A long time ago I saw a rather good behind the scenes of Aladdin.
I was quite surprised to see that after writing the script they had stand-in actors do the entire script, which they then did animatics (storyboards times to the recorded audio) to, after which they edited the story. Only then did final actors record. Then redo animatics and editing before doing final animation.
Imagine my surprise watching the documentary on Hayao Miyazaki, where he has a 100 animators working on final animation, while he is still storyboarding, undecided on the ending of the movie and hasn’t even casted the voice actors!
Modern Disney filmmaking (Pixar, WDAS) is much closer to the Miyazaki approach you describe than you'd think. It's very, very iterative; each film goes through 5-6 screenings, during which the story structure can and does change dramatically. People are very definitely working on the final product while the story is still being worked out. One pretty common pattern: with 8-9 months left to go until release, the entire third act has to be scrapped and reworked, and often big chunks of the first and second act reworked to match. Voice actors for the main characters are involved throughout, and often come in many times to record new pages of freshly written dialog.
If all this seems chaotic, it is. It leads to untold stress as the release date looms closer and closer and the ending still isn't figured out, which compresses the schedule for each department to deliver a finished product. Very very rarely, the release date is allowed to slip (see "The Good Dinosaur" for example) but that's really the nuclear option, as it involves shuffling the release schedule and incurs a ton of cost. This is a big part of why these movies cost so much: compressing the schedule means hiring tons of people and paying them tons of overtime.
Source: I worked the better part of a decade at WDAS.
I found it fascinating how the team was still developing key plot points (let alone dialog/animation) down to the final few weeks/days before the film needed to be completed!
I have a few friends in the industry and their whole process just seems nuts. They earn good money from overtime but I'd just be so annoyed doing so much throwaway work even though a lot of it just seems like it could be avoided with planning, time management and more honest pricing when it comes to sub contracting.
>I was quite surprised to see that after writing the script they had stand-in actors do the entire script, which they then did animatics (storyboards times to the recorded audio) to, after which they edited the story. Only then did final actors record. Then redo animatics and editing before doing final animation
I have no experience in animation, however that process is not unlike the common process in music production: a song is written, a demo is cut by the songwriter, a "scratch track" is cut by the chosen lead vocalist and an instrument or two, then the arrangement is recorded by the band (to the scratch track), then final vocals are cut to the band's backing track, and often after that tweaks to the accompaniment are still made.
Yup. I've recorded several albums, some in small home studios and others in pro environments. It's always been scratch track -> drums (me) -> guitars/bass (bass almost always direct to console) -> vocals.
Its basically like writing code. Aladdin was prototyped, Proof of concept, then put into production. So if anything needed a complete re-write, it wouldn't affect final production.
Hayao seems to doing continuous refactoring, so as long as you don't need to edit too many scenes already drawn you can potentially come out with a good final product while giving production as much time as possible.
It might sound odd, but it is not abnormal for a movie to be rewritten deep into production. Some infamous movies for this include Die Hard and Stripes, the endings for which were not written until after filming had begun. Given the much longer process for animated movies I'm not surprised this happens at Disney too.
This goes back to the days of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty! One of the pieces of old footage Disney likes to show off is animators sketching the movements of a girl dancing around the room and then merging that into the final product for Sleeping Beauty where she's in the dress and it's spinning around.
Slight aside, but Encanto is a brilliant film, we watched it together as a family first but my 7yo daughter has watched a few more times since. We have had to listen to the sound track each way on the school run for the last couple of weeks, which to be honest is no bad thing as its so good.
The "Welcome to the Family Madrigal" sequence at the begging of the film is absolutely jaw dropping, if you don't watch the whole film at least watch that sequence to see what is now possible. The fabric simulation for her dress while dancing is so incredible.
I don't have kids at all and I found it a fun movie. It's not a heavy plot (there really is no villain) but so refreshing after a steady diet of superhero movies. Look at the average broadway musical and the plot is even lighter; every movie doesn't have to be Citizen Kane. The movie is a perfect embodiment of the culture (from people who are Columbian, not me), the music is very broadway but still in keeping with the country and well written and sung, and the animation is of course magical. There is no comparison with tripe such as Sing 2.
