(Source: www.bcdb.com)
Animation fans, rejoice. After the news that DisneyToon Studios president Sharon Morrill had been asked to resign her post, the Mouse House has officially announced that DisneyToon is out of the "direct-to-DVD" sequel biz.
This announcement closes one of Disney's most profitable, and controversial, eras. DisneyToon Studios was started in the late 1980s, in order to produce animated movies more cheaply and efficiently than at Walt Disney Feature Animation. DisneyToon's first release was 1990's Duck Tales: Treasure of the Lost Lamp. The studio quickly started making sequels to Walt Disney Feature Animation's classic movies, beginning with 1994's Aladdin: The Return of Jafar and hitting its stride with flicks like 1997's Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas and 1998's The Lion King II: Simba's Pride.
Many of these movies were produced at DisneyToon Studios' animation facility in Sydney, Australia. After the infamous "Tom Meeting" of 2002, where many WDFA artists were informed that their services were no longer wanted, DisneyToon Australia was the Mouse House's last bastion of hand-drawn cel animation.
DisneyToon Studios started making 2 animated, feature-length movies per year in 1997, going up to 3 in 1998. The period between 2003 and 2006 was the studio's most productive period, with DisneyToon cranking out 5 feature-length direct-to-DVD sequels per year.
However, on July 25, 2005, Disney announced that they were closing DisneyToon Australia due to rising costs, and would henceforth outsource its animation to places like India and China.
While these direct-to-DVD sequels reportedly made billions of dollars for the Mouse House, animation fans despised their formulaic plots and cheap animation. Fans also accused DisneyToons of debasing Disney's storied heritage. It's also worth noting that the release of The Return of Jafar coincided with the year Disney released its last runaway animated hit, The Lion King. After that, WDFA movies started suffering from reduced box office.
There were several forces driving the demise of the "dreck-to-DVD" sequels. One was the fact that, as the films' prices were going up, they weren't as profitable as they once were. The final straw was the upcoming The Tinker Bell Movie, in which $30 million worth of animation had to be scrapped after a huge turf war erupted between DisneyToon and Walt Disney Feature Animation.
The second force was the April 2006 deal where Disney bought Pixar for $7.4 billion, which made Pixar founder Steve Jobs became Disney's largest single shareholder. Jobs, along with his employees John Lasseter and Ed Catmull, were huge fans of Disney's classic animated movies, and firmly believed that DisneyToon's output not only diminished the value of WDFA's work, but also tarnished the Mouse House's animation classics. Steve Jobs even went so far as to describe 2002's Peter Pan: Return to Neverland and 2004's The Lion King 1-and-1/2 as "embarrassing."
It's also believed that Roy E. Disney, Walt's nephew and the man who ousted former CEO Michael Eisner, didn't like the "dreck to video" sequels either.
After Lasseter and Morrill battled over The Tinker Bell Movie, it quickly became obvious that the conflict was between John Lasseter and Ed Catumull's "New Disney," which gave artists and writers more creative control, and the hold-overs from Eisner's administration, who believed that MBA graduates should be the only ones making decisions about movies. Given that Eisner's administration was widely believed to have driven Disney Animation into the ground, it would become obvious who would win in this conflict.
Not only that, John Lasseter's position was strengthened by the success of his 2006 movie Cars, which made $244 million in domestic box office, and a lot more in merchandising.
DisneyToon still has several movies left on its slate. The revamped Tinker Bell movie is due in 2008, as is The Little Mermaid III. There will be three other Tinker Bell sequels, but after that DisneyToon will make DVD's that feature characters from Mickey's Clubhouse, My Pals Tigger and Pooh and Handy Manny.
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