The Race to Animate
In the streaming era, animation is big business.
Vulture takes a look at where we are, and how we got here.
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It starts with a series of black-and-white drawings.
She wanders, singing, through her pleasant French village, all rough lines and charcoal shades.
If this sounds like DisneysBeauty and the Beast, thats because itisDisneysBeauty and the Beast.
I remember my dear friend, the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, asking, Whats next?
A retrospective screening ofCasablanca?
Whats more,Beauty and the Beastwas only about 60 to 70 percent finished.
You could see coffee stains and paper folds and marginalia.
Sometimes a character would be accompanied by arrows and hand-scribbled numbers.
(The film had been in production for four yearsbut in development for decades.
But in some ways, that unfinished quality made it just right for a film-literate audience.
This would really show us the skeleton, Pena says.
It was like an X-ray, in that you were really seeing inside the image and how its constructed.
While watching it, you were learning things, but you were not losing the narrative thread.
And you also had the emotional impact of not only the scenes, but the characters as well.
More on that in a bit.)
To that end,Beauty and the Beastwas being promoted asmore than just a cartoon.
We were very intimidated by the notion of showing the movie with storyboards and rough animation.
One, we didnt know if the audience would be able to follow it.
This hat has a hole in it.
Thats how we pull the rabbit out!
They burst into wild applause just as though they were seeing a show on Broadway live, recalls Wise.
That was just a magic moment.
We knew at that point the audience was hooked.
Miraculously, the audience remained rapt.
It just kept going.
There was huge applause and roars after a lot of the production numbers, recalls Keys.
The enthusiasm was ecstatic myself included.
Id already seen the movie, but I was reacting to the audience.
People were tearful with joy.
We were all roaring with pleasure.
When the film finally ended, the crowd gave it a standing ovation that some clocked at ten minutes.
Roy Disney was glowing.
Katzenberg walked up to Pena and said, calmly, Ill remember this.
It would make nearly $430 million worldwide and garner six Oscar nominations.
Within a few years, other studios would also sprout their own feature animation departments.
By 2001, the Academy would introduce a whole new Best Animated Feature Oscar.
And in the end, maybe such a screening in such a venue wasnt so odd a match.
The disease would take a further toll on the company.
There were all these people who I worked with in my seven years at Disney, says Scheffey.
There was Gary, and Ed Pine, who worked for Gary, andRobert Jahn.
It was a marketing department and a world that just got completely decimated by AIDS.
Another death would rock the company a few years later.
It is cinema in a nutshell: human, constructed, imperfect, and yet still magically transcendent.