I wonder what it would be like to work on something that takes 5 years to make, the longest I have ever worked on 1.0 apps (since the 80s when I started) is 14-16 months. Just coordinating thousands of people for 5 years is mind boggling.
i read an article about a month ago about how disney animation has steadily migrated away from a villain, to the self (or some other internal conflict) as the primary antagonist.
frozen
moana
frozen 2
encanto
during that time there were also traditional "villain" types:
big hero 6
zootopia
ralph breaks the internet
raya and the last drago
> I wonder what it would be like to work on something that takes 5 years to make
Organic is the best way I can put it. At least for software.
The largest project I've been on started in 1998 with a software team of 3 people (me and two others) and shipped V1.0 in 2003 with a team that varied in size over the years. Max was probably about 10 or 15 people. Total team size including electrical, mechanical, manufacturing, systems, technical writers, field service, training and QA was probably 70+.
It's like watching a child or a plant grow: you have this tiny kernel of functionality where you just need something to get started, not knowing how it's going to change and then guiding it in the right direction, growing all the time, as you figure out how to get where you need to go. Pruning the dead branches and rotten fruit and fertilizing it where it's growing right.
Then finally it's good enough to take to market. Then ship two major updates each year for 10 years.
It's fun in its own way, but I prefer shorter projects. I get bored easily.
I think we all need to have a talk about what a "heavy" plot is. You don't NEED a villain for a plot to be heavy - I would argue that Encanto's focus on internal, emotional stakes is far heavier (and darker!) than most movies with clear-cut heroes and villains. It also resonates with people in a much more personal way - the vast majority of people can't identify with Aladdin's battle against Jafar (As fun as it is), but I know several people who were on the verge of tears watching Encanto because they could identify with Mirabel's struggle with her place in her family.
This is really an interesting callout, because I also found it interesting that there is no "bad guy" for kids to anchor on, but yet seems to have no problem with it.
> I wonder what it would be like to work on something that takes 5 years to make, the longest I have ever worked on 1.0 apps (since the 80s when I started) is 14-16 months. Just coordinating thousands of people for 5 years is mind boggling.
In software, automotive projects can come quite close to this. Building a modern high-end headunit ECU with software can take a couple of years, 100-150 dev teams, 2k engineers and coordinating with many other groups/departments around it.
> I wonder what it would be like to work on something that takes 5 years to make
The active departments and the size scale a lot along those 5 years. The first few are usually a very small group of people. The weirdest part is that if you're targeting 5 year olds, they are just being born when you start the project.
Glad I am not the only one. Have even watched it without my kids and listen to the soundtrack when they’re not there! Haven’t done that with a Disney movie, aside from maybe Moana with the soundtrack, probably ever.
Aside on your aside, Kubo and the Two Strings is also really impressive. Until I saw the behind the scenes short video I had no idea it was done stop-motion.
Oh my goodness, the cloth animation is amazing. Watching "We Don't Talk about Bruno" again and again, watching how the skirts move as they're grabbed, tugged, and swirled. Even Mirabel's sleeve as her father gently pushes her aside to look at the vision, is amazing. (Yeah, I'm a hetero male, but that isn't the main attraction. At least I don't think so.)
That's my problem with Encanto: technically it's very impressive. All the rest: standard Disney movie with forgettable songs, forgettable characters, forgettable story that rushes from plot point to plot point with no time to breathe.
And given all the magic in it it's so highly unimaginative with it.
Isabella's lament was the best part of the movie (filled with emotion, meaning and imagination), but it's literally just a "meaningless stepping stone to discover Bruno" within the movie.
