Posted on 12/02/2006 11:04:03 AM PST by abb
Walt Disney Co. said Friday that it would dismiss about 160 of the 800 employees in its feature animation unit as the company slowed production at what once was its crown jewel.
The 20% cutback comes nearly a year after Disney purchased Pixar Animation Studios, maker of such computer-animated hits as "Cars" and "The Incredibles." Pixar executives including creative guru John Lasseter took control of the Disney group, aiming to revive an operation that was a crucial profit center before it lost ground to other studios.
"With John Lasseter from Pixar being put over the division, and the much brighter track record they've had, he's going to keep his guys and his projects first," said David Koenig, an author of books on Disney.
The number of artists, technologists and production managers in Burbank will be reduced. A separate TV animation unit is unaffected.
Employees said they were told that because the average production time for the Burbank company's animated films was expanding from 12 months to 18 months, fewer staffers could handle the workload.
"The management team at Walt Disney Animation has determined that each film will dictate its own appropriate production schedule," Disney Studios spokeswoman Heidi Trotta said. "The result of this necessitated a reduction of staff."
Hundreds of the division's employees are members of the local animators guild and are covered under a collective-bargaining contract. But management can choose whom to fire based on skill level instead of seniority, guild business representative Steve Hulett said. Notification of those affected is to begin the week of Dec. 11.
"Everybody's wondering who's going to be getting the ax," Hulett said.
Tempering the news about the layoffs is the healthy job market for computer animation.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Ping
I think of animation as being a good thing.
Disney perfected animation. I grew up on it. Then Eisner ruined it with uncontrolled PC...
Well, the animation studio is somewhat peripheral to MSM. MSM could be defined as a propaganda machine with its technological base now increasingly obsolescent. Now, movies could be propagandistic, and many of them are, but Disney animated ones are not the prime suspects in this regard.
Disney still does great animation with Pixar.
Does this fall under Dinosaur Media Deathwatch? A lot of animated Disney movies are great films.
Examples? Those would agree that there has been a string of (suggestively) anti-Christianity in some of the movies.
Traditional hand-drawn line animation is all but dead, that's what this story is about. Pixar-type computer animation is the name of the game today, unfortunately. I say unfortunately because the great hand-drawn Disney animation features are true classics in a way that the Pixar films and their imitators will never be.
Disney does own ABC / Capitol Cities. I just saw Eisner speak and Disney considers ESPN a key brand. Disney does not consider ABC a key brand. So in some sense ABC may be the first of the bigs to suffer complete dhimminitude. I mean it has to be humbing. One day you have your own skyscraper across the street from your older rival, CBS. You are profitable concern, more or less. You are TV! You have revolutionized Sports and News coverage. Then, from out of nowhere a bunch of Radio hicks buy the shop out from under you. They are all about money and don't give a hoot about Edward R. Murrow. Then, before the paper on the junk bonds has cooled you've been sold to Disney! Disney!! The cartoon company. You are now officially a Mickey Mouse News Organization. But that's ancient history. ABC is viewed by Disney as a moderately profitable segment, but not part of the lore, the core, the stuff Walt invented. Disney begins with Mickey Mouse, ABC is just a little something they picked up along the way.
Thank you! Mickey became a symbol of America, but had no real personality. Truth is that after Disney went whole hog for feature-length animated films, its cartoon shorts grew increasingly lame. Who can remember more than one Mickey Mouse short after "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" in Fantasia?
OTOH, anyone who can recall Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Yosemite Sam, Elmer Fudd, Speedy Gonzalez, Foghorn Leghorn or Wile E. and the Road Runner before PC took hold can remember Saturday mornings filled with belly laughs. What's Opera, Doc?, Duck Amuck and it's response Rabbit Rampage immediately come to mind. This is not to mention William Hanna & Joseph Barbera's breakthrough creation Tom & Jerry, and Tex Avery's side-splitting deadpan basset hound Droopy ("Y'know what? I'm happy.")
My reply above was meant to be to you I think.
Gosh the endless Dinosaur Media Death Watch is amazing considering that the movie industry will make more money than last year. In order for the Media to die we are going to have these threads until the end of every FREEPERS life for sure (even the youngest one out there). I just don't see the media going anywhere anytime this century.
Who killed Roger Rabbit? was great. The Disney cartoon movies like "Little Mermaid" are what my kids, now 20 love and remember. Lion King. Jasmine. Mulan. Pochahontus. Classics of another era.
Sadly WB didn't make feature length cartoons in the 1980s and 1990s that I am aware of. Did they even make shorts?
Space Jam.
Yes, I agree. Define Dinosaur Media? Any media conglomorate? Some will prosper and continue. I would put money on Disney being one of them.
If you limit Dinosaur media to the things actually endangered by the new media it would be a more interesting thesis. To me that would be #1 with a star: daily newspapers on paper. Totally unneeded in a connected world of the net / laptops/ wireless. And #2 the big three broadcast networks - in an era of 1000 channel cable and sattelite ubiquity.
Radio - the older sibling of TV, seems to be haning on and flourishing.
So the Dino thing is imprecise and unenlightening.
It was cute the first 1000 times I saw it. Once the (tm) got added I think you started taking yourself a little too seriously.
Rethink and rework. Grade: C-.
Good call. I had forgotten that. It was pretty bad wasn't it? It's not a cultural icon like Lion King.
Advantage Disney.
I think this qualifies as DeathWatch™ reporting. Anything that relates to layoffs, downsizing, re-organizing, human resource re-tasking, or what ever euphemism they chose, is relevant by definition.
Full disclosure: I'm a Disney stockholder and have been for years. I grew up watching "Wonderful World of Disney." I still to this day have Disney Comics I read when I was a child fifty (50) years ago. The reason I bought the stock twenty five years ago was I had faith in their purpose.
I think they've been headed in the wrong direction for years and I vote against the board nominees every year. It isn't the company Walt created and I think he's turning over in his grave at what it has become. It breaks my heart, too.
What was once strictly a family movie studio isn't any more. It hasn't been that for years. When the Disney Channel first came on cable in the early eighties you could allow your young kids to watch without having to worry about inappropriate content. You can't do that now.
The older Disney animated movies are indeed classics, and I still enjoy watching them today. However, no one can argue that the movies of the last few years have a decided PC slant. At this past spring's Disney annual meeting, CEO Robert Iger refused to re-release the Academy Award winning movie "Song of the South."
Disney, like all the Drive-By Media companies, will not change unless sufficient financial pain is inflicted upon them. They are, after all, part of Hollywood...
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