Jim on Film
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Even now, into my sixth year in the education profession, I am all too aware of this sort of nonsense, though in education it is elected officials who haven’t been in a classroom for over twenty-five years and don’t even write their own letters who decide what goes on in my English classroom. Just looking at the well-intended but sorely misguided Minnesota Grad Standards that cost my state millions upon millions of dollars and broke up in the time span of the typical Hollywood marriage, the danger of this management style is evident. Those responsible for making decisions in a company (or in education in the above illustration) need to fully understand the system and appreciate the people below them in order to make effective decisions.

Sadly, it was during the above said conversation when I realized that Walt Disney Feature Animation is being run exactly like my friend’s company, my years at Kmart, and even the way our education system functions. Of course, I have not experienced Walt Disney Feature Animation management first-hand, however, as with an algebra problem, you can figure out the variables by looking at the known numbers.

First of all, we know there is low morale in the ranks of the artists. Without these artists, there will never be another Lilo and Stitch, Tarzan, Pocahontas, or the billions of dollars of revenue these movies generated and will continue to generate in the future. Unfortunately, it is these artists who have recounted in interview after interview that there is a marked low morale among the artists. And why wouldn’t there be, after the cuts made during the Schumacher reign in which artists, who had been with Disney since the early 1980s, were given the boot; after projects with promise were squashed because of MBA meddling; and after artists were belittled and demeaned by animation management who had no passion for the art form.

Secondly, we know that the studio has wasted millions of dollars on inefficiencies due to mismanagement. We all know the sad story of how Kingdom in the Sun, which, after millions down the drain, much beautiful (and expensive) artwork sent to the vaults, and a change in director became the hilarious classic The Emperor’s New Groove. Great final product aside, animation mismanagement cost the studio (and stockholders) millions of dollars, a story that would replay in different variations on many of the films that followed it, such as Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Treasure Planet, Home on the Range, and the upcoming Chicken Little, not to mention the misguided, expensive, and thankfully abandoned Wild Life.

We also know that there was a recent decree from above that all future animation projects would need approved screenplays before progressing through the studio’s time-tested method of story development (which, sadly, only works well when the captain of the ship knows something about ocean-going vessels). As Rhett Wickham has written about extensively, this is not the wisest decision for developing a visual art form.

On top of my Disney Christmas List is that I could once again become excited about the future projects in the Walt Disney Feature Animation pipeline, knowing that the artists wouldn’t succeed despite their management but would succeed because of their management.

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-- Jim Miles

-- Posted December 15, 2004