Binary Bonsai

This commentary was written partially as a response to a comment about Suspended Animation, an article by David Koenig and partially because I’ve wanted to talk a little bit about this for a while now.

Like most other people today I grew up watching animation shorts and Disney features. Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh; characters that today have become entire institutions in and by themselves. And even today they still hold a special place in most people’s hearts, if for nothing else then for nostalgia. The company that unquestionably laid the tracks for the animation genre is no longer the innovative mouse it started out as. Rather it has grown into a lumbering colossus of uninspired management, cheap rehashes and sequels, paint-by-numbers animation features and stockholder satisfaction.

Today the animation features that exit Disney Animation Studio’s are ironically just as two dimensional as the techniques on which the studio built its initial success. And the characters that inhabit them hold no more soul than the pencils with which they were conceived. Hard lined contrasts are used to set up conflicts so banal that not even the youngest of the audience are held in surprise any longer.

Success however is no easy position to be in; On one hand the stockholders pull a certain weight in the direction of the company, easily breeding the idea that ‘if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it’. And in this writer’s opinion, that is one of the reasons that has caused the current state of formulaic and contrived ‘junk food’-animation which quite frankly holds little or nothing in terms of artistic value.

It can be easy to loose sight of exactly how unique a company Disney was in its early years when it truly had to fight for its existence. Walt Disney brought animation from its humble beginnings to the point where one could refer to it as an actual genre without snickering. Nobody thought people could be made to sit and watch a feature length animated movie and then Snow White was released taking the world by storm. And later Fantasia proved that animation was about more than fuzzy animals. If one were to list the movies that were produced under Walt Disney, one would come up with a veritable list of classics: Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty and One Hundred and One Dalmations. And this was before 1960 mind you (with the exception of Dalmations which is 1961). The genre was literally engineered by Walt Disney, artistically as well as technically with such devices as the multiplane camera.

The art, and I use that word in its ‘pretentious’ nose-in-the-air sense here, of animation was carved out of years of trial and error by the Disney Studios, during which the nine old men laid down the 12 basic principles for character animation, principles that are still adhered to today as if they were inscribed on stone tablets and carried down off a mountain.

And though the criticisms that are made of the Disney Corporation today easily come off as being nothing more than idealistic company bashing, I think that it is tremendously important to keep in mind that Walt Disney and the crew of Disney Studio’s back in those days actually were idealists. Here was a group of people who up until that point had been trying to make a living by doing what most people thought of as nothing more than 2 minute fillers in an era of black and white television. And out of sheer love of their trade they mustered up enough moxy to stand against an industry of live-action movies and come out on top.

The emphasis of the time was on story and characters, of which the animation would become a product. These were fairytales in the traditional sense of the word, before that idea was mutated by the very same company into meaning ‘stories for kids’. And when that story finally made it into animation, great care and pride was taken in the artistic development of those cartoons.

Today it takes no more than a quick glance at titles like Treasure Planet, Atlantis, Mulan, to realize that all that has gone out the window and that current productions are still riding high on Disney’s golden age productions and business tactics that are ethically quite questionable. And in the ensuing desperation caused by financial failure at the box office even poorer productions are now being pushed out the door. Atlantis and Treasure Planet were both examples of some of the committee-like trash that has resulted from the artistic and economical stagnation of Disney.

And while the occasional genuinely interesting movie manages to slip through like (to a certain degree) Pocahontas, Lion King and Lilo & Stich things are looking bleak in terms of the lasting-value that Disney used to hold. Something that is quite dramatically underscored by such outsourced bargain bin follow-ups to classics as Cinderella 2 and Peter Pan 2.

And as the article Suspended Animation mentions, the move to 3D and the subsequent shearing of the traditional animation departments has left Disney not only in a vacuum of actual talent, but also on loose ground in terms of where exactly they’re heading as a company. And it currently seems like little actual thought has gone into figuring out what that direction should be, which makes the current implementation of computer graphics in their features seem like bells for the sake of bells.

Walt Disney was adamant about pleasing the child in us all, but always underscored that his movies were for adults as well as children:

“Too many people grow up. That’s the real trouble with the world, too many people grow up. They don’t remember what it’s like to be 12 years old. They patronize, they treat children as inferiors. Well I won’t do that.”

Spielberg understands this and Lucas used to understand it which is what made those two directors come to the very forefront of new Hollywood. That is, the idea that family entertainment actually is family entertainment, and not the mental equivalent of Teletubbies. Unfortunately for Walt that Michael Eisner, the current CEO of Disney doesn’t seem to put too much weight in the qualities of the classic Disney.

Luckily the last few years have marked a paradigm shift in the world of animation and family entertainment with Pixar being the leader of the pack. And one needs only take a look at productions like Finding Nemo, Prince of Egypt and The Iron Giant to see how modern techniques can be used without stumbling by companies whose love of their work is penned in every pore of their work.