Jim On Film
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Problem Three: Marketing Problems
As Thomas Schumacher, head of Disney animation, recently said in an interview quoted in Entertainment Weekly, you cannot make someone like you. When it comes to marketing, however, it is not a matter of whether people like you; much of it has to do with making people think they will like you. Unfortunately, Disney has failed to do this at the expense of several of its recent traditionally animated films.

Beginning with Fantasia 2000, Disney has not always marketed its traditionally animated features well. For example, for Fantasia 2000, the release was split between two times of the year, ensuring that when the film hit wide release, it had lost its press. With Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) and Treasure Planet (2002), Disney repeated the same mistake it made with another PG-rated traditionally animated film, The Black Cauldron in 1985--they marketed it toward older audiences with the emphasis on its darkness and adventure elements.

The film missing from this analogy of recent Disney "flops" is perhaps the biggest mistake Disney has made in recent years. After shockingly minimal promotion, The Emperor’s New Groove earned favorable reviews and strong word of mouth. This was evidenced by the fact that the film earned more in its second week of release than it did in its first, but Disney did nothing to capitalize on its potential. The result was that it became a top-selling video the following year, and more importantly, it has a strong following among teens and tweens, the two groups that drive film grosses.

Because of its inability to see the quality in its own product and plan accordingly, Disney failed its artists and its investors by neglecting to reach for the film’s blockbuster potential.

Instead of looking at these coinciding strings of cause, Disney and Hollywood analysts have eagerly jumped on the thought of the demise of quality traditional animation, but these are hasty generalizations made without serious thought on what is real. And it is these hasty generalizations that are guiding Disney to potentially end its production of traditionally animated films which will lead to financially disastrous results.

Problem Four: Leadership Change Required
Since the new regime in 1984, Disney has put traditional business executives in charge of feature animation. Animation is an extensive process with a rich history that was developed over many years since the early part of the last century. It is not like live-action film-making; the executives in charge need to know and understand visual artists and the animation process. The executives who have helmed this department since the mid-1980s have not understood this. Jeffery Katzenberg, who was highly praised for his role in the Disney animation renaissance, has shown how little he had to do with it with his own studio’s release of The Road to El Dorado and Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, both of which were panned by critics and not wildly popular because of their lack of storytelling and character development.

Katzenberg was followed by Peter Schneider, and he was followed by Thomas Schumacher. During the reigns of the latter two, Disney animated features racked up many unnecessary cost-overruns. The animation process, as implemented at Disney since Walt’s day, works to avoid the high cost of editing completed scenes and other such expenses.

As an example of who should run the animation division is Howard Ashman. By all accounts, Howard Ashman, who sadly died of AIDS in 1991, was the closest the studio ever had to having another Walt Disney. He loved animation and knew and understood the great legacy of Disney animation, and he was a genius storyteller. It was Howard Ashman who suggested for Sebastian the crab to be Caribbean and solved key problems for the Beauty and the Beast plot, among many other things. When reading stories of Ashman’s input for these films, one cannot help but think of Walt Disney in how he intrinsically understood how to make films full of heart and warmth.

Howard Ashman did not work his way up in the gears of Hollywood executive positions. He was a lyricist before he became the Executive Producer of Beauty and the Beast. That is what Disney needs--not someone who has been playing the corporate game for years but the next Walt Disney--someone who knows animation storytelling and whose passion for the art drives him/her to create the truly perfect animated film.