It’s hard to believe that just 10 years ago we were in the midst of a new golden age of Disney animation. The Little Mermaid. Beauty and the Beast. Aladdin. The Lion King. Every animated feature the Disney studio cranked out was better than the one before. Then something happened. After The Lion King became one of the highest grossing movies of all time in 1994, the Big Cheese at the Mouse House got restless. Motivated by what must be an insatiable greed, Michael Eisner issued forth a declaration that now the Disney Company wouldn’t be striving for one new animated feature each year but TWO. If these movies were making so much money then why not double the profits by doubling the amount of product? What could be simpler?
Back then I knew what ol’ Mikey couldn’t see--that he was going to kill Disney Feature Animation, overwork the dream machine until it cracked and ran into the ground.
Now what most people don’t realize about animation is how much time it takes to do. There’s a joke in an episode of The Simpsons where Homer, providing a voice for a new character on the Itchy and Scratchy cartoon show, asks where the animators are during a recording session. The veteran voice actor working with him replies that cartoons aren’t done “live” because it’s a horrible strain on the animators’ wrists. It actually takes about on average five years to get a classically animated feature film completed, so the implications of Eisner’s “doubling up” wouldn’t fully be evident until around the turn of the century. While the Disney animated features slowly declined in the late ‘90s (Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules) it wasn’t until 2000, almost exactly five years after Eisner’s proclamation, that the effects of overworking the dream machine really started to show. Dinosaur. Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Treasure Planet. Brother Bear.
Brother Bear feels like a very tired film. The sparkling life that once illuminated and separated Disney’s animation from any competitor is dimmed. All the elements are there--the paint, the animation, the music, the cute characters, even the familiar story twists and lessons--but they feel hollow. The products of a tired, overworked machine still contain the same elements but show obvious signs of wear and more noticeable imperfections.
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