| Monday, March 5, 2007 |
18:55 - Nuke & Pave
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/disney/lasseter-article-in-ny-times
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Hey, this could be good. Looks like Lasseter plans to start all over from scratch with Disney Feature Animation, right down to the building:
Another piece of info is that WDFA is planning to move out of their semi-iconic (and architecturally dysfunctional) hat building and into brand-new headquarters in Glendale. At first, I thought to myself, “Wow, that’s a huge and unnecessary expenditure to build another studio, even if the current studio does leave a lot to be desired.” But after giving it more thought, I realized what Lasseter and Ed Catmull were doing. What’s notable is not that they’re building a better animation studio, but that they’re moving the whole animation operation off the Burbank lot, far away from the studio’s acrid corporate culture, and creating a separate campus that will hopefully be dominated by passionate artists and storytellers. Looking at it from that perspective, it’s a daring and excellent business decision.
I've been in there. It's a dang cool building, to be sure, though it's when the occupant's fortunes turn sour that you stop talking about it as being "whimsical" and start using words like "architecturally dysfunctional". Inside, it's all light-beige-painted exposed metal handrailings over the cavernous atrium that occupies that big weird curving part that faces the freeway, and once you go into the actual studio floors it's just cubicle-land like anywhere else (well, except for all the storyboard sheets taped to the hallway walls).
The entryway was really the best part: you walk in from the spreading parking lot under the giant Sorcerer's Apprentice hat, and down a hallway with glass display cases showing off ancient animation treasures (when I visited, there were pencilled sheets from Snow White featuring some of the original, less-PC Dwarfs, such as Deafy). You get to the front desk and you feel like you're awaiting admittance into the presence of Oz the Great and Powerful, and you expect at any moment to be grabbed roughly by the shoulders and marched back down the hallway and propelled back out into the hazy Southern California sunshine.
But that was back in the late 90s. Since 2001, the parking lot of the Animation building has been occupied by this giant Stalinist-wedding-cake-looking building, the ABC/Capital Cities headquarters, whose cold black shadow falls across the blue Mickey hat in those long afternoons.
Over the years it's looked more and more like the Animation building is just some disused warehouse out behind the dark and hulking skyscraper, something someone ought to clear out of there and free up some parking spots for the real movers and shakers. It's only once you get a little further east on the 134 that you see the huge letters on that curving atrium: ANIMATION. And you wonder what happened to make it look so insignificant.
So now Lasseter's going to up anchor and move to a new building, huh? Good for him. It pains me to see the Animation building be abandoned, but I can't say it's surprising—and if he's going to resurrect the studio, it's just as well that he do it somewhere where there aren't any looming corporate megaliths peering in the windows, or ghosts of disgruntled artists prowling the halls.
I'm actually kinda surprised—pleasantly—that he kept it within the limits of the Burbank/Glendale/Hollywood nexus, hellaciously expensive though it must be. I was half expecting them to move to Korea or something. Or Wisconsin...
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Brian Tiemann
