UPDATE: Keith H. writes:

I've been hoping for that. Yet I'm also a little bit nervous that this will pervert Pixar's marvelous story apparatus. Being absorbed by the company that produced Treasure Planet? That's rather dangerous.

Yeah... well, that (and Atlantis) were the thrashings of a company terrified by the anime invasion, and laboring under the misguided theory that they could provide what anime fans were looking for just by changing their core competency. They don't seem to grok that people watch anime specifically because it's the "anti-Disney"... it's as much a backlash against the "Western corporate filmmaking" meme as alignment with Japan's writing/animation style. Disney could produce Cowboy Bebop and the anime fans would still shun it... just as the hardcore ones do with the Miyazaki films just because of who's distributing them in the US.

Pixar is one of the few companies that understands how to make movies in the "Disney style" that appeal to audiences in the way that the Disney movies did when it was building itself up as a household name. Today a successful Disney-style movie needs to have clever humor and lavish design to appeal to the adults, and engaging characters and dialogue and worldbuilding for the kids. Disney hasn't blended those elements successfully since The Lion King, but Pixar knows how to do both things masterfully.

When Disney was writing Atlantis, the directors' credos were: 1) "Fewer songs, more explosions," and 2) "Not a dry pair of pants in the house." Interesting ideas, and we all looked forward to what it might mean, aside from the obvious ("Quick, stem the anime tide!"). Unfortunately, what it meant was that the faux-anime storytelling was watered-down and formulaic, and the engaging characters were entirely missing, and so the movie appealed to exactly nobody. And in uproariously funny movies like The Emperor's New Groove, they got the adult-level humor spot-on, but they couldn't come up with a franchisable set of characters that anyone under age 15 could appreciate. Brother Bear was a valiant attempt to recapture the magic, but it was too little, too late. And Disney needs to understand that Phil Collins does not help matters.

Buying Pixar is the only way Disney can re-inject some of that DNA back into the company. I think they realize what they've been doing is no good, and they know where they have to look if they want their core market back. Plus they'll get all those animators back that fled to Pixar in the last ten years...