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Disney's D23 Expo starts today and runs through the weekend, and we're going to be getting a lot of information from several of the films and series that they are developing. Some of those animated films include Frozen, Marvel's Big Hero 6, and Pixar'sThe Good Dinosaur, Inside/Out and the Finding Nemo sequel, Finding Dory. Then of course there will be stuff from Marvel and hopefully Star Wars.
In a recent interview with EW, Disney CCO John Lasseter talked about the animation side of the studio. In it he says that there are no Star Wars animated movies being planned, and that there are no feature length traditional animated films in the works either. He also talks about Marvel's Big Hero 6, and answers a few other questions that you can check out below! Then above you'll find a new piece of production art for The Good Dinosaur.
Do you see any potential Star Wars or Lucas film-related projects for Disney’s animation branches?
Not really, other than Pixar has always used Skywalker Sound for all of our productions. They’re the best so we’ll always continue using them and we’re very good friends. And we always have been with [special effects house Industrial Light and Magic] as well. But other than being friends we have never needed to do anything with them. But we’re also massive Star Wars fans so we’re all very excited, as is everybody around the world, for new Star Wars films.
Big Hero 6 is Walt Disney Animation Studios’ first team-up with Marvel. What’s the nature of that collaboration?
It’s based upon a very short series of comic books and it’s six comic books. They’re out of the Marvel universe, but more of a Japanese manga style. We’re creating something based upon that so it’s really a Disney Animation production. A loose adaptation — like all adaptations are. They almost have to be.
And then there’s the direct-to-DVD market, which the previous version of Disneytoon Studios concentrated on. Is that still the main focus there?
Disneytoon Studios was started a number of years ago to feed into the direct-to-video market, but as the home video sales have continued to decrease rapidly we are looking at the evolution of the studio going more theatrical. With Disneytoon Studios we start from the beginning by thinking of it as a series in a world — it’s a continuation: the Tinkerbell films, and now with Planes, inspired from the world of Cars, but with airplane characters … You really have to spend time upfront to make sure the world is robust enough and interesting enough to be able to hold many different stories.
What’s the future of 2-D, hand-drawn animation at Disney?
We still are doing some … We’re still doing a lot of short films. There are no features on the docket for hand-drawn, but we’re definitely keeping hand drawn alive at the studio. Hand-drawn is finding it’s way in a very interesting way into the technology. There’s a lot of hand-drawing that goes into the computer animated movies at Walt Disney Animation Studios. There’s a different style to the animation from that studio, too. Even though it’s computer animation in the end the way they do it, and the feeling it has, is more the feeling of hand-drawn animation. And then there’s a little bit of work going on with shorts such as Paperman, John Kahr’s film which won the Academy Award, and has this really interesting very innovative combination of hand-drawn and CG.
It's really kind of sad that traditionally animated films are completely dead. I'm a huge fan of those kinds of films. No matter what Lasseter says there's a certain charm and style that they have that you just can't replicate with CG animation.
