Disney's Cousins - The New DisneyToon CGI Features

[Neal]

Sounds like we're getting a new show like Goof Troop or Duck Tales, but more in the "Tiny Toon Adventures" vein.

Back in June, this came from the TAG Blog:

I was able to get a look at some of the visual development for the next group of Toon Disney features (waay different than Tinkerbell) and my first reaction was: "That's going to make the Mouse a lot of money!"

Because it is a real commercial property.

(And no, I'm not going to say anything about what it is, since the company hasn't announced much about it yet.)

We have a new update:

There's also a new c.g.i series of features at Diz Toons -- apart from the Tinkerbells -- in early development.

Stories being scripted, characters being developed. (New characters, but cousins of other creations in the Disney empire ...

So, following Tinker Bell comes new CGI features starring the relatives of classic Disney characters in various adventures.

Personally, I hope it's not like Talespin which throws continuity out the window (by putting Baloo in modern times) but is more like the DTVs with the 'continuing adventures of the classic characters, by telling the stories of their kids'

Kira for Simba
Melody for Ariel
etc.

...but, I never get what I want.

[estefan]

Would rather it be 2-D (I have to be honest here. I find the character movements that I've seen on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse to very poor).

But, I welcome a well-done series based on classic Disney characters, even if I don't care much for their direct-to-video cheap-quels. But, if it's in the vein of Duck Tales or Chip 'n' Dale Rescue Rangers, they will give it a look.

And in regards to Tail Spin, it wasn't meant to take place in the same universe as The Jungle Book. That was more what Jungle Cubs was for and I guess that is what they might be going for:



Their current original series like Phineas and Ferb bore me. Though, even The Emperor's New School did nothing for me (Disney's last series that I actually enjoyed was Kim Possible).

Frankly, I'm still waiting for them to bring back Tad Stone to make some direct-to-video Darkwing Duck features. That would be excellent.

[Neal]

I know Talespin wasn't meant to be in the same universe, that's what annoyed me. Couldn't they have made a new character, and not used Baloo and mess up any continuity with the Jungle Books?

[Dusterian]

When dealing with sequels, spin-offs, and especially if in DTV's, you should never count on continuity anyway.

Some people like to think the sequels never happened. After all, they usually aren't anything like the originals, especially in animation, but also even in character. Thumper being a hip obnoxious kid, Flower farting, Cinderella kicking butt, even if it's development that grows out of their sequel's plot, it's still different from how they originally were.

And if Disney fans would like to pretend they never existed, so would probably the original creators of the originals, living or dead they may be.

For me, no sequel has canon continuity unless the original creators approve.

Oh, and remember Walt Disney put some characters from films, like Figaro or Lucifer or Jiminy Cricket, in comics and shorts in way later times and different universes with Mickey and the gang? Yea, that's not continuity either. That's for entertainment, that's for an alternate universe, and alternate way of thinking of the characters. But we all know Figaro only lived in Pinocchio's time for real.

[ribbedebie]

^uh, Flower wasn't farting. He was spraying. That's something else. It's the defense mechanism of the skunk, and it's just located under the tail. Yeah, skunks don't spray from their tails.

Ontopicness: Uh, it seems interesting. I prefer animated stuff over Jonas Brothers or Hanna Montana or whatever her name is anyway

And did anyone notice that some 'sequels' are actually inbetweenquels? (like Bambi 2)

[EricJ]

When dealing with sequels, spin-offs, and especially if in DTV's, you should never count on continuity anyway.

And if Disney fans would like to pretend they never existed, so would probably the original creators of the originals, living or dead they may be.

Actually, there aren't that many of them still alive to comment...
(Apart from PL Travers, who was too danged crabby anyway, one of the few commentaries on those alive to have seen their work classic-Disnified was Lloyd Alexander, who thought "Black Cauldron" was okay-but-disappointing and should've been live-action.)

But if it's any consolation...even Disney's own execs consider "Cinderella II" (the TV-pilot one, not the cruise-ship one) the one that gave the sequel studio the official black eye, and may have played a big part in its exile.

[Ben]

The problem was - and I've said this often in the past - that Walt Disney did not want to make sequels to his films, period.

