Disney is seen to have fallen behind other animators, and its latest cinema releases have failed to set the box office alightAmen.
"Disney is perhaps revealing a slight lack of confidence," said Anant Sundaram of Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business.
"If that assessment is true, then it is a somewhat unfortunate admission from a once-great company that fundamentally created and defined this space," the professor said.
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2 comments:
This has all the earmarks of what happens when a large conglomerate decides to buy out/absorb their creative agency and "bring it in house."
In this case, the acquiring company probably still has enough pizzazz to retain some key talent and capabilities such that it wouldn't be a disaster, but most of the time all that happens is that the people they're really buying wander off and create the next cool agency/firm they'll end up wanting to buy.
The one additional wrinkle here is that there is at least some asset base here that Disney is acquiring -- the Toy Story franchise, The Incredibles, etc. Probably not worth the price alone, but if they can keep the people, it might work.
Susie: For some time, I've watched as Disney fell from being pretty much the gold standard for full-length feature animation to also-ran status.
My main point was that it has saddened me to watch this happen.
Disney's animation division has been foundering creatively, but instead of figuring out why, they seem to have decided that 2-dimensional animation is worthless and that the only way to make any money is to go 3-D.
True, Pixar has aptly demonstrated that computer animation can have a heart, but 2-D animation has never been Disney's problem. Lack of creativity has.
People didn't stop going to Disney films because they weren't 3-D. They stopped going because Disney put out junk like Home On The Range and by churning out poor quality, direct-to-video knockoffs of franchises like Atlantis and Lilo and Stitch.
Bret: I suppose it could work, but the culture of Disney is so different from Pixar that Disney would have to really make some accomodations if they don't want all of Pixar's most creative people to (as you say) go off and start over.
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