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"10Gbs etho and blow your mind away servers"

This isn't Dreamworks or Pixar, but I had a job interview a few years ago with Blue Sky Studios who created Ice Age. They had a render farm of over 250 machines, but they were hardly "blow your mind away" servers. I believe they had 1Ghz. processors in them which at the time wasn't bad, but not quite top of the line. They said each frame took around 9 hours to render and each machine was working on one frame at a time.

Though I agree that Disney still is a powerful media conglomerate and as a brand name it sure has appeal to mass from kids to retired, animation from Disney has lost a lot of momentum compared to its heyday. Animated feature is no longer dominated by Disney, as 3D animation is becoming the mainstream in the film biz. This has been proven by success of animated feature from other studios, like Dreamworks and Fox. Meanwhile, in 2D animation world, there are some indication that Disney might have lost touch in animation business. Boxoffice success of Disney animation is no longer guaranteed unlike old days. While Disney is apparently aware of this trend, they are yet to come up with viable alternative to their ex-partner, Pixer.

Is 2D animation dead? I think not, and neither some studios. But from what we have seen in success of Pixer/Dis films, it is undeniable that Pixer has a better ground to compete in animation after this separation.

They are by no means trusted to the level of Disney in a family atmosphere.

Sure, WE trust Disney for its purity. Disney is clean as long as it doesn't engrave their banner on top of crap they make under other brand name they own.

Cheers.

It's a myth that Pixar are uncontested when it comes to digital features (as it states in the article). For example:

(1) Blue Sky Studios made a little movie called Ice Age.

(2) Pacific Data Images made a little movie called Shrek, and also released the 2nd ever computer generated feature, Antz (the official site, Antz.com seems dead).

Here's another myth:

While Pixar's rendering techniques are *good*, they aren't necessarily cutting edge when it comes to technology. Blue Sky uses raytracing for their images. This gives them features like caustics, global illumination and efficient curved surfaces. Curves in particular had a huge advantage through memory efficiency for their render farm - meanwhile Pixar's render nodes were crashing because of scene complexity simulating curves through polygons. Sure, Pixar's movies are impressive, but I can't help but think they'd do better without clinging to some legacy baggage that comes with Renderman.

Anyway - the technology is overhyped. It's just a better pencil. Story, story, story is what counts. Disney can probably afford to take longer developing scripts. This is why you can have something as gorgeous as the Final Fantasy movie and have it completely suck at the box office; and Disney flicks don't look so great, but sell well.

Just that Twentieth Century Fox made the Ice Age movie.

For those who didn't watch: Ice Age, Lilo & Stitch, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, and Treasure Planet.

I can only claim to have seen two of these, but I think I can say that "Lilo & Stitch" was the only worthwhile competition in this category. Still, it should rightly be considered remarkable that a dubbed foreign film won in this category, especially since Disney put almost no effort into promoting this film when it was released.

And on that note, it looks like Miyazaki's film "Castle in the Sky" will be released in the US on DVD at the same time as "Spirited Away", both of which should get a lot more attention from Disney now than they did last calendar year. Hey, whatever works....

All this is because doing things really right, with full raytracing and global illumination, is too expensive even for production off-line rendering.

Not true. Ice Age was raytraced. At the time I remember reading about how their solution was vastly more memory efficient than other movie renderers (such as Renderman) as there was no intermediate polygon stage.

I'm not sure about global illumination, but that can't be far behind.

The other fact you need to face is the best way to secure employment is not through classifieds and monster.com, but personal contact with people in the field.

Very true, but don't count out monster. I got my current post-graduation job through monster (my employer found me) and I also secured 3 other interviews through them, including one with Blue Sky Studios of Ice Age fame. Didn't get that job, though heh.