Sure, an animated film is expensive to produce. It has always been since the Golden Age in the 1930s. Don Bluth, director of An American Tail, The Land Before Time and Anastasia, claimed that depending on the project it takes approximately $400.000 to produce one minute of animation with the highest of the production values. This may vary from studio to studio. In the 1990s, with the animation industry shaked by the highest salaries offered by Disney to keep their animators and artists under the mouse's wing in retaliation to Dreamworks' hirings. Futhermore, production of those movies had been bureaucratizated, rushing projects in development with instant formulas and resulting into corporate predicaments that caused animated movies to reach girnormous $140 million budgets. By adding the $30 million budget for marketing, the box-office gross of $100 million would be a big fat no-no. In order to have a box-office success, animated movies should be produced with $35 to $50 million budgets and marketed with at least a $25 million budget.
The first attempt to lower production costs began in the early 1980s when Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Frank Wells came to Disney. The animated feature film The Black Cauldron has been in production for 5 years and in development for the other 5 years, on a budget of $20 million. Eisner couldn't see why production was so expensive and time-consuming.
Disney, originally, refused to produce TV cartoons in the 1970s, in an effort to not hinder their feature animation unit. Competition (Hanna-Barbera, Filmation, etc.) was churning out low-budget TV cartoons at that point. It was calculated that it was needed $500.000 to produce a half-hour TV cartoon at least. The then-new executives' argument was that if competition could produce 20 minutes on $500.000, they could produce an animated feature film on $2 million. As for the low aesthetic quality of those shows, if Disney invested three times further, being in thesis three times more quality, the budget could be just $6 million. In fact, it was less than $20 million used in The Black Cauldron which premiered in 1985.
It seemed perfect, but they soon found out that their argument made no sense. The studio tried a less expensive production style with The Great Mouse Detective, reducing the budget and production period to the half. The cutbacks were not bad, but despite the production crew's best efforts, the quality wasn't Disney's finest.
In 1988, Disney tried another low-budget method. It became obvious that the proportional sense between TV and movies was wrong. As a result, Jeffrey Katzenberg decided to produce movies with a lower budget and a minor production framework while still retaining some quality from Disney's main animated features. Co-produced in France, with relatively new professionals, Disney produced DuckTales: The Movie - Treasure of the Lost Lamp and A Goofy Movie through their new MovieToons label. Despite the sleeper critical and commercial success of those movies, the final account proved that it was still costly to keep this kind of alternate production going.
DuckTales: The Movie - The Treasure of Lost Lamp: the 1990 movie that predated The Rugrats Movie.
One final attempt was done in 1992. Basking on the critical and commercial success of Aladdin, Disney released The Return of Jafar direct-to-video with great commercial success. The exciting sales encouraged Disney to open their satellite shops internationally to produce sequels to successful movies on the lowest production costs (thanks to the differing workload costs).
A Goofy Movie: just because an animated movie is made with low budget doesn't mean it ain't no good.
This is how Disney was able to pump out such movies (mostly with abysmal results) which varied from the horrible The Hunchback of Notre Dame II to the sweet and heartwarming Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch. The latter was produced by the talented animators from Australia who, regardless, had to work under more strict Standards & Practices than their American counterparts.
But I'm not talking about the behind-the-scenes of those productions. I'm just pointing the dangers which were polluting the market with movies lacking even less artistic quality, hindering the beautiful and captivating high quality of Disney movies and slowly killing hand-drawn animation for no reason.
Belle's Magical World: the rock bottom
There was an interesting comparison between the so-called cheapquels and the fast-food soda. Since years ago, the fast-food corporations found the easy way of selling more soda and earning more with that by making consumers believe that soda needs ice to keep it cool. Sure, ice is theorically free or at least more cheap.. If we fill the trays with ice and soda, the fast-food company earns more for less. We spend too much for ice. What people little notice is that, normally, soda already comes out cool from post-mix machines. Disney and Universal Pictures (including their DreamWorks Animation division which released their own DTV movie Joseph: King of Dreams) got that formula to get extra bucks for the already existing stuff.
This formula is basic: get a successful movie (preferably a classic), (re)create a similar movie by losing one mere fraction of the normal budget (resulting into ear-rapist songs and uncanny animation), introduce a new element (generally, the characters' relatives) even if it results into a very obvious thing without the surprise factor, and finally we have a disguised "remake".
The Lion King 1/2: beautiful animation made down under
What is so wrong with this???!!! The same way that, gradually, animation went to become more preachy and formulaic (a spit to the experimental productions from the 1920s to the 1940s), the glut of cheapquels made the audience more tolerable towards the "new", "hip", "cool" and "cheap" Disney style. Even poor Pixar had fallen prey into this (*cough*Cars 2*cough*).
Unless we get more careful, the "ice glut" can ruin "pure soda" (the triple AAA Disney and Pixar movies) that Disney insists on offering as high quality entertainment. Thankfully, parents and kids are currently able to differentiate quality standards with the power of internet. Similarly, critics and fans are getting more and more cautious towards Disney's "real" thing and ignorant towards the mockbusters that are being produced to the lowest scale thanks to current market conditions caused by video-games, Netflix, streaming, Youtube and the popularity of Cartoon Network/Nickelodeon/Disney TV cartoons.
Translated from www.animation-animagic.com/colunas.aspx?idConteudo=1111
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário