Jim on Film: Rescue Aid Society
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Rescue Aid Society
It was with great excitement this past weekend when I saw that my Dream On Silly Dreamer DVD arrived in the mail. To go from thinking that the Minneapolis screening I saw last year would be my only encounter with this invaluably informative documentary to being able to own it on DVD was a very pleasant surprise.
Right away after watching the film, I gobbled up the choice bonus features, most notably the “Super-Sized�? sequences, which give us additional discussion of some of the key segments of the film, such as the dissolution of the visual development department and the general mismanagement of resources. Much of what is discussed in the movie and in these bonus features have been circulating as rumors around the Internet for a number of years, but for the first time, we get first-hand accounts with analogies and concrete examples to verify them.
Now, I must interject here that I am generally a very positive person, particularly when it comes to Walt Disney Feature Animation. I championed the studio for trying something as bold as Atlantis: The Lost Empire and succeeding with flying colors. As detailed in my last column, I also think Treasure Planet is a masterpiece. The Emperor’s New Groove, likewise, is amazing, and I still watch Brother Bear in awe for its richness and literary approach to animated storytelling.
Because of my love for traditional animation, I’ve been highly intrigued by recent reports on the Internet concerning the inner workings of Walt Disney Feature Animation since the Pixar purchase. For example, I am delighted that one report indicated that Rapunzel will somehow incorporate traditional animation to some extent. Just two months ago, I was hoping in my column that John Lasseter and friends would do whatever was needed to make sure Disney didn’t release another mediocre film with its name on it. Now we have reports that my prayers have been answered as Meet the Robinsons, the next Disney CGI effort, has been postponed by several months. One account, courtesy of Jim Hill, has it that a good portion of the film is going to be re-worked, even as the film was supposed to be nearing completion.
While watching the bonus features for Dream On Silly Dreamer, I was probably most interested in hearing about the disintegration of storytelling at Disney. You see, for several years after these nightmare stories started circulating around the Internet, I maintained that the structure was put in place so that Walt Disney Feature Animation could never make a bad animated movie. Heck, even Walt Disney Feature Animation’s lesser films—such as Make Mine Music, The Sword in the Stone, The Black Cauldron—are still very entertaining. As the impressive Lilo and Stitch hit the theaters, followed by a very impressive Treasure Planet and Brother Bear, I felt confident that the artists would always be able to get their great pictures made. However, the disintegration of artists under Thomas Schumacher’s regime and the seeds planted by the contamination of the story department and the dissolution of the visual development department as detailed in Dream On Silly Dreamer’s bonus features have manifested in some of the recent releases by the studio, which is not surprising considering that the interviews for the documentary were filmed in 2002. The problems former story and visual development artist Sue Nichols describes in her interviews are a play-by-play, dead-on prophecy brought to fulfillment in Home on the Range and Chicken Little. And those prophecies were already strongly, if not very strongly, present in the short synopses of the recently halted Gnomeo and Juliet (with a heavy use of old Elton John songs no doubt not inspired by the artistic needs of the film but by the popularity of the Elvis songs in Lilo and Stitch and the pop music used in DreamWorks pictures) and a hip, self-aware Rapunzel a la Shrek.