40:30 GMT -7
@monkeyboy I also saw most of my Disney movies on VHS as my sister bought almost every one the week they were released. Aladdin and Oliver and Company are the only times I remember seeing a Disney animated film in theaters (we saw D2: The Mighty Ducks in theaters as well). That's awesome that your wish was granted! I love hearing stories like that, and sounds like an awesome, uplifting experience! I think "Hercules" was the last Disney movie I was actively anticipating. After that, Disney kinda fell off the mark for me, but lately they seem to be getting much better. I really enjoyed the new Winnie-the-Pooh release and Tangled was fantastic, wonderful classic Disney style. I wish I owned every Disney animated film so I could take that journey through the ages. As far as the question of Disney's animated involvement in the 60's, I'm sure the budget for "Mary Poppins" had a lot to do with the lack of releases. From what i understand, Walt Disney would often make smaller budget films in hopes of grossing enough to finance his bigger pictures. I believe "Dumbo" is a case of a low-budget film that was created specifically to finance production on another film "Fantasia". I could be wrong, here, but I've heard stories like that. Obviously, Disney had a much bigger interest in the live-action film industry than they had in decades passed, but to my knowledge, nothing came close to matching the success of "Mary Poppins", which is, in my opinion, a truly beautiful film on every level. Anyway, just a few thoughts.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 6, 2012 16:51:45 GMT -7
Anyway, like I said, I'm a Disney person through and through. And with the exception of one person on this forum, I'm thinking we all are to an extent. Am I right? I suspect you are indeed right. (Though I am curious as to who the one person is, I must confess.) My understanding is that this is because Walt was focussed on other media at that time, as well as on theme park-building and other such concepts. I just checked, and there's a citation for that here, if it's of interest.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 6, 2012 19:30:12 GMT -7
@vilicles
I didn't see a lot of the live-action Disney movies of the '90s except for The Parent Trap, George of the Jungle, Homeward Bound, Inspector Gadget, and I'll Be Home for Christmas. The only '90s animated Disney movies I didn't see were Pocahontas and Fantasia 2000, and I didn't own those two, plus Tarzan.
It was a wonderful dream come true. Though looking back on it, if I'd thought of it I would've asked to meet Ken Forsse, or Phil Baron, or see the Walt Disney Studios, instead of just going to Disneyland. Lol.
I know. I saw Tangled in theatres with my best friend on New Year's Eve 2010 (his girlfriend was out partying and the two of us wanted to go see it). I was a huge fan of the original Winnie-the-Pooh featurettes from the late '60s and early '70s (packaged with newly animated material into the feature film, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh in 1977), and so to have a new Pooh movie that was reminiscent of the old shorts was awesome. And it was such a good movie too.
That's what I thought. As I know throughout the '50s and '60s Walt was more involved with the live-action movies, Disneyland, and television than the animated features. Though his involvement wouldn't have anything to do with the number of animated movies being released, as the '50s released five of them, despite Walt's reduced involvement. Though the work on Mary Poppins, plus work on Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (the only cartoon short being made by Disney at the time, as Walt had shut down the short department in 1962), would've consumed the workload of the animators in addition to the three animated feature films.
@ Cyborg Illiop
Didn't you say that you were more of a Pixar fan than a Disney fan? But does make sense that fans of Teddy Ruxpin, would be fans of Disney, as they're cut from the same cloth, even if the techniques and storytelling aren't the same.
It could also be other things. I mean the Jungle Book was redone after the initial story development as Walt didn't like his storyman's work on the film, as it was too dark, despite the fact that the original Rudyard Kipling version isn't light-hearted at all. And that work can take a while. It took me ten years to develop my story to the way I wanted it to be, and it's just a collection of short stories, not a story to be made into a movie, live-action or animated.
