The 1990s saw Hollywood studios make a rush to 3D animation in the wake of Toy Story. But in the process, it abandoned decades of hand drawn artistry.
When Ron Clements and John Musker got the greenlight to make The Princess And The Frog at Walt Disney Animation Studios, they faced a problem.
Appreciating some hand-drawn animation had been done for the slightly earlier Disney production, Enchanted, remarkably Disney had to outsource those segments as it didn’t have the internal resources to bring them to life. When it then decided to attempt a hand drawn animated film for the first time in over a decade, the apparatus to do so was all but gone.
“They had gotten rid of many of the machines, even the animation desk that had lightboards in them,ā co-director John Musker told me on the press tour for The Princess And The Frog in 2009. āThey had gotten rid of all that stuff, and we weren’t sure we had even the desks to make one of these films.”
Fortunately, an employee had gone rogue. “Chris Hibler, who’s the manager of operations, who was the grandson of Winston Hibler who worked with Walt Disney, quickly stashed away a bunch of desks. It was almost like a fairy tale. He said, ‘I was told to get rid of all of these things, but I secretly stashed enough of them away to make a film.’”
Itās testament to how low down the pecking order hand drawn animation had become at major film studios, and also, how fast the collapse was. Looking back, it’s astonishing how quickly an artform that had enjoyed gigantic success ā and had survived for decades ā was sacrificed at such speed.
Lions
In 1994, Disney released The Lion King, then its most successful animated movie of all time, and the kind of lightning in a bottle it’s still trying to recapture. Then, ten years later, Home On The Range limped out with little fanfare, and took hand drawn feature animation at Disney with it. Over 70 years of tradition, gone from the very studio that turned animated features mainstream with the ground-breaking Snow White.
Don’t forget, too, that when DreamWorks SKG launched in 1994, one of its key tenets was to remain committed to hand drawn animation. Its flagship animated launch movie was to be the hugely ambitious biblical tale, The Prince Of Egypt. Not long behind it, The Road To El Dorado and Sinbad: Legend Of The Seven Seas.
Such was the importance of hand drawn animation to DreamWorks – and it’s significant that it was part-founded and overseen by former Disney animation overlord Jeffrey Katzenberg – that the new company was writing big cheques to lure animators from Disney ā arguably the kind of cheques that hand drawn animations had not seen before or since. It wanted the best talent, and it’s firmly on show in The Prince Of Egypt. Yet when Sinbad: Legend Of The Seven Seas landed in 2003, that was it. DreamWorks exited that side of the business too, and never came back.
The most tragic tale was arguably at Warner Bros.
Giants
In 1997, as told in a now-deleted blog by Stephen Frank, a bunch of animators came together under the stewardship of some fella from The Simpsons. That’d be Brad Bird, who – against significant pressures – was trying to shepherd an animated hand drawn project through Warner Bros.
This was Bird’s directorial debut, and he wasn’t awash with either resources or time. As Frank wrote, “the schedule was very short (the whole thing was done in about a year), and the pressure intense. I remember looking at three-foot tall piles of scenes stacking up in my room, feeling I’d never get out from under them. But I did. And we did. People gave it their all.”
Yet the ecosystem around The Iron Giant was shifting, even as the team of animators raced to the finish line. Even at Warner Bros.
It was in May 1998 that the metaphorical fit hit the metaphorical shan. Warners released the animated feature Quest For Camelot, and while others were bringing in nine figure grosses, the $38.1m return of the film didn’t even cover its production budget. There’s a story not entirely accurately told that suggests when Camelot stumbled, Warner Bros decided to quickly shutter its hand drawn animation studio. That’s not quite true, but there are grains of accuracy to the tale. It would release just two more animated features theatrically, and one of those – the underrated Osmosis Jones – turned into a bit of an odd hybrid.
The turning point, of course, came just a year after the release of The Lion King. When Toy Story landed in 1995, the game changed at speed. The CG animation land rush promptly began, and what Pixar’s debut feature unlocked was the barrier to entry where animation was concerned. Studios that had struggled to get an animated feature division working profitably – Fox was a good example – had a new path to big family hits.
Could the Ice Age series have soared at Fox had digital animation not come along, for instance?
Tellingly, even in hand drawn animation, the old status quo was shifting: both Paramount and DreamWorks had features that crossed $100m at the US box office, when The Rugrats Movie and the aforementioned The Prince Of Egypt both dented Disney’s dominance.
But even when The Prince Of Egypt first released, the die had been cast. The movie was to have been the flagship debut release from the animation side of the DreamWorks business. Yet famously (and infamously), the studio shifted the release date of another film being made elsewhere – Antz – to get ahead of Pixar’s sophomore effort, A Bug’s Life (both 1998).
Insects
Antz hadn’t been made in-house at DreamWorks, but was instead put together at a separate company entirely: PDI. In time, the studio would acquire and then shutter PDI. But not before it had generated gigantic hits such as the Shrek and How To Train Your Dragon movies.
The perception grew that audiences didn’t want hand drawn anymore. Yet consider the choices: Disney hand drawn features such as Brother Bear and Home On The Range have their moments, but they’re hardly golden age stuff. However, look at Lilo & Stitch. It was released in 2002, it hit at a time when apparently we just wanted CG stuff, and it’s turned, over time, into one of Disney’s biggest licencing juggernauts.
It seems, though, that Hollywood dismissed that as something of a fluke, and had moved on. It wasn’t the only example.
There’s a strong argument that The Iron Giant is the best animated film to come out of a Hollywood studio in the last 30 years. At worst, it’s in the conversation. Yet Warner Bros didn’t really know what it had, didn’t know how to market it, and the film cratered at the box office. It didn’t take long for it to get people banging the drum for it, but for animators at Warner Bros, it was too little too late. Seeing how revered the film is today makes it all the more tragic that the team and facilities needed to make more works like it were dismantled at speed.
Look too at another DreamWorks feature: Spirit: Stallion Of The Cimarron. No box office champion (although it did decently on its original release), the horsey feature has spawned a spin-off TV series and a (digitally animated) sequel. But again: too little too late for hand drawn.
Hand drawn continues elsewhere, of course. There are priceless studios such as Cartoon Saloon and Studio Ghibli who keep this going. Even in a film like Moana, there’s the need for hand drawn artistry alongside the CG spectacle (Maui’s tattoos in those films brought in Disney legend Eric Goldberg).
But the problem now is that a full, hand drawn animated feature takes time. In an era where Jeffrey Katzenberg has talked up AI doing some of the heavy lifting in animation, you also have Aardman taking five years to make its stop frame Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (that just happens to be a compelling critique of AI too).
Frogs
With Disney, The Princess And The Frog would prove to be an exception, rather than the rule. John Musker and Ron Clement, who’d delivered much-loved animated hits Aladdin, The Little Mermaid and Basil The Great Mouse Detective, did sterling work with The Princess And The Frog. Yet it didn’t do the numbers Disney wanted, and so their next project was, admittedly, one of their very best: the original Moana, realised primarily in CG.
Bob Iger, the overlord of Disney, a man whose life seems to be surrounded by three-monthly finance reports, has long said that the company isn’t looking towards hand drawn anymore for its big features, and hasn’t since 2011’s Winnie The Pooh. Instead, we get Lion King movies that are technically amazing, but also jarring and odd. The quirk of an animator’s pen replaced by photo realism.
Appreciating it’s a hypothetical, would the original The Lion King had become a cultural phenomenon if it wasn’t hand drawn? I’d strongly argue not.
The speed at which hand drawn was abandoned remains, looking back now, the staggering thing. That for a studio to try now is seen as a massive risk, and not worth the corporate resources. Yet walk into a Primark in the UK, and see what films are plastered on all the Disney clothes the company is selling. It’s 90 percent the hand drawn films, from Lilo & Stitch and Snow White to The Lion King and Alice In Wonderland.
Perhaps hand drawn, ultimately, has been the victim of modern cinema’s need to measure success in weeks and months rather than years and decades. And perhaps following the latest land rush shouldn’t be at the expense of a form that clearly still resonates so much.
Just check out The Iron Giant if you donāt believe meā¦
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