I kind of disagree. I found the elder sister being physically strong and an impressive leader and yet still a woman and also have vulnerability to be pretty new. Her arc didn’t involve her marrying a man or finding absolution in becoming less independent as is common when a strong independent woman has a character arc. The lack of any big bad and instead implications of danger because of complex family expectations and dynamics are also new. When I was young there was always some big evil person (scar in lion king, Ursula in little mermaid). Even more recent but older movies like Tangled had bad/evil people with no nuance. Now a days childrens movies are much more nuanced in good and evil and I really liked the diversity of characters in Encanto and the diversity of how these characters get validation.
Catching up with a couple of friends recently, it came up that our daughters, all of similar ages, are crazy about watching Encanto and even more keen on the songs. It's perfectly reasonable to have normal movie-criticism opinions about the film, but for the target audience, it's a smash. Another 'Frozen'.
> forgettable songs, forgettable characters, forgettable story
Strong disagree on all three. IMO this group of songs are some of the most memorable Disney animation tunes since Frozen, and maybe even since the mid-90s— don't ask me, look at how they're exploding all over Tiktok right now. For characters, I felt the movie does a pretty decent job of giving depth and personality to most members of a really large ensemble cast, particularly those closest to Mirabel. And even those with a lighter presence (Dolores, Camilo) still get their little moments that endeared them to me.
And as to the story, it's unique within the Disney canon in a number of ways; chief among them is that it doesn't have a conventional villain. Yes there is a character who is the "main" problem, but the real antagonist is the family dynamics and the grandmother's trauma. These are issues that are super relatable for a lot of people/families, much moreso than the over-the-topness of a clearly antagonistic and unredeemable character like Mother Gothel (Tangled) or Prince Hans (Frozen). The comparison is even more stark if you go back further to classic villains like Scar, Gaston, or Ursula.
> Isabella's lament was the best part of the movie[...], but it's literally just a "meaningless stepping stone to discover Bruno" within the movie.
Isabella's song ("What Else Can I Do") is pretty much the opposite of a lament and takes place after Mirabel has found Bruno. I don't know what "lament" you could be talking about, maybe "Waiting On a Miracle" which is Mirabel's classic Disney "I Want" song, in the same vein as "Part of Your World" or "Let It Go".
My kids have basically listened to the soundtrack on repeat for two months now and I assure you the songs are anything but "forgettable".
Yes, the eye candy on the average cereal box marketed at children looks impressive too, for some definition of "impressive". A movie needs more than just good graphics.
I really enjoy that Disney puts a lot of effort into making the "behind the scenes" edutainment to the point where it's a natural part of their brand.
I remember watching the making-of videos for the Lion King when I was little and being blown away that the artists went and watched actual lions and live-sketched them to try and capture the physical motions and emotions of the animal.
These kinds of steps are obvious to an adult but as a little kid it really helped me understand that movies like that are made through more or less obvious steps (want to draw a lion well? go look at a lion!) vs. magically coming into being.
> These kinds of steps are obvious to an adult but as a little kid it really helped me understand that movies like that are made through more or less obvious steps (want to draw a lion well? go look at a lion!) vs. magically coming into being.
I think I know what you mean. As a kid I sometimes felt really intimidated and dispirited by things that appeared to be overwhelmingly hard or seemed to require rare talent to accomplish. Kind adults breaking down how it's done and how many people or what level of preparation it takes made a huge difference then. Understanding how an average person in the normal range of abilities can do it, and that an accomplished professional has worked hard but is only "cooking with water", too.
An example: As a young kid I took guitar lessons. I was struggling with keeping time, I was very frustrated and I concluded I'm just no good at this and gave up. Later on I told this story to a professional orchestra musician and he told me that keeping time is simply hard for humans, and he still has to practice it every day and will practice for the rest of his career. It's just something he accepts as a part of what he likes to do. This completely reset my expectations of what playing music should be like, and allowed me to work on the skill and progress further.
Unfortunately I think a lot of professionals try to shroud what they do in a certain level of mystery instead, because they enjoy being looked up to and consider it the reward for their toils and hardships. Programmers are frequently guilty of this - when non-IT people naively assume every programmer is a math wizard and programmers do nothing to correct this idea, for example. I tell people that if you wake up in the morning and sketch out the steps of an algorithm for how you get from there to your cup of morning coffee, you're essentially doing what programmers do. You could do it too if you choose to dedicate the time. It's fun to see how this sometimes makes people's level of genuine interest bloom.
We recently took our daughter to see the Harry Potter Studio Tour.
With the magic of movies, it's easy to forget what goes into a film.
It was eye opening the amount of detail and thought that goes into every little thing. No wonder they can be so expensive to create.
This is really nice. Although Disney is only currently producing 3D animation films, it's a bit of a shame that nothing about 2D animation is included.
The 3D animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) has a refreshing 3D/2D hybrid visual look that breaks away from the 3D aesthetic common across the industry. I suspect in the future we'll see more animated films with a 2D aesthetic but created with 3D software.
Aside: Disney produced lots of behind-the-scenes for their 2D animated films in the 50s and 60s. Here's one on the MultiPlane Camera - a camera setup that gave 2D animation greater depth:
I own an amazing coffee table book called the illusion of life. It essentially lays out the history and key techniques of cell animation. I haven't opened it for a few years now, but it still has pride of place within my design books.
It's interesting hearing the Illusion of Life referred to as a coffee table book, since it's actually a learning resource and reference book for those in animation.
I know it wasn't meant as a diminutive etc... It just caught my eye because it made me think what the delineation would be between a coffee table book and a reference book
This is likely because the approaches and techniques are not measurably different with a "2D" animated movie in 2022 or recently, unless they're doing some retro cel animation.
Disney's last was The Princess and The Frog (which is a very good one that predates the story-in-a-box Pixar plots), which of course was still partially made in the same animation software used by others at the time.
If Disney made another traditional animation movie I suspect it would be a lot like spiderverse: mostly an aesthetic change to the existing process.
If this kind of stuff interests you, there is a good documentary on Disney+ about the making of Frozen 2. They filmed the documentary from the beginning of the process to the end with the intention of making a deeply detailed doc. The directors had a lot of access.
It's really interesting and I recommend it (but also make sure you watch Frozen 2 before you watch it if you aren't already familiar because it's more interesting if you can recall the scenes they are talking about).
I hate hate HATE this style of web site design. Great content but why does it all have to be scrollbar-triggered-dynamic? It never works right for me. It's completely unusable on mobile and incredibly tedious on desktop.
Could you imagine if Disney decided to open source one of their 3D films? How much fun would that be to play with?
It would be like when Doom was open sourced (I pick Doom because it's one of the first major video games that I can remember being open sourced, and the creative results have been vast)
I'd like to see Toy Story 1 re-rendered using the Toy Story 4 models (assuming Disney also made those available). Imagine all the technical challenges you'd face to do that: Write code to convert the models, sets, skeletons, animations. Upscale/create new textures, etc.
Pixar has already released production ready, rigged models of the toy story characters as well as the kid’s bedroom. You can download them into blender or maya as assets and animate them into scenes.
They have open sourced some assets: https://disneyanimation.com/data-sets/. Obviously not a full movie, but enough that a researcher/developer could begin to experience the kind of technical challenges that arise at "Disney-scale". IIRC a single frame from the movie Moana used something like 100GB of assets.
I can imagine. And I am pretty sure I know the industry which - as usual - will move first to new technology/data. And I am pretty sure, Disney will not like that.
When I was working in the industry around the turn of the century it was mostly just folders. One per scene. They'd start with just the scene number and the storyboard panels on them; they'd go off to layout and get drawings of key poses and background roughs, then go back to the set of shelves designated for that episode. After directorial approval they'd go on to further parts of the process - we were a Flash studio so the layout drawings would get inked, get approved, get scanned and cleaned up and put into a file (with a studio-wide standard for naming both the file and every single piece of art in the file so as to avoid conflicts when putting the final file together), get colored, then get handed off to the Flash crew who would make the animation happen.