Plus Walt died in '66 and the company didn't really have a direction to go in right after that. So, that could've been a factor in the scheme of things too.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 6, 2012 22:02:40 GMT -7
@ Cyborg Illiop Didn't you say that you were more of a Pixar fan than a Disney fan? Sort of, yes. Don't get me wrong, though - though a lot of the movies may not be to my taste, I actually am a fan of Disney's many and varied works, by and large. It's more that I just don't like the style (in various ways) of quite a number of Disney's movies, just due to differing tastes. That said, now that I've thought about it some more, there are a few more that I like (including one that I didn't think a great deal of as a kid, which was on TV recently, and I found to be quite good through fresh eyes), though I know that their television animation output and the off-beat stuff like Lilo & Stitch is much more my sort of thing. I still couldn't stick it to any one era, though - my tastes seem to be pretty eclectic as far as their stuff goes. Speaking of which, man, were they ever on a roll with TV animation in the late 80s and early 90s, or what? So much good stuff that had an ethos of not talking down to the audience at its core, and a focus on quality in all aspects - Chip 'n' Dale: Rescue Rangers, DuckTales, Adventures of the Gummi Bears, Goof Troop, all sorts of stuff. Pepper Ann, Hercules: The Series, and 101 Dalmatians: The Series, from the late 90s were all superb as well. Their lesser focus on TV animation (in favour of rafts of hastily-produced and unfunny live-action shows for... ugh, I hate this term... "tweens") of late means that from the last ten years, the only true greats have been Lilo & Stitch: The Series, Fillmore!, The Emperor's New School, and Kim Possible, but they're every bit as good as the 80s and 90s stuff, if you ask me. I dearly hope that they change their approach to this sometime soon, as the field seems to be stagnating quite a bit at the moment... (From a UK perspective, as an aside, you can't watch any of their TV animation at all anymore, as they've shuffled it off from their one freely-available TV channel - it just ends up looking like they want to keep the good shows on the still-costing-extra Disney TV channels, after having made a big deal of making The Disney Channel itself a freebie. ). It's quite different to a lot of TV animation nowadays, which is a major sore-point with me as an animation enthusiast, because it now all seems to have boiled down to other companies producing badly-written shows with low-quality animation and unprofessional artwork that could be outdone by a ten-year-old or younger, producing shows like the aforementioned but with the added intent of putting inappropriate content on children's television (which I first strongly noticed about fifteen years ago, though it's really been going on for a bit longer than that, and I still find it to be a disturbing trend), or otherwise lazily dubbing a lot of stuff instead of producing their own. Not that there's anything wrong with dubbing foreign shows, of course - back in the 80s and 90s, the greater variety in television animation came partly from this. The problem now is that some folks have realised that it's more profitable to just dub things, and not produce new domestically-made content as well. When Disney were at the top of their game with TV animation, it led to more competition from others, leading to greater quality on the whole, too. (To give credit where credit is due, for example, some of Warner's output from that time is equally excellent, especially stuff like Taz-Mania, Animaniacs, and Batman: The Animated Series, which also did not talk down to the audience, and respected their intelligence and sense of humour without ever being nasty.) I could talk about TV animation in general quite a bit. I might have to write a separate thread for this! Absolutely. I'm glad of the variety, it must be said. Things would be terribly dull if things were all the same (which, ironically, led to the stagnation of some aspects of feature animation in the mid-to-late 1990s, because of the bizarre "All Animation Is Disney" mindset that somehow became quite pervasive, and led to far too much aping and look-alike-ing because that mindset somehow couldn't be broken). I must admit, I didn't know that this film was reworked so much, and I'm surprised that the initial work was considered to be dark. How dark are we talking? (If that's known.) Ooh, I know that feeling. Somewhat relatedly, it's always fun when some parts come together fully-formed from the beginning, though, no? ;D (I've got some still-ongoing stories that I've written for fun for about sixteen and a half years, now, myself; Some key aspects of these just came up on their own from the very beginning, which led to other parts coming about naturally, and that's been fun.) Undoubtedly. I wonder how many things that that influenced, incidentally...?
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Post by Deleted on Oct 7, 2012 4:58:55 GMT -7
@cyborg Illiop
I know right, pretty much from 1988 until probably 2000, Disney produced some really good animation on tv. My favourite was Gargoyles, as it had the darkness of Batman: The Animated Series, and wasn't the same as other animated Disney shows. I also liked The Adventures of the Gummi Bears, The New Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh, Aladdin The Animated Series, Goof Troop, Tailspin and Jungle Cubs.
Definitely. I had The Swan Princess and Thumbelina on VHS and they're so much like the Disney movies, that I didn't realize until later that Don Bluth did Thumbelina and Richard Rich did The Swan Princess.
Yeah, it was reworked after Disney didn't like the way the movie was going with it's sequences. Basically, the storyman originally behind The Jungle Book, named Bill Peet kept to the original Kipling version of The Jungle Book, so it wasn't a light-hearted musical like the movie ended up being. Walt felt it was too dark for movie going audiences, especially the children who would see it, so he fired Bill Peet and got three guys on the script to rework it. Even the early production sketches were in a darker tone than what ended up being in the movie.
And the music was changed too. Terry Gilkyson originally wrote the songs for the movie, but all of them, except for 'The Bear Necessities' were removed, as they were dark, solemn pieces rather than the upbeat tunes that are in the movie.
Yeah, well sometimes my ideas did that, but then I'd get new ideas that worked better, so I'd redevelop characters and storylines to fit the new ideas. Which is why it's taken ten years to write this story. Lol.
Walt's death didn't influence a whole lot in terms of production, but it did affect the general direction the studio was taking. Disneyland Florida was renamed Walt Disney World by Walt's brother Roy after Walt died. Walt was the driving force of the company, and the only ones to come that close to being Walt's true replacement, were Walt's nephew, Roy E. Disney, and Howard Ashman. But, neither of them were made CEO of the whole company. Ashman was just a composer, who helped to produce at least one of the Disney films of the early '90s, and Roy was chairman of the board, but the CEO position was first given to Walt's son-in-law, Ron W. Miller, and then later Michael Eisner.
Miller was a producer like Walt, but didn't have the same charisma or creative drive that Walt did. Eisner was a Hollywood Executive, who just come off a successful run at Paramount Studios, and included the revival of Star Trek as a feature film series, and didn't have the creative drive or the producer's mindset that Walt had. So, when Walt died, the company lost something.
@vilicles
I totally forgot to address part of your response. It's an amazing journey. I've watched all of the Disney movies from Snow White up to The Aristocats, and it's been breathtaking so far, seeing the different styles of each decade. The early years of Snow White, Pinocchio, and Fantasia, then the Mary Blair style of the '50s, and the simpler style of the '60s movies. That and the styles of Disney's Nine Old Men, which were becoming dominant as all of them were head animators and some of them had begun producing and directing the animated features, from The Sword in the Stone until The Fox and the Hound, when the new generation of animators began coming in.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 8, 2012 9:04:17 GMT -7
I grew up on those shows. I don't know it was true in the UK, but here in the US there was a two hour block of shows called "The Disney Afternoon" that ran (in Northeastern US) from 3:00p.m. - 5:00p.m. 5 days a week. It consisted of all the shows that Disney had produced for Saturday mornings: starting with "Adventures of the Gummi Bears", "DuckTales", "Chip n' Dale: Rescue Rangers", and "TaleSpin", but wold grow to include "Darkwing Duck", "Goof Troop", "Bonkers", "Aladdin", "Quack Pack" and others. I grew up on all of these and have the DVD sets Disney has released for several of these shows. I remember when the Toon Disney channel used to continue to show all these shows as well as "Hercules", "101 Dalmations" and other Disney fare from that era, but unfortunately, as you've pointed out, it's all devolved into simplistic animation with terrible writing. The only Disney animated show I can stand these days is "Phineas and Ferb" simply because it manages to be entertaining without trying to be harmful or putting a slant on their views. They're not trying to be "cool", they're just having fun. I've heard "Gargoyles" is great, but as a kid was too scared to watch it because it was so much darker than anything I was used to. I see they have DVD sets out now for that show, and I'm hoping I'll get one eventually. I totally agree that shows either talk down to their audience now, or imbue their audience with pretentious and superficial principals, such as staying away from "losers" and only trying to be "cool" and looking down on people who are not as "cool" as you. This is something that made Teddy so spectacular to me: his acceptance of EVERYONE on the same level. One of the reasons I like the "Elves and Woodsprites" and "Grundo Graduation" episodes is that it brings together so many of Teddy's friends from Leota and Wooly to Amanda the Ladybug to Katie and Seymour. It's just a wonderful, wholesome idea that subtly teaches acceptance and tolerance. Lately I've been enjoying "Regular Show" on Nickelodeon, though that's probably a poor example of animation in this day and age, but I love the laid-back style and the easy going characters. I have to say, I loved "Spongebob Squarepants" until about the 5th season where they completely changed his character. The early episodes were funny because he was just this nerdy, naive optimist, but starting in Season 5 they dumbed down his intelligence and made him into more of a child to gear the show toward younger fans (he'd been enjoying popularity among college-age viewers before then). I still love the early episodes, but can't stand the new ones. I've never actually seen "Lilo & Stitch", but I saw snipets of it when my niece and nephew got the DVD, and while I hadn't been impressed with the previews, I found the story to be engaging and was actually fairly impressed. I had no idea "The Jungle Book" was reworked so much as that seems to be one of Walt's best-loved films. I can definitely understand why he'd want it to be more of a light-hearted musical than the dark story it could have been. I still think some of the imagery of Sheer Kahn (forgive any mispelling there) is some of the more terrifying in Disney lore, particularly in the final confrontation with Baloo. On a related note, how ingenious was it to use those characters as pilots in "TaleSpin"? It just sort of works! "TaleSpin" was probably my least favorite Disney animated show growing up, (which is hard to say because I loved them all), but now that I'm older and rewatching a lot of it, it's growing back on me as one of my favorites. So much heart in there. I have to say that as a child, I knew the difference between a Disney and non-Disney film. Disney was always my favorite, though now that I'm older, I can appreciate Don Bluth's work more fully, particularly "The Secret of N.I.M.H." and "The Land Before Time", the latter of which has always been a staple of my childhood. The different styles of each era are much more obvious to me now than they used to be. There is a grandeur to the early work ("Snow White", "Cinderella", "Pinnochio", "Sleeping Beauty") that i think was somewhat diminished in with the style of the 60's. That's not to say they were bad films, but just looking at "The Jungle Book", it lacks the brightness and the polish of the early work. "Oliver and Company" is another example when held up against "The Little Mermaid" of a film that simply lacks that special Disney beauty, though perhaps the grittiness of its New York City setting had something to do with that. @monkeyboy5185: you certainly seem to know your Disney history! Very interesting stuff!
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Post by Deleted on Oct 8, 2012 9:47:20 GMT -7
Here in Canada we had Master Control on CTV (Canadian Television), which had a former host from YTV on this set which was like a tv studio's control panel, where she would turn on the show that was on the schedule at the time. At the time I watched it, 'Gargoyles', 'Aladdin', 'Goof Troop', 'Timon & Pumbaa', 'Jungle Cubs' and 'Hercules: The Animated Series' were the shows on it.
Before that, CTV had a Saturday morning block of cartoons which included 'Gummi Bears', 'Winnie-the-Pooh' and some of the earlier Disney shows on it, and that evolved into Master Control, and later, Disney's One Saturday Morning (CTV broadcast that at the same time as ABC did). But for the most part all those shows were on Family Channel.
'Gargoyles' was amazing. It ran for three seasons, though it's creator wasn't involved with the third season, so it's considered non-canon, while a comic book series published by SLG Comics, is considered the canon continuation of the show. They only released the complete first season, and volume 1 of the second season, as sales weren't high enough to release the entire series. Though I think they rerun it on either the Disney Channel, or ABC Family.
I know. It's really hard to watch cartoons on tv that aren't based on comic book superheroes or a Japanese product. Spongebob was awesome. I stopped watching it after a while too, mainly because my siblings would hog the tv for video games, so I didn't get the tv very much.
Yeah. The only reason Walt got so involved with the making of The Jungle Book is because Bill Peet screwed it up. Bill Peet had also worked on Sword and the Stone, which Walt hadn't liked at all. So he and Bill were already in disagreement when Bill took Jungle Book in the direction he did. So, once he was fired, Walt took charge, told his animators, storymen and musicians not to read the book, because they were going to make their own version of Jungle Book.
Tailspin was great. I liked it just because Baloo was in it. Lol. That and it was a Disney cartoon.
In the '60s Disney started using Xerography to animate their work, so the individual animator's work would be copied by the machine, without having to clean it up. That's why the movies of that era, and of the '70s and early '80s didn't look as bright as the movies from the '30s, '40s and '50s.
I went to the library and borrowed as many books on Disney, it's movies and it's history as I possibly could, and just immersed myself in it. Even going back and watching the early cartoons from the '20s and '30s on Youtube. I just found it fascinating and rich. Which is why I'm watching all the movies in the Disney Animation Canon.
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Post by Sylverwolfe on Nov 3, 2012 23:02:24 GMT -7
The best era has been the era with feature length movies which were animated by hand painted TALENTED Classic artists, not these computerized animators. If you don't get paint on your paws, it can hardly be called animation.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 11, 2012 20:08:38 GMT -7
Part of me totally understands why computerized animation is the standard nowadays, and not just the CGI stuff like Toy Story. I understand how cost-effective it is to render something virtually rather than sketch and paint and such. And I can't exactly tell what the reason is, but there is a beauty and grandeur to the early films that is sorely lacking in the later fare. I recently watched "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" for the first time in YEARS and while I know the movie almost by heart, I had tears in my eyes from the sheer beauty of the film, the care and detail of every scene: so obviously a labor of love that sparkles through in every frame. Still such an incredibly beautiful, charming film. Pixar has managed to capture this spirit in their animation in films like "Finding Nemo", the "Toy Story" franchise, and so many others, and even Disney's "Tangled" managed to harken back to the beauty of the early Disney. But by and large the personal touch that is found in all the classic Disney pictures is lost on the recent stuff, partly because of the medium's evolution, partly because of the nature of the industry, and partly due to a complete lack of inspiration in many areas as storytellers and animators alike continue to reiterate (recycle) rather than innovate (create).
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Post by Deleted on Nov 19, 2012 8:42:48 GMT -7
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a beautiful looking film. When I began watching the Disney movies, I started with it, as it's the first full-length Disney Animated Feature Film, and the animators who worked on that movie did an amazing job, considering they'd only worked on short cartoons up to that point. Even comparing it to films like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King, which were the best movies of the late '80s/early '90s Disney films, Snow White is more beautiful in terms of the way the film looked, since those late '80s/early '90s were animated with assistance from the Computer Animated Production System (CAPS) program developed by Pixar, while Snow White was purely hand drawn and inked without any electronic/mechanical assistance.
I'm on the movies of the mid to late-'90s and there's just no comparison to Snow White and the classic Disney movies of the 1940s and 1950s.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 20, 2012 2:17:41 GMT -7
Regarding CGI, I think it's well worth pointing out that it is not more cost-effective than traditional animation. Compare the budgets of Toy Story 3 and the recent Winnie the Pooh movie, for example - Toy Story 3's budget was ~$200 million, whilst Winnie the Pooh's was ~$30 million.
It does still largely use the same skill-sets, though - just applied in a different manner sometimes.
My understanding, from occasional following of animation-industry blogs and articles, is that CGI simply resonates with the general public more (or, at least, this is what those who've worked in the field for decades, including some who knew Walt Disney as I understand it, say). This is perhaps partly because it has thoroughly broken down the "All animation is Disney" barrier that impacted (and, it could be argued, held back) the medium before, allowing for increased competition. Indeed, the fact that CGI is not more cost-effective, yet has become the animation medium of choice (even allowing little-known or brand-new studios to compete on even ground), speaks volumes for this.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 20, 2012 16:59:07 GMT -7
If you look at the film industry as a whole, CGI has really taken over everything. In fact, I don't think you can look at a single action movie and not have CGI in it. The things they used to do with models, people in costumes, or other special effects, are now being done with CGI.
In terms of Animation, up until Don Bluth founded his studios in the late '70s/early '80s, there was no animation studios making movies. They were all making short cartoons, and animated series for television. Then, in the '90s, other studios began making animated feature films, but except for Bluth, there wasn't any competition until Dreamworks came into being, with it's CGI animated films.
Though as much as I enjoyed movies such as An American Tail, Shrek and Ice Age, Disney is still king of animation to me.
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