Quote:
Originally Posted by warhorse78
Disney just showing they don't have any creativity anymore since Walt died. They either copy from obscure movies, books and TV, remake their own stuff, or just buy out companies and remake their stuff.
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I don't think that's true. The Disney company has the size and depth to make any kind of movies they want, and they do release some highly creative flicks under the titles of the smaller production studios they own.
But the Disney name on a movie comes with a lot of constraints. It's such a well-known name for family fare that a really adults-only movie released as a Disney would cause a stockholder's revolt and turn away their audiences.
Diisney's huge size gives them a lot of creativity, but it also gives the company a lot of weight to carry as a corporation. So, just like the other studios, anything carrying the Disney name is going to have to be a big-budget film that swings for the fences.
The Lion King was a tremendous hit for them in animation, but that animation looks very dated now, and flat animated drawings no longer can pack a house like full 3-D animation does. Disney learned that very well from the success of Avatar and from their own success in re-doing The Jungle Book.
The Lion King re-do just makes good financial sense. And if it is as good as the trailers promise it to be, it may be an even better movie than the first one.
For a fact, Walt's creativity almost brought him and his company down to bankruptcy repeatedly. After Snpw White, every animated full-length feature Walt supervised was a flop, and each drew less money than the last.
If one goes back and watches those classics to see why they failed, it's pretty easy to see.
Pinoccio was a rotten little liar who got everyone into trouble, and the trouble was horrifying for a small child.
Dumbo scared little kids and made them cry when Dumbo was taken away from his mother and forced to look foolish.
Hunters shot Bambi's mother. No child even wants to think about their mother dying. Neither do adults.
Alice in Wonderland was a bad acid trip that was also scary as hell.
Only Sleeping Beauty was a money-making hit. And it came after a very long and expensive run of one failure after another.
Fantasia was overblown, high-falutin', snooty, pretentious and boring. Art students loved it, but everone else snoozed halfway through. The only sequence in it, with old stand-by Mickey, was a last minute addition of a short that was already finished. It's the only thing most people remember about the film.
The repeated failures of his animated movies and their rising costs are why Disney turned to live action films in the 1950s, and they made enough money to keep Walt afloat. When ABC picked up Disneyland, none of the classics were shown; only Disney's older cartoon shorts, and they became the company's breadwinners again.
And once Disneyland obsessed Walt, the company was left with no leadership to direct where the movies' direction was to take. So the movie staff simply chose the safest material for families possible.
Walt was a visionary, but he was no creative genius. He hired a few, but his own creations were too dark, too mean-spirited, and far too scary to be hits as family movies for the times they were made.
His long string of flops scared the corporation so badly the Disney studio didn't even make another full-length animated feature until nearly 20 years after his death. And that one had nothing that would scare the pants off a child in it.
The Disney corporation has some massive creativity within it. The creativity is just kept within strict boundaries. Never forget that the movie business is always business first, creativity second.
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