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Thursday, March 7, 2002
17:31 - Lilo & Stitch Poster
http://www.network54.com/Hide/Forum/message?forumid=182013&messageid=1015505729

(top) link

Pretty funkeh, if you ask me.

Disney's such a weird phenomenon. Down at the artists' level, it's so chock-full of creativity and talent-- it's where all the very best artists of our time go to realize their skills, and the results are often exhilarating just to see in a brief glimpse. I know from the feeling I get whenever I see just a single pencil sketch by a ranking animator from Disney that if I could ever capture that "spark", that touch of magic, I'd want for very little else in my life.

But raise yourself even a step or two in the corporate hierarchy and you start getting into the bean-counters, the demographers, the merchandisers, the marketers, the Starbucks schmoozers, the Siamese siblings joined at the faces and laps. You start nearing the top, where it's always been corporate, even back in the Golden Age (Walt himself was a fairly nasty dude when it came to labor laws and unions and immigration and so on, in a Henry Ford kind of way). But it's still jarring to see it in the same cartoon of a building, the big curve-roofed ANIMATION warehouse just off Highway 238 in Burbank, as the white-hot flame of the animators' minds who make the magic happen. And it's even more sinister to see it in light of the recent SSSCA stuff, where the top echelons seek to control the very bits of data that make up the stories and worlds that tomorrow's kids will be growing up with and basing their own little worlds upon and developing their world views from as they grow.

So Lilo & Stitch seems to be something calculated to take Disney itself about as seriously as The Simpsons takes Rupert Murdock; specifically leveraging the popularity of the play-it-straight successes of recent movies, breaking that fourth wall, experimenting like they did in The Emperor's New Groove. It's something new for Disney. It could be fantastically fun, just like Groove was.

But how much of it is because the story men and the animators thought this was an idea with which they could have immense amounts of fun, and how much of it is because the marketdroids determined that "Gee, that 'self-effacing corporate angst' angle-- that's a huge dollar potential, huh? Hey, pass me another latté, and oh, you might wanna put on these knee pads"?

Trying to make a business case around art is always such a recipe for heartbreak. No wonder so many animators are so mentally unbalanced.

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© Brian Tiemann