Raiders112390 said:
Same question as the topic. Do you think 2D will ever make a comeback, and will Disney ever do another deep, classic 2D film along the lines of the '90s Renaissance films? Or is it Pixar toy movies from here on out?
Good thing to bring up.
Well, for one, not even all the Pixar movies are Pixar toy movies, a slam that really just seems suited to Cars as far as I'm concerned. (Unless you mean that computer animation is a toy that Walt Disney Animation Studios has become too enamored of, which I would agree with.)
Two, both 2009 (Princess and the Frog) and 2011 (Winnie the Pooh) saw Disney release films theatrically made with relatively traditional 2D, hand-drawn (though computer aided) animation.
Three? Yeah, I agree that the future of more traditional methods of animation at WDAS is somewhat grim.
But then things get more complicated.
When people talk about the Disney Renaissance, there's usually four in particular that they have in mind: The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King. Every one of these has a princess (usually yearning to escape her confines), a prince (usually dashing and adventuresome), a Broadway-style musical score (including a showstopper for the villain), and origins in a famous pre-existing story.
Guess which two recent Disney films slot perfectly into that framework? The Princess and the Frog and Tangled. Oh, and Frozen, another Disney princess musical, is coming out in just a couple weeks. They are very self-consciously emulating their biggest hits of the 1990s. Heck, there's even a trailer for Frozen calling it "The Greatest Animated Event since The Lion King." Way to throw a bunch of other works under the bus, and not just clearly mediocre ones.
Yes, a number of the Disney animated films post-2000 were not exactly up to par. But was Chicken Little really going to be a great film if it weren't computer animated? No. And the rather charming Lilo & Stitch benefited from being a little out of the ordinary. Meet the Robinsons has its appeal as well.
Will two-dimensional, hand-drawn style animation make a comeback? Well, we're not likely to see much of it coming out of Disney or Hollywood generally, so not in the megaplex market. And while being absent from yours and my local AMC or Cinemark or Regal is a certain kind of death, non-computer work will undoubtedly still exist in the independent market, on television, in the avant garde, and in anime and other non-American forms.
Some of them even get Oscar nominations.
But will Disney return to what they did in the past? The recent past, anyhow? Yeah. And that they've returned so fully is what makes this current cycle so uninspiring, albeit appealing.
Me? I'd rather see them go for more daring work, as in the Pocahontas-Hunchback-Hercules-Mulan cycle, then to blatantly mimic a set of work on which they've stuck the landing already.