![brother bear and home on the range brother bear and home on the range](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/disney/images/8/86/Brother_Bear_Poster.png)
This is significant, because what did in the Disney animation renaissance was not a failure of technique, but a failure of ideas. Conversely, a 2-D hand-drawn flop like Disney’s recent Brother Bear would be just as forgettable had it been rendered with computers. Finding Nemo wouldn’t be quite as eye-popping as a 2-D hand-drawn cartoon, but it would still be a great film. What makes movies like Toy Story and Jimmy Neutron so successful is not just their colorful 3-D imagery, but their sharp, funny writing, compelling characters, and well-crafted stories. But both Jonah and Final Fantasy look so different from the likes of Toy Story and Jimmy Neutron that most viewers still associate computer-generated animation with consistently successful entertainment.Įventually, of course, that’s got to change. The medium’s only real stumbles to date have been the video-game flop Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which approached photorealism in its technique but used it to tell a lame, New-Agey sci-fi story, and the Christian-produced Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie, which was unable to parlay the franchise’s kid-video success to the big screen. Computer-generated efforts from other studios, including Shrek, Ice Age, Antz, and Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, have also managed to maintain a passing level of quality and entertainment value.
![brother bear and home on the range brother bear and home on the range](https://abload.de/img/animatedclassics09ewx8n.png)
Pixar has been the driving force of computer animation, and the quality of their work has been consistently excellent: The closest they’ve come to making a bad film, which is not very, was the modestly charming A Bug’s Life. Until now, computer-generated cartoons released under the Walt Disney label have all been produced by the wizard-geniuses at Pixar Animation Studios, whose résumé to date includes Finding Nemo, the Toy Story movies, and the still-to-come superhero spoof The Incredibles, directed by Brad Bird of The Iron Giant fame. ( Dinosaur, released in 2000, doesn’t quite count as a computer-generated cartoon, since it superimposed pixel-painted dinosaurs and other characters onto real-life landscapes and location shots.) This time it’s different: The main Disney animation studios in Orlando have been shut down, animators have been given their walking papers, and Disney is turning its attention away from traditional hand-drawn work to the animation technique in which the best work of the last ten years has been done: computer-generated cartoons.ĭisney’s first homegrown computer-animated effort, Chicken Little, is scheduled for a 2005 release. But that was at a time when Disney animators had other projects, such as short subjects, to occupy them. Still, Home on the Range represents the end of an era: For the first time since who knows when, Disney animation has no new feature film in the works, and no plans to start one.Īt times in the past there have been lacunas of as much as four years between animated Disney features.
![brother bear and home on the range brother bear and home on the range](https://i.pinimg.com/236x/68/78/1c/68781c9b5845ecfc58837880e8499b3b--home-on-the-range-disney-images.jpg)
Chances are, sooner or later Walt Disney Pictures will return to the art form for which it is best known, and in which it has done its most respected work. Is Home on the Range really the final entry in the canon of Disney’s traditional hand-animated feature films - a body of work that goes back to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and includes such landmarks as Fantasia, Pinocchio, and Beauty and the Beast?