We ended the first act of this amazing revival with the following “Will you marry me?�? “Yes!�? followed by thunderous applause. Now that the din of anticipation filling the lobby during intermission has quieted down, and everyone is getting ready to settle in for the meat of this story, the majority of the audience is anticipating a tale of what happens to the animated features currently in various stages of development and production in both Burbank and Emoryville. As the house lights dim and we prepare to pick up on our merry band of Templar Toon Knights unleashing the word of Walt, I’m looking for something entirely different. I don’t have any questions or worries or wonder about what they will do to fill the screens at theatres around the world. No, it is the small, concentrated magic contained in the palm of our hands that has me leaning forward in my seat.

Every time I sit down in a movie theatre and the lights go down, I remember the thrill I experienced as a little boy, watching a nearly life-sized Monstro careening down with terrifying force on the tiny raft that carried Pinocchio and Gepetto. The light from the projection booth bounced off of the screen at Orlando’s Beacham Theatre with a luminosity greater than the moon. Even though I would grow up to marvel at how that same distant orb would soon-enough be conquered by astronauts just miles away at Cape Canaveral, it was the magic of a movie screen that held all the power in my heart for a very long time.

Some years later, my best childhood friend and fellow comic-book geek, Charles Treadwell introduced me to the life changing news that cartoons were drawn by hand, one frame at a time, and that we too could make our own magic on little sheets of paper, cut into four inch squares and stapled together at one end, twenty-four at a time. Wow! I could carry the experience with me everywhere and at all times! When I discovered that you could also find little heartbeats of the real thing, from the hands of the masters, well hello original Chernabog drawing and goodbye college fund (or, as my beloved so lovingly reminds me in today’s booming real estate market, good bye house down-payment.)

I eventually turned my passion into my vocation, and moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career driven largely by my love affair with the great performances created by three consecutive generations of artists. The American movie going experience that launched my dreams shifted from theatres to living rooms in the decades that followed, and has now moved to the drop down screens in the back seats of SUVs and the laptops of commuters around the globe. So much has changed in how we choose to be entertained since Monstro first splintered that tiny raft before my very eyes, and what I hold so dear, what I champion so often – the experience of seeing a movie on a big screen – is not the same for the young writers and artists I teach and coach, and the children who are growing up with an entirely different kind of orientation to visual entertainment. I frequently have to keep in check my sometimes radical ideology and stubbornly held opinion of how and where animation is best experienced. Truth be told, I still get my biggest kick from holding a stack of drawings in my hand and flipping through one page at a time. There is something even more powerful and evocative about the deceptively simple pleasure of a flipbook.

When I got the call confirming that Disney was about to go public with their announcement of the acquisition of Pixar, nursing a head cold and trudging around in my sweats, I decided to forego all the MSNBC interviews and conference calls and elected instead to celebrate by pulling up a large, comfortable club chair in my home office, propping my feet up on a stool, and clicking “play�? on a 17 inch LCD screen to experience the glory, grace, beauty and wonder of one of my favorite Disney features. I chose a contemporary feature by my favorite directing and writing team, one that I still believe will one day prove to be among the greatest triumphs of the studio (in spite of the short-sighted criticism and inside studio scuttling that kept so many people away when it was released.) I have to admit that the color, the clarity, the proximity (doubtless contributing to my ever increasing myopia) were as pleasant and powerful an experience as I’ve had at any theatre. I could dismiss the experience to being driven largely by a Dayquil buzz and my “ding dong the witch is dead�? euphoria, but it was actually quite separate from that; I found my solitary, up close and private screening a rich, intimate experience that left me feeling more closely connected to the story and the characters. I could taste that old flipbook high.

That experience is hard come by for someone who works in the film industry, who gets paid to analyze story, who coaches writers and animation story artists and actors, and who examines animation itself in two separate realms – the technical and the artistic – and who also writes about it regularly. You get a little detached and a touch jaded. But seated in that chair, with the blinds closed and my flat panel monitor combing over bits of data at speeds faster than my math-challenged mind could comprehend, I heard the muse that is whispering from behind the curtain of the next act in the “Disney Buys Pixar�? drama.