If you had wanted to sabotage our process, the set of shelves that held all the scene folders would have been a great place to go. Every scene lived there when it wasn't being worked on by someone.
If you want a glimpse at the modern process for 2D animation, have a look at Toon Boom's suite of software. https://www.toonboom.com - not everyone uses it but it's pretty widespread.
Though realistically? I'm not in the industry any more but the bits I see of the process from my friends who are directors lead me to believe that it's still not uncommon to have a checklist that lives on a wall in the director's office, tracking the journey of every scene from storyboard to finished shot.
Each studio has their own (usually crappy) tools. Sometimes it's just spreadsheets.
One thing I hear Netflix is doing right now is focusing on making better studio tools so that creatives prefer to work for Netflix because they have better tools.
Its not the tooling keeping people away from wanting to work for Netflix though. People want to work where they have creative freedom and reasonable expectations.
This is exactly what I was looking for in it too. I've come to be a believer in custom tools and building your workflow so you can make your best product (bye Jira) and Disney did not disappoint on this front: here's a screenshot from their production management tool hidden deep in this website: https://disneyanimation.com/img/uploads/pipeline/production-...
Even with the old 2D movies, I've always liked the rough sketched animations even more. That rawness really makes you feel close to the artist and their process and is the most magical for me.
Beauty and the Beast has a feature on DVD (Blu ray too?) where you can watch the entire movie in animatic form. It's great! I don't know if Disney ever did that again with any of their other releases.
We absolutely experiment with 48, 60 and even 120fps. We’d use them if they looked good. They don’t, they make any content look atrocious. adding more (temporal) detail does indeed improve the realism but improving realism isn’t good when you’re delivering Impressionism.
Your question is very analogous to asking “Van Gogh’s work is great and all but it needs more (spatial) detail. I can’t believe he’s still using those broad brushes when now days you can buy fine brushes. His work would have much more detail and would look more realistic!”
Once you seriously ponder how naive such a statement is, you’ll understand why filmmakers stick with 24fps. It’s not reality. It’s not what our eyes see. Just like an impressionistic painting is not what our eyes see. And that’s a good thing.
There seems to be a lot of evidence that audiences that prefer 24fps do so because they’re so used to it, and for that reason, expert film makers seem to be even more strongly biased than general audiences.
24fps wasn’t chosen by animators, and wasn’t decided on for it’s Impressionism, right? If you want Impressionism, 1fps is better than 24, no? Disney used to animate on 1s, 2s, 3s for both economy and style reasons, and no longer do. Live action films are also 24fps, because all films are 24 by default, and many people complain about live action in higher frame rates. Suggesting that Disney consciously chose 24 for it’s impressionism seems revisionist and inaccurate.
Kids watching modern TVs, however, don’t seem as bothered by 60fps video, because they’re much more used to it.
BTW I used to prefer 24 fps categorically, back when I worked in film. Personally, 60fps looks weird to me, but it’s becoming better. I’ve started really disliking 24fps when there are horizontal pans, that kind of shot is now unwatchable for me, it’s awful. I don’t know why it used to seem tolerable.
Higher frame rates do result in smoother motion and animation.
The reason viewers prefer 24 FPS is that film is traditionally 24 FPS and video is 30 FPS (60 half-frame fields per second in NTSC). That has trained a generation of viewers to associate higher framerates with "cheap". The aesthetic carries an association that is counter to its actual quality.
Sort of like how people prefer "rustic" furniture because that implies "handmade" which implies "expensive" even though roughly-made things can often be mass produced more cheaply.
If it wasn't for the historical quirk that video was based on halving the AC rate which ended up being a few FPS faster than film, we'd all prefer higher framerates.
I suspect that thanks to the rise of gaming, that association will fade and eventually we will use higher framerates for movies. You already see trends in that direction: YouTube will stream 60 FPS because a lot of what people are watching on YouTube is gaming. But because of that, people get used to it, and I now see more non-gaming videos at 60 FPS too.
