It Disney matter any more

This story didn't come as a huge surprise to me. I don't consider myself the expert in all affairs Disney that I once thought of myself as (and maybe once was), but it's still a subject that interests me. Have a look in the extended entry for the rest of this. I may be here for a while yet...

Ok, so Disney is closing their Florida animation studio. Considering the declining revenues from their animated features coupled with ever increasing costs this should not come as a great surprise. The Florida studio does go back a way, but it's not exactly the lifeblood of Disney's animation unit that some have recently made it out to be. The Florida studio began its foray in feature Animation by working on segments of films that were still largely produced in Burbank. Beauty and the Beast, for instance, had several sequences produced by the Florida studio (and if you look closely at the film, you can see where the segues occur), but it took on increasing importance by the mid 90's with the arrival of The Lion King. The Lion King was, to understate matters, an incredible success for Disney. The popularity of animated films had been waxing for several years before The Lion King came along, starting with the release of The Little Mermaid at the end of the eighties. Subsequent films proved to be increasingly successful, but The Lion King eclipsed its forerunners completely. This one film alone managed to reap an insane amount of money for the Disney - over a billion dollars of profit came from the box office receipts and ancillary merchandising. And I do mean profit, not revenue. Disney it had to be said didn't rest on their laurels. By the time The Lion King was released in 1994, Disney were rolling out a new animated film each year - this is something of an achievement in it's own right, since producing animated films at this rate was a dream of Walt Disney himself, unrealised in his lifetime. In order to enable this rate of production, Disney could no longer afford to helm all its animated films in California - it was operating on too large a scale. And so the staff at the Florida studio was increased to a level that would allow it to produce it's first animated feature. Except by this point it was really too late.

Disney weren't alone in creating a new animation unit. The vast sums of money brought home by each new feature were to great for other studios to ignore and several new production units were quickly put together. This increase in competition was not without it's costs. Given the limited pool of experienced feature animators this had the result of pushing salaries through the roof. The top animators suddenly found themselves capable of earning a million dollars each year. Production costs skyrocketed.

One thing I never really understood about large companies is their refusal to see any success as a one off. They seem to be of the single minded belief that any success can be replicated, however unlikely it may seem to a rational individual. These people seem to be entirely unaware of the notion of something reaching it's zenith. And The Lion King was Disney's zenith. The films produced by studios in the wake of The Lion King largely failed to perform at the box office. DreamWorks’s Prince of Egypt proved a moderate success, surpassing the magic £100 million dollar mark that previously only Disney's animated features had achieved, but this was an isolated incident and later films poorly. No subsequent film even began to approach that of The Lion King, including those produced by Disney itself. Other studios eventually wrapped up their animation units, and whilst Disney continued producing an animated film each year box office returns decreased year after year. I suspect this has as much to do with an over saturation of the market as it does with the quality of the films themselves, but in the end the result is that Disney's latest animated efforts have lost considerable sums of money.

Now, whilst this has the ring of doom and gloom I should point out so far I've been writing exclusively about traditional 2D films. The animated film genre is alive and well, merely in a slightly different form. If The Lion King proved a watershed in 2D animation then Toy Story was equally important for 3D animated - not only because it was the first 3D feature film, but it was an enormous success, it also wasn't purely Disney.

Toy Story was the result of a 3-picture deal between Disney and Pixar. That the deal was later extended to 5 films and then 7 should give an indication of it's success. But the important thing to note here is that Pixar is not Disney - after the current deal expires Pixar are free to do as they will. Pixar is currently negotiating with Disney, but the cards are now stacked almost entirely in Pixars favour - any future ventures between the companies will not be nearly as beneficial to Disney as those in the past have been, but the alternative of losing Pixar as an ally will still come as a blow to Disney. Disney are obviously aware of this and have announced that they are reducing their traditional animated output in favour of their own 3D animation, partly, one suspects, as a means of reducing their reliance on Pixar. However Disney's sole past effort, the 3D animated film Dinosaur, does not bode well for their future.

So where does this lead? For Disney, in my judgment, it's downhill from here. By pursuing 3D animation at the exclusion of 2D, Disney are, if not dooming themselves, then they at least leaving themselves wide open to a the sort of competition they've never had to face before. Because, for once in the world of animation, Disney aren't the leaders. They're trailing in the wake of a monster they themselves helped create, and their competition is substantial. What sort of monster are we talking about? Well, Finding Nemo has managed to exceed The Lion King's takings at the box office. I can't really begin to convey just how impressive that is. And the competition? Fox's Ice Age was a modest success, but DreamWorks are again shaping up to provide even stiffer competition. That Shrek won the first Oscar for best animated film came as a huge embarrassment for Disney, especially given the bitter rivalry between the two. Whether Disney can redress the balance is another issue altogether.

There's a piece of apocrypha that I've heard in relation to various animated films over the years. The story goes that one of Disney's competitors, having produced an animated film set about test screening it. Two distinct screenings were organised and when each audience was polled for it's opinions, one group rated the film far higher than the other. The difference between the two films? One was shown with the Disney logo, the other shown with the logo of the actual studio. Whilst I'm not sure if that story is true, if such results had been obtained it wouldn't surprise me. What I would be interested about is if a similar experiment could be tested against the latest 3D animated films. Somehow I doubt that audiences would register quite the same degree of approval at Disney's name and more importantly I believe that Pixar's name might now make the biggest difference. I've been of the belief for several years now that Pixar is the next Disney. As time passes I become more and more convinced of it. Disney seem to be furiously reinventing themselves, but for all their efforts they seem adrift from what the market wants (I'm not even going to discuss Roy Disney's current attempt to oust Michael Eisner as CEO). Pixar, by comparison, seems to be producing success after success near effortlessly. Again though I must stress that I'm looking purely at animated films. Disney is now a huge media conglomeration with interests that stretch far beyond the animated films, to the point that if Disney were to stop producing animated films, it may rankle, but the company would survive none the less. This is a luxury Pixar does not have. This is an especially important point when you realise that the situation in the 3D arena is beginning to look an awful lot like the situation with 2D animation back in the mid-nineties: a major success for one studio, followed by a glut of competition. Finding Nemo could well prove to be like The Lion King in more ways than one. Numerous competitors are waiting in the wings, and whilst the strength of Pixar's name alone will carry them through (no disrespect to the quality of their product), the public are fickle. It's quite possible they'll tire of 3D animation as they appeared to tire of 2D.

The rise and fall in popularity of 2D animation is a cycle that's been repeated many times the 70 years since Disney first created Snow White and it will repeat again. And I don't think 3D animation will be immune.