Traditional animation may be under threat after the disappointing performance of Disney's 'Treasure Planet', writes Donald Clarke.
It's late October and Edinburgh's opulent Balmoral Hotel appears to have been annexed by forces from the Disney store on the other side of Prince's Street. This benign anschluss, led by Disney Feature Animation President Thomas Schumacher, is on behalf of Treasure Planet, the company's science fiction re-imagining of Edinburgh native Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.
Animators tend to be a jolly bunch, a gang of overgrown children, unsullied by the greed and avarice found elsewhere in the movie business. They lend the press junket an end-of-term feel as they revel in a few days' freedom from the dark bunkers in which they normally toil. Everyone is having a blast.
A few short months later, Treasure Planet has turned into one of the biggest headaches in Disney's history, despite this week's Oscar nomination for best animation feature. After 15 years, Schumacher has left the movie side of the business (a move that was long planned), to concentrate on developing the corporation's theatrical projects. In a recent Variety interview, he said "I have been through the ride, even if there might have been sweeter exits than Treasure Planet".
Meanwhile, Disney head Michael Eisner was forced to break off from a bullish assessment of the company's economic prospects to add: "Of course, just when I thought everything was moving forward perfectly, the animated movie, Treasure Planet, did not meet our expectations at the box office. It's really a very good movie that never punched through in the crowded movie marketplace to get noticed. Either we mismarketed it, or the idea wasn't appealing, or the stars were not aligned. But one thing it did teach us: the entertainment business is fickle."
The film, which cost somewhere between $110 million and $140 million to make, opened in the US at Thanksgiving to so-so reviews, took a comparatively measly $17 million on its first weekend, and went on to collect only $40 million in total. Ever since, the industry has been awash with rumours that the financial debacle may signal the end for traditional animation in a market increasingly distracted by the delights of computer graphics.
That is unlikely. But a chapter in the history of the revival of the animator's art has certainly drawn to a close. After Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King, it is easy to forget that at one stage it looked as if the very medium that made Disney an empire was destined for the scrap heap.
"In the period after Walt Disney died, and [Walt's brother] Roy Senior died, animation was a sleeping giant," Schumacher explains. "When our Roy Disney - Roy Senior's son - came back to Disney, he led a takeover of the board, and led a revolution that brought in a new management team that included Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg. They said to Roy, 'Is there anything you really care about?' And he said, 'Yes, animation'. At that point they were about to throw it off the studio lot.
"Two films then changed everything: The Little Mermaid and a co-production between Disney and Amblin called Who Framed Roger Rabbit."
The animated features that immediately preceded 1989's The Little Mermaid were an unlovely bunch: The Fox and The Hound, The Great Mouse Detective, The Black Cauldron. The movies retained an anachronistic cuteness from Disney's golden era in the 1940s and 1950s, but had none of the artistry that made Pinocchio and Dumbo wonders of the age.
Ron Clements and John Musker, the directors of Treasure Planet, remember the irritation they and their fellow animators felt. "All these young people had been frustrated for some time. You would see incredible creativity in practical jokes, and in casual sketches, and you thought, if this creativity could just be channelled into the movies then it would be extraordinary," says Clements.
"It was particularly frustrating working on The Black Cauldron," adds Musker. "Because Tim Burton, who was working there at the time, did a bunch of character designs that were very extreme, very caricatured. And the management were like, 'Eugh! What's this?' They just didn't get it."
The directors credit Eisner and Roy Disney with liberating these more potent energies. Clements and Musker's The Little Mermaid could not be mistaken for the work of Quentin Tarantino, but it did have a contemporary zest that the company's cartoons had hitherto disdained.
What followed was a genuine renaissance. Beauty and the Beast (1991) achieved the unprecedented feat for an animated movie of winning a Best Picture Oscar nomination while The Lion King ate 1994 alive and spat out the bones.
But look at those films now and you will see ghosts of the future flitting through them. As early as Beauty and the Beast, Disney was incorporating computer animation into its features. Realising that this was a train it needed to board, the company then went into partnership with digital wizard John Lasseter's Pixar and managed to become its own biggest competitor with the release of 1995's Toy Story. That relationship will come to an end in 2005, and is the source of constant gossip.
Indeed, Pixar supremo Steve Jobs appeared to be deliberately stirring up controversy when he said recently, "while our first choice remains to continue our relationship with Disney in a new form, this is far from certain at this point."
In Edinburgh, everybody was keen to point out the way in which Treasure Planet incorporates digital work with old-fashioned, 2-D animation. The computers emulate the effect of oil paint in an attempt to grasp the spirit of the 19th-century Brandywine school of American illustrators. But, in truth, the backgrounds have neither the solidity of Pixar's work nor the genuine painterly richness of Disney's masterpieces of the 1940s.
I put it to the directors that, as the only film company still investing heavily in traditional animation, surely Disney should exploit its heritage and focus on hand-drawn artwork.
"It is true that Disney has always done the hand-drawn thing better than anybody else and they could exploit it a bit more, I guess," Musker agrees. "This is their own unique thing that other people have tried to copy and failed."
Clements points to the company's previous picture, Lilo and Stitch: "That film had some computer technology, but not nearly as much as Treasure Planet. We still think of Treasure Planet as a hand-drawn movie though. We wanted dimension. We wanted all these camera moves, and so computer animation helped us with that." Lilo and Stitch, a delightful film which made a fortune, proves an interesting comparison with Treasure Planet. The washes of watercolour flowing through the Hawaii locations suggested the presence of a living, breathing artist in a way that no computer animation could. But almost as important in Lilo's success was the hip, irreverent script which was as zany as Treasure Planet's is flat.
It's not as if Clements and Musker had not been warned. The two men tell me that they had been pitching the idea to studio chiefs since the late 1980s.
But year in, year out, the money men would stare blankly at them and say, "Treasure Island in space? Why exactly?" (It is a question the film fails to answer.) The Los Angeles Times recently went so far as to suggest that Disney's eventual agreement to proceed with the project was instrumental in persuading Jeffrey Katzenberg to storm off and form DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg in 1994.
If this is true, then Treasure Planet was partly responsible for the production of that company's Shrek, the greatest animated feature Disney never made. What was that about headaches?
To be fair, Treasure Planet is not a terrible film, just an ordinary one. And producer Roy Conli has some justification in complaining that the press has focused exclusively on financial matters when discussing it. In a recent e-mail to friends and colleagues he said, "They have literallymade the box office the predominant story, not the film itself. It's absurd."
He added that the timing of the film's release was not ideal: "We were unable to 'capture' the weekend box office against the incredible success of the cultural phenomenon Harry Potter and the strongest film franchise in history, James Bond. Basically, we were squeezed between Harry and Halle!"
It is also worth pointing out that Treasure Planet has, so far, performed decently in foreign markets.
The film should not derail Disney's commitment to traditional animation, not least because the suits need only look at Lilo and Stitch to remind themselves of the correct way to proceed.
What is required is a balance between the sassy, anarchic humour that Musker and Clements's generation introduced and the more old-fashioned devotion to brush and pencil that Walt himself exhibited 80 years ago. The future (and Pixar) can take care of itself.
Treasure Planet is on general release