The low FPS also helps in disguising the theater. Lots of things in movies are fake, and if it was in 60 FPS you’d be able to see clearly what is happening. Additionally it helps in making still things stand out, like scenery or the main character in a crowd.
For real things like sports and esports, more FPS is used because instead of hiding things you want to show things.
For live action I believe this is the case. For example the 48fps version of The Hobbit was very uncanny, and the makeup and SFX were too obvious.
But for purely animated films I don't think this is the case; there's no makeup or SFX to hide. The bigger issue would be budget I think, and tradition.
That's maybe a bit native, but for an animated movie, I think that the intermediate frames could be computed automatically, for a small additional cost.
I don't dispute that there might be a bit more work (I guess some frames might need to be adjusted manually), but I am not convinced that it is that much expensive to do 60fps rather of 24fps.
I saw The Hobbit in a theater playing at 60fps in 3D and several people in the theater laughed at points in the film that were not supposed to be funny just because how odd certain things looked. Although I personally enjoyed the unique presentation it kind of made me realize that 60fps would never take off.
On a similar note, I highly recommend the documentary "The Sweatbox", which is a behind-the-scenes look at the process behind the creation of "The Emperor's New Groove". It was originally meant to be a very different, more serious film, but despite all the effort into creating the storyboards, characters, music etc the producers rejected it and they had to change direction. The documentary was never supposed to be released, but it eventually was leaked.
Film is ridiculously expensive and time consuming, and at the end of a film you throw everything away just to do it all again later. (I painfully know this as I've made films.)
With the GPU and ML revolution, this entire industry is ripe for automation and disruption. Everything from scripting, camera work, location scouting, set dec, editing, and effects. 2D animation, 3D animation, and live action.
In the future, kids will be making their own Star Wars films in their basement over the weekend. This will put a big dent into IP as well.
I don’t know where you get those numbers from, but obviously animation price for both 2D and 3D are dependent on level of detail.
Naive calculation says that princess and the frog (disneys last 2D) was 100mill for 97 minutes, while Up (released same year) was 175mill for 96 minutes.
I don’t think either movie had particularly bigger stars than the other, so i think the overall budget ratio gives an okay idea of how far your estimate is off for cinema animation.
3d movies require a lot more technical r&d, experimentation and tool development.
This was true for 2d in the past, but Princess and the Frog was made in more or less off the shelf 2d animation software.
The biggest challenge to doing 2d though is finding the talent and the justification. Take a look at what most art school are offering as far as animation goes...
As someone who recently began producing 2D animation, it seems like 2D has only gotten more rare and expensive as 3D/CG animation continues to proliferate.
"Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life" is also a great read. Here is short video demonstrating 12 basic principles of animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiGY0qiy8fY
Not to denigrate the fine work of many great animators and storytellers, but the missing element from this Disney filmmaking story is also the worst part of Disney: its commercial and political choices over why films get made and stories bent and subjects avoided and to what end and whose benefit. Tell that story.
Many of us, or most of us, are probably not sure what you’re referring to, so it might be more useful to offer some focus to your argument rather than the vague suggestions you’re making.
Disney make films - as part of a filmmaking process we might want to know why they make film X and not Y, why they depict characters a certain way and not others. Are filmmakers limited or directed in any way? Enquiring minds would like to know. Presumably if you were to view Soviet or Nazi propaganda films, you wouldn't consider it off-topic to ask about their provenance, or if the political orientation of their sponsors was evident, and if that is morally acceptable. Do you think Disney is immune?
I really don't agree. Just look at the history of Disney, and Walt himself.
Disney has a history of promoting socially conscious narratives and trying to promote peace and harmony. It's kitsch, but look at the message of 'It's a small world'. This is what Disney has always been about, from promoting animal welfare and an appreciation of the natural world, to telling stories of people from a variety of races and cultures and focusing on what should unite us.
The other thing that Disney is (and has always been) about, is pushing the boundaries of the visