Disney General - The saddest fandom on Earth

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Which is Better

  • Chicken Little

    Votes: 433 27.5%
  • Hunchback 2

    Votes: 57 3.6%
  • A slow death

    Votes: 1,086 68.9%

  • Total voters
    1,576
iirc they really were and Walt was just tismo enough he literally almost bankrupted the company a couple of times before the park and tv was the stable money draw
do people not realize how expensive this was? there's a reason so few other movie studios tried it, people forget how often they'd do live action/cartoon mixes or anthology crap just to get the costs down. an entirely animated film was usually the most expensive film by the time they'd be released. and this was true from Snow White up until the 90s. fun fact The Little Mermaid cost just as much to make as Indiana jones and the last crusade or 1989's Batman or Back to the Future 2 or Lethal Weapon 2.

Thats how fucking expensive animation is, the little mermaid is only about 80 minutes too, its a very short film. CAPS brought costs down enough to make it viable while retaining quality, the alternative is the hanna barbera bullshit techniques.

When you actually look through the disney catalogue there's way more cheaply made live action films or poorly animated ones, but those never have a legacy.
 
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They're banking hard on this astroturfed meme to save the film.
 
So the company's decline can be blamed largely on being cheap and lazy because 2D is too expensive.

3D is expensive and hard, too. Or at least was a decade ago. The pipeline is very different with a lot of highly specialized jobs, you could make a living entirely off of being an expert in CGI water or the guy who puts the controls on the models (rigging. It sucks) at one point. Many Disney or Pixar CGI projects had budgets in the 150-200 million dollar range, Tangled was 260 million.

For decades it was also in a constant state of being developed. Movies weren't just being made, they were pushing the limit and progressing the tech each time. The sad thing is that stuff that takes forever in CGI doesn't necessarily equal being visually impressive and a lot of times they would spend time and effort of stuff that 2D just does without issue and people don't understand how much it matters.

CGI also comes with its own restrictions that 2D doesn't have. It's not Disney, but Kung Fu Panda 2 has a great example; originally Lord Shen was supposed to move like a contortionist while fighting. It worked fine in 2D test animations where they could just draw his body twisting however they liked but it didn't work with the 3D model that expects some kind of logic.

When Disney started delving into CGI films they were anything but lazy, they dived into that headfirst. Dinosaur (technically their first CGI film, though with real backgrounds) includes pretty much everything you could think of that's hard to do in CGI. They came out of that gate swinging and enthusiastic, ready to push the medium...then the next one they made was Chicken Little. Tragic.

Nowadays the medium is used now to make ugly, rounded blobs and seems to be ashamed of what it's capable of, but that's a different autistic rant for a different autistic thread. The company's decline can be blamed on a lot of things, but the 2D-3D switch has nothing to do with it.

(I don't know what it's like nowadays, but they started declining years ago anyway.)
 
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The sad thing is that stuff that takes forever in CGI doesn't necessarily equal being visually impressive and a lot of times they would spend time and effort of stuff that 2D just does without issue and people don't understand how much it matters.
*coughcough*Marvel*coughcough*
 
The company's decline can be blamed on a lot of things, but the 2D-3D switch has nothing to do with it.
Its not a fault of either but laziness and unskilled people in both fields, same as any profession. I look at King Kong 2005 and think thats pretty much the pinnacle of how some real love and talent can go into making a believable, adventurous world with creatures and CGI backgrounds. That was 22 years ago, now it would take 300,000 indians and SEA variants to do 1/2 the work of that movie with a budget of 800 million for a movie thats 110 minutes long.
 
Its not a fault of either but laziness and unskilled people in both fields, same as any profession. I look at King Kong 2005 and think thats pretty much the pinnacle of how some real love and talent can go into making a believable, adventurous world with creatures and CGI backgrounds. That was 22 years ago, now it would take 300,000 indians and SEA variants to do 1/2 the work of that movie with a budget of 800 million for a movie thats 110 minutes long.
I think part of it is
 
So the company's decline can be blamed largely on being cheap and lazy because 2D is too expensive.
They didn't leave 2D for cost, they were forced away from it through a changing climate they failed to adapt to. Pixar and Dreamworks were murdering them through their CG outings, hell, even small fries like Blue Sky were able to provide competition to Disney. People really took to CG as a new quality assessment, that 2D was inherently inferior on some metric.

While I am sure the excitement of rising tech played a huge role in 2D's destruction, I think there was also a large story problem Disney was unwilling to face. Disney was too stuck being kid's content. They very rarely made a movie that felt like it could be aimed at an adult audience, something the CG revolution tried desperately to correct.

Pixar wrote films for adults that could be watched by kids - The Incredibles tackled a 40-something year old not feeling he is living up to his full-potential, a man that longs for the glory days of his youth to the point of checking out of his own life. The deeper conflict of the film is not something kids would get because it centers around an issue the parents would relate to. DreamWorks was also fairly adult, even if they had a weak story, a film like Madagascar had heavy adult humor to make up for it.

Disney never did this beyond their one success, Lilo & Stitch, which had a large adult underbelly of a sister trying to raise her sibling and keep her family together amongst financial struggles and an impeding child protective services agent, written in a mature manner to only be looking out for the child's best interest. Disney was stuck telling weak children's tales or heavily neutered action flicks, they couldn't compete with the more adult story-telling, or more adult-centered comedies, their competition was pumping out.
 
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Disney never did this beyond their one success, Lilo & Stitch, which had a large adult underbelly of a sister trying to raise her sibling and keep her family together amongst financial struggles and an impeding child protective services agent, written in a mature manner to only be looking out for the child's best interest. Disney was stuck telling weak children's tales or heavily neutered action flicks, they couldn't compete with the more adult story-telling, or more adult-centered comedies, their competition was pumping out.
Emperor's New Groove was the closest they did (which is why El Dorado and it are considered "cousins"). If they had gone down that route for their films, they might've had a shot in keeping to 2D.
 
Emperor's New Groove was the closest they did (which is why El Dorado and it are considered "cousins"). If they had gone down that route for their films, they might've had a shot in keeping to 2D.
I would actually disagree, when the film came out, many took it as Disney's conceit that they were dead as a studio. It was a film seen as below Disney, a poor attempt from a fledgling studio to be DreamWorks/Warner Bros..

A big problem for Disney was that they were the original Pixar/DreamWorks, but only for 4 films. Adults loved The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and the Lion King. All these films had tight scripts, incredible music, and a general sense that everyone on staff wanted these to be for adults - evidenced by the Oscar nominations. When people think Disney, it is basically these films, so something like Emperor's New Groove didn't sit right with audiences. It lacked the grandness that made the golden 4.

Tangled was the true best direction for the studio. It modernized Disney with some DreamWorks humor but ultimately gave audiences exactly what they were looking for, a new Princess romance film without any of the bullshit from late-stage Renaissance. The animal characters didn't talk, so no Rosie O'Donnell or Eddie Murphy tanking the film. Both were also written to have an edge and importance in the narrative, so they aren't cute fodder like they would be in older films. No jingling keys to keep kids' attentions, a problem that is arguably present in Hercules with its ADHD pop-culture reference style and especially present in something like Home on The Range. Tangled won by just having a tight script that housed an extremely likable romance, all with a few nice music tracks. Disney following up with Wreck-It-Ralph, a film that is basically a stealth Pixar flick really highlighted what direction the studio should have been on a decade prior. They were able to take the best of their roots, while also experimenting with more adult tales on the side. Lilo & Stitch shouldn't have been a fluke, but a type of film that would alternate with more traditional Disney to keep the studio from just being musicals.

Instead, 2000s Disney was a desperate attempt to capture a male audience at a time where Disney was guaranteed to get slaughtered doing that. They were never going to compete with the raunchy comedies of studios like DreamWorks and they were never going to compete with action flicks amongst Harry Potter, Star Wars, LOTR, Spider-Man, X-Men, and even their own series with Pirates of The Caribbean. Them being a girl studio arguably would have kept them distinct in this period, they just needed to rid themselves of the kid garbage, maybe take a queue from YA at the time.
 
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We got confirmation of a cancelled Pixar movie. It was going to be called "Be Fri", as in half of a broken Best Friends heart necklace. Concept was two girl best friends in school having a falling out, one of them was obsessed with a Sailor Moon like franchise and would transform into a character from it, which is part of what drove a wedge between them. Same old beanmouth blobslop art style that Pixar has been outputting recently.
Much like the Win or Lose lost trans episode, someone immediately leaked a clip of the movie's storyboard. However Disney was on their ass and took it down.
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I managed to get my hands on the clip (albeit it has a lot of audio issues with missing dialogue but I think the original upload was like that); will it be safe to upload it here? The Win or Lose storyboard got posted and is still up but I don't wanna bring Disney down on Null's head.
 
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I managed to get my hands on the clip (albeit it has a lot of audio issues with missing dialogue but I think the original upload was like that); will it be safe to upload it here? The Win or Lose storyboard got posted and is still up but I don't wanna bring Disney down on Null's head.
Archive everything. I've posted a couple of things that the companies wanted scrubbed and the site's still kicking.
 
Okie doke, here it is:



More context from the leaker:
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Should be Kristen Lester I think, has been at Pixar since Finding Dory but this would have been her directorial debut.
Watching the clip, I'm thinking a big reason it was scrapped might have been because the magical girl transformation stuff was a metaphor for puberty, and that would just have been repeating Turning Red again. Plus the idea of "rejecting the gem" to not transform would be akin to puberty blockers and that's no bueno for a Disney product now.
 
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Concept was two girl best friends in school having a falling out, one of them was obsessed with a Sailor Moon like franchise and would transform into a character from it, which is part of what drove a wedge between them.
How in the world could this concept even be a movie? That's something more for a TV series, and even then, I swear that kind of concept was already done in anime. Sounds like something Pretty Sammy tackled.
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