We now live in a franchise movie world, and my thinking has always been that if the creators of projects want to continue a franchise then so be it on their terms.

But it's not right for new creators to come along long after the fact and fashion new follow-ups with new sensibilities sometimes vastly different to the original intentions.

I think where Cinderella II: Electric Bibbidy-Bobbidy-Boo really hit a bad spot was because it was a Walt-era sequel, which hadn't been done before that point. Sure, sequelize the heck out of Lion King, Aladdin, Pocahontas...the current regime made those films and have every right to exploit and/or degrade them, but don't go doing it to others' work long after they've gone.

Walt Disney did not make a sequel to Snow White, though he took similar elements and produced Cinderella. That the film was such an achievement first time around and went on to become a classic is what made the feeling of a modernly-produced continuation something unnatural, and that the result itself was such an insult to the original film and the audience is where the rot started to kick in.

Eric's trying to be clever in saying "there aren't that many" of the original creators around...but if he had read Dusterian's thread he might have realised that he was remarking about the creators of the films: Walt, Frank and Ollie, etc, not the original book or story writers and authors. And basically, Walt's "You can't top pigs with pigs" sticks as far as sequels to his films go.

Yes, we got "lucky" with Return To Neverland, but remember that this was itself close to being shut down before execs thought the crew had come along quite a way to making it not completely suck. I like the film, but is it really needed? No. Does it follow any of JM Barrie's continuations? No. So while it's not particularly offensive, it does still suggest that the only Disney films that should be sequelized are the ones being produced arguably from since when Walt died, or at least from the 1984 new regime changes.

Basically, a guy called Walt Disney ran a studio from 1923 until 1966 and called the shots. He decreed no sequels to his films (including live-action ones for a time, hence why "Long John Silver" was produced away from his control) and maintained that stance on the animated films. Since his passing, the Studio has been run by a committee of suits, some more creative than others, but still a group of people more interested in returns than anything else. As such, they should be allowed to run things as they see fit, to produce what films they like...but they should leave what came before as just that.

[EricJ]

I think where Cinderella II: Electric Bibbidy-Bobbidy-Boo really hit a bad spot was because it was a Walt-era sequel, which hadn't been done before that point. Sure, sequelize the heck out of Lion King, Aladdin, Pocahontas...the current regime made those films and have every right to exploit and/or degrade them, but don't go doing it to others' work long after they've gone.

The problem was that everyone thought it was A Movie, because Disney's marketing told them so--Some people still do, and go freakin' figure.

Doing Cindy:the Saturday-Morning Series may have started out as Copyright extension (just like all the other 40's/50's-character sequels), and then downgraded to Princess Marketing based on the roll their ABC/ToonDisney movie-tie-in shows were having with Lilo, Hercules and Tarzan...But I'd heard it was a TV pilot before watching, and didn't find myself going into the frothing rages of Disney fans who hadn't.
There're some who still hate "Atlantis II: Milo's Return" for thinking it was a "movie", while the result clearly shows that maybe "Team Atlantis" should've gotten that Disney Afternoon slot after all.
"Kronk's New Groove"....nnnnnot so much.

Yes, we got "lucky" with Return To Neverland, but remember that this was itself close to being shut down before execs thought the crew had come along quite a way to making it not completely suck. I like the film, but is it really needed? No. Does it follow any of JM Barrie's continuations? No.

Did new characters/designs extend a 1953 copyright for 50 more years before the legislation was changed? On that corporate-mercenary level, yes.
But--again with rather gullible audiences--they let a bad genie out of the bottle by the "luck" putting it in February school-vacation-week theaters because "the animation was so good!", and even Eisner admitted it was a mistake jumping on a sudden gold-rush of theater-upgrading what was only intended for small screens--Even he was the first to point out it was damaging the public image of the hardworking Real movies intended for paying audiences.

[Ben]

It wasn't just the animation that was "so good" in the Neverland flick...the story didn't totally suck and there are a couple of neat allusions back to Barrie, as well as the final Pan and Wendy scene which plays out very nicely.

I'd be interested in a confirmation on what you say about Eisner...nothing I have ever seen or read suggests he didn't think February was a bad time to release a secondary product, and the studio continued to do so for a few years after that (Jungle Book II, endless Pooh continuations)...

[GeorgeC]

Ben,

I think release schedules for the big studio films are pretty well set.

It's accepted in the American Hollywood film community that big-tent films/summer blockbusters are generally released between mid-May and end of July and then the other big release period is shortly before Thanksgiving/November and New Year's Eve. This is for North America/USA seasonal schedule releases. The mileage will vary across the rest of the world and according to alternate school schedules, too. There's no coincidence that popcorn film releases are tied around school recesses.

(Very, very unfortunate that the big studios have given up on mature film audience releases. One of the tragedies of today is that there is little room for a Godfather let alone an intelligent animated film that isn't full of singing animals adaptable for Broadway or not aimed at families. This too will hopefully pass some day and we'll enter another age where there's more variety and fewer films based on recycled TV concepts... or thirty-plus-year-old sci-fi films...)

"Summer films" that get released in August are generally smaller films that studios don't expect to make much money and don't get the big promotional push that the bigger popcorn films do.

Home video is different. You can release a film on DVD/Blu ray practically any time of year... Except first quarter. For whatever reasons, not a lot of big title films get released between January and March. Maybe the home video companies are allowing collectors/families to recover from Christmas shopping?

For the US new home video releases are generally on Tuesdays for whatever reasons. I've never really figured out why that time of the week, but it's been so for as many years as I've paid attention.

Some home videos do get weird release days like Fridays (Spider-Man) or on Sundays as was the case for Kung Fu Panda.

This is of course doesn't mean off-date films don't become hits.

The original Ice Age was released theatrically in January (US) in a year where there was really nothing happening that month and it became a huge hit. The fact that the movie was low-budget certainly didn't hurt its profit line, either!


********

Eisner, Smeishner... Old news. Moving onward!

Different regimes, different problems. No point on dwelling too much on old problems and things that have been swept away.

As much as I've liked reading about history and politics between different parties, there are things I don't dwell on too much like the Civil War. I just get tired of regurgitating older, less relevant news... Some of the stuff is frankly too nasty to be bringing up again and again and again. It saps your strength and well-being to think about it too much.

We can only hope the new eras are a bit more compassionate and patient with talent than previous admins were.

Other than that, I can see newer, lower-cost technologies opening up venues for people with the time and talent to take advantage of them.

For other people, now might be a great time to find barnfire sales on old 16mm equipment and make films/do animation in the old style.

Part of the dirty secret about digital animation is that it really isn't as time-saving and cost-conservative as most of us were led to believe.

I know for one that Bill Plympton did an all-digital feature film (probably Hair High) a few years back. He said it cost him more to make the film that way. He claims he'll never make another film with digital ink and paint any time soon!

[EricJ]

I'd be interested in a confirmation on what you say about Eisner...nothing I have ever seen or read suggests he didn't think February was a bad time to release a secondary product, and the studio continued to do so for a few years after that (Jungle Book II, endless Pooh continuations)...

I don't have the article in front of me, but I remember it was one of the corporate (stockholders'?) meetings in Spring '03, where Disney had gotten on so much of a roll for "upgrading" TV product for quick February spring-vacation theatricals, they'd gone overboard that year and released "Jungle Book 2" in March, within the same spring-vacation as "Lizzie McGuire Movie" in April and "Piglet's Big Movie" in February.
(Spring vacation movies tended to be either Disney Channel upgrades, Pooh, or the new post-Neverland "Classic sequels", this was just the first year they'd tried ALL THREE.)

Eisner addressed that the rush of ToonStudio "upgrades" was glutting the theatrical-animation market (what with Paramount/Nickelodeon already keeping up their end of the Rugrats-upgrade production line, after "Hey Arnold!" had done a well-publicized swan-dive the previous summer), and the video-vs.-theatrical confusion was spreading public cynicism about their own hi-quality Feature animation: "We've got a good product out there, we've just got a little too much of it out there right now."

[Ben]

I think release schedules for the big studio films are pretty well set.

Apart from what they call the "tentpoles", George, far from it. And it's all a guessing game anyway, and down to availability of prints, theaters and estimated audiences for similar product that's been proven in the past, etc.

