Well it’s looking like Pixar will be bought out by Disney tomorrow. I am worried for Pixar. I worked at the *mouse* for 2 & 1/2 years and witnessed first-hand (operationally) how a great company can destroy itself. To be fair Michael Eisner was at the helm of the company and he was quite a lazy, pompus idiot. Disney is under new CEO control and this guy (Iger) seems to be focused on fixing lazy Eisner created problems.
If this deal goes down tomorrow it will put Steve Jobs as the largest single shareholder in Disney. This situation will be interesting to watch unfold. Steve Jobs was able to fix Apple can he lend a hand to fix Disney. Disney has not had a sucessful / good animation film in quite some time. This is probably due to them replacing their quality employees and compensating the resulting (bad) flims with more frequent releases. Lets hope they don’t change much at Pixar and just stick to the formula that’s worked for both companies: A Quality Film = Disney Investment + Disney Distribution + Pixar Controlled Animation, Story and Character Design.
Cars will be out soon, the trailer looks good and i can’t wait to see another quality short and feature length animation.
I would think Pixar could be extremely successful on their own, because it was always Pixar that made the recent movies successful. It seems the hand drawn animated feature is dead and the computer animated feature is king though, so if Disney hopes to have any animated studio in the future, this might be the best bet. I didn’t see it, but Chicken Little was nowhere near the same league as Finding Nemo and The Incredibles right?
Reply to this
Chicken Little looked good (textures and models were decent and it was colorful) although it suffered from the same problems all the recent disney traditional animations (since the lion king) had: weak story, poor character design, and campy/cheesy moments for pop appeal.
For me, the very original concept, art design, story , voice casting and sucessful (visual) presentation of Monsters Inc is proof enough that Pixar does their homework in areas where Disney hasn’t in a long time!
Reply to this