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Can Hayao Miyazaki Save Disney's Soul?
IronicGrin writes "Even hard-core House of Mouse apologists have to admit that Disney's Feature Animation division has lost its way. After a half decade of pathetic failures (Atlantis) and epic disasters (Treasure Planet), the company shut its fabled Orlando 2D animation studios last year and announced that it was jumping on the computer animation bandwagon. A big motivation for the move to CGI was, of course, the Magic Kingdom's tenuous relationship with Pixar--the source of all of Disney's recent animated hits. But Disney is overlooking a better example of just what its toon team has been doing wrong...right under its nose.
Howl's Moving Castle, which opened this weekend to rapturous critical acclaim, is the third masterpiece from Japan's Studio Ghibli that Disney has released theatrically. Today's New York Times has a feature by A.O. Scott [reg required, blah blah] calling Miyazaki the "world's greatest living animated-filmmaker"; meanwhile, last Thursday, I wrote a column for SFGate.com on why Disney animation, 3D rendered or not, is doomed to irrelevance if it fails to (re)learn some basic lessons from Miyazaki and his cohorts at Ghibli. What do you think? Is Disney destined to fade to black, or can a little Ghibli flavor (mmm....Ghibli) get it back on track?"
Try watching Castle in the Sky and then while you're sitting there, amazed, at how it is such a shameless ripoff of Atlantis, note that it was made several years earlier.
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THE LINK
Mercy was given to me by Christ...I must give the same to others.
Miyazaki may be an ubelievably great artist, but his movies will not bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in movie sales, and billions in merchandizing
... Except in Japan. In Japan, Miyazaki's movies really do bring in this kind of revenue, and he's without question the most popular animator in Japan. Maybe the most popular film-maker in Japan. Of course there are cultural differences, but is the concept of what makes a good story really that different in Japan and America? And by the way, the article is talking about using Miyazaki's approach, not his actual films - Disney have already have already managed to procure global distribution rights to Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, as well as the video rights to most of the others. (They've done a really poor job of the region 2 DVDs so far, as well.)
One good turn - gets all the covers.
Disney != Google at any time.
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http://www.answers.com/topic/disney-animators-str
''...The salary structure remained crazy-quilt, and the only general wage increase Disney granted in those years was self-serving: he brought a number of workers up over the forty-dollar-a-week level, at which point, under the Wagner Labor Relations Act, they ceased being entitled to time-and-a-half for overtime." Schickel says that Disney "responded gracelessly to the pressures of his increasingly difficult economic situation." Story conferences became brutal. "An animator working on Fantasia took piano lessons at his own expense" to increase his understanding of music, and when Disney found out about it, he snarled "What are you, some kind of fag?"
As the biggest and most successful animation studio, Disney was an obvious target for the Screen Cartoonists' Guild. There was a layoff which seemed to target members of the Guild selectively, and things reached a boiling point when Disney fired animator Art Babbitt, whom Disney regarded as a "troublemaker." Three days later, on May 29, 1941, the strike began.
As I understand it, it's impossible to "steal" from the public domain.
Understand this.
A small feature on the Pixar Exhibition at the Studio Ghibli Museum: http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/museum/pixar/
It fails to mention that The Lion King is not Disney's original story, but was instead plagiarized from Kimba the White Lion.
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.