Walt Disney Is Rolling Over In His Tank
Joe Escalante ·
Jul 10, 2011 at 9:41pm
This is fascinating. After witnessing what strong American unions did for kids at school in the excellent film Waiting For Superman (recommended to me on this site), I also discovered what strong American unions did for kids after school. Watch this video of Disney cartoons. Snow White And The Seven Dwarves was somehow made before the organization of I.A.T.S.E's Animation Guild. But after it became strong, and Walt Disney died (after Jungle Book was made), you have cartoon hackery run amok.
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Jun '10
Re: Walt Disney Is Rolling Over In His Tank
Disney animator and later director Wolfgang Reitherman made the decision to repeatedly borrow sequences from earlier Disney films more than likely as a money saving effort and to get features to market quicker. This had nothing to do with union animators.
Re: Walt Disney Is Rolling Over In His Tank
What Brian said. And sometimes they just did it all over again note for note. It's still quite labor-intensive - the re-use of a template allowed them to get material to the artists and paint-&-ink people faster. The Storyboard Local #309 probably filed a grievance.
Jun '10
Re: Walt Disney Is Rolling Over In His Tank
I think it's been mentioned also on some animation blog sites that much of this reusing of earlier footage was prior to the advent of VHS tapes and many in Disney management just didn't think that many people would notice the borrowed sequences from the older films. The ROI on Sleeping Beauty which used all original animation was negligible given the money that the studio sunk into it and after Walt's death there was pressure to get to market as many inexpensive animated features as possible to continue to dominate the market especially since the company realized that continued feature films helped to keep the Disney brand alive and visitors coming back to the theme parks.
May '11
Re: Walt Disney Is Rolling Over In His Tank
This is an interesting topic to me, since I'm currently in school studying animation. These days I could just knock out a whole scene in Adobe Flash and redress individual sections without anyone noticing, but back then they had to do thousands of individual drawings. Most animators I've met are lazy. They require cintiq monitors (the big ones you draw directly one), to actually do real work. Since they cost several grand, I imagine these digitized days we live in are not cheaper. As usual, Hollywood's people don't seem to like the policies that politicians they elect in implement. Fox has subcontracted The Simpsons to various studios in South Korea. I don't know what their union situation ease, but it must be cheaper to operate there.
May '10
Re: Walt Disney Is Rolling Over In His Tank
Do the math. Snow White ran 83 minutes, so with titling let's say there's 80 minutes of animation. With 24 individual drawings per second, that's 115, 200 hand drawn frames, inked on one side of a cell and painted on the other. Those were then photographed individually on a multiplane camera over the background.
Pinocchio (1940) was budgeted at $2.6M ($42M adjusted inflation dollars) and at 85 minutes long was the most expensive film per minute of any project of the day. Provided you could find enough talented animators to do it the old-fashioned way, that film would probably come in north of $100M today.
Sep '10
Re: Walt Disney Is Rolling Over In His Tank
I hope you all realize that the Bugs Bunny cartoons had various studio execs pilloried and made fun of because the animators were in the midst of trying to organize a union. I read about this in, I believe, Chuck Amuck by Chuck Jones.
Re: Walt Disney Is Rolling Over In His Tank
Unless disgruntled animators, rightly or wrongly, put pressure on the company to ease working conditions or raise wages.
Jun '10
Re: Walt Disney Is Rolling Over In His Tank
Joe Escalante: Unless disgruntled animators, rightly or wrongly, put pressure on the company to ease working conditions or raise wages. · Jul 11 at 8:49am
Wage increases were negotiated when Walt was alive. I don't think there's any documented evidence that reusing old sequences had anything to do with easing working conditions. If anything new original animation sequences would have meant slightly more work and money for lead animators and inbetweeners not less. After the strikes, Disney like any other studio had to be careful not to have animators work too much overtime. Everything I've read points to Roy Disney, Sr. and Reitherman taking short cuts so more films could get to market because they were probably still smarting from the long and costly development of Sleeping Beauty (the most expensive animation project to date) along with other pictures Disney released in 1959/60 which actually resulted in posting their first annual loss of revenue.
Jun '10
Re: Walt Disney Is Rolling Over In His Tank
If there was any action on the part of union animators and inbetweeners it would have been to demand additional compensation for the work they did that was repurposed for other films since they were under the impression that the work they originally did was meant for one film only. This might depend on how their contracts read and what rights the studio claimed to reuse any work they created. I haven't seen that addressed in any sources but if there was such an action and they were successful in getting Disney to compensate them, then perhaps settlements were handled quietly.