There is just the same kind of basic release reasoning (I wouldn't call it a schedule) to DVD releases, often of course tied into fads, other merchandise and new theatricals.

Everyone likes to <I>think</I> they have some sort of grand plan, but mostly it's all about what product they think they will sell at any given time.

[Dusterian]

I want to say Ben's feelings on not making sequels or otherwise chnaging the universe to the work of a creator who's dead is exactly right and exactly how I feel. Movies or other forms of adaptations that change the story are different, because they are adaptations.

But I did want to say Walt once actually wondered if he should re-use Snow White and her animals friends and some other characters I guess in his new Cinderella movie, I guess casting Snow White as Cinderella. That he decided to make a whole new character and whole new animals and other characters showed that it was meant to be a whole new kind of movie.

Also, the new Snow White Blu-ray is going to have a feature on "Snow White Returns" where a short that would act as a sort of sequel to Snow White was planned, or at least, considered!

EricJ, it doesn't matter if any sequels were at first intended to be animated series. In fact, to make an animated series with characters of a creator who's not around anymore could be pretty wrong, too, if a little less wrong. But the point is they decided to turn them into official sequels. "Name of dead creator's film II" is still wrong.

GeorgeC, did you forget that on Broadway there are many "mature" or "intelligent" musicals? And did you forget that coming up with singing animals takes imagination, creativity, and well, intelligence? Cleverness?

[GeorgeC]

Dusterian,

If I could afford to go to Broadway and spend up to $200 per ticket to see the same thing I saw in a movie theater, great.

That doesn't take away from the excellence of "Wicked" or "Into the Woods" but in no way do I think that movies should be prepped to serve as launchpads for Broadway spin-offs, either. Note that many films evolved from Broadway don't do well. It's a combination of some material not being suitable for one medium or another or the wrong director/cinematographer/playwright being assigned to a project. Broadway film adaptations in general suffer from being assigned to rookie directors who don't take advantage of cameras and become trapped in the notion that they have to be slavishly faithful to the plays -- to the point that they replicate all the staging! You don't have to do that with cameras that can rotate 360 degrees and be cocked at angles that plays can't duplicate for practical and physical reasons.

Also, count me out as someone who thinks Disney doing Tarzan, Beauty & The Beast, Mary Poppins, or The Little Mermaid on Broadway is such a good thing. Last I heard, the Disney plays weren't doing that well (or at least not as well as Beauty & The Beast initially did) and a few were closing early or scaling down touring tremendously. Part of the problem with Disney today is that its recent properties have become overly familiar with the marketing and translations to TV and other media. It's saturated as is... Sometimes I think the best thing to do is let things die down after the initial run and then bring them back a few years later when everyone's memories have cooled a bit instead of hyping them all the time. I think the Seven-Year Rule Disney used to follow faithfully was actually a good thing. Now, it's been abandoned to a large extent and the Vault is applied haphazardly depending on what Ed or Gene in marketing thinks is the next fad to exploit.

I like some of the films with singing animals but again animated films suffer like any other films do when you do repeat the same kind of stories and situations so often that they become formula. The animated animal film archetype has been done to death, good films or not. As someone who has watched these films most of my life I can assure it's not my sole view that formula should become anthema to film instead of standard practice.

That is one of the big problems when you put business people, and especially marketing majors, in charge of production of films instead of creative types who have new ideas and new angles to explore.

[Ben]

George...The Lion King on stage is a very different beast to The Lion King on film.

I have mixed feelings about some of them: Beauty was a natural at the time, the reviews were all commenting on the Broadway level songs and it doesn't take a genius to work out the next step. It was a hit on the back of a hit movie and because it did indeed have a top-notch score, but in that case you're right...it was very closely tailored to the movie.

Lion King was a spectacle, as much a stage achievement as it was on film but totally different. It was its own thing, admirably.

Poppins likewise <I>should</I> have worked, but PL Travers scuppered that by insisting that any future stage version (yes, even back when Walt was signing those contracts there were stage versions spoken about over many properties) was based more on her books, and out went the Disney whimsy.

Tarzan, Mermaid...these were unique to books or film and should never have been attempted on the stage. Some things are best left to one medium, and I think the reason they failed/are failing is because they simply can't beat what has been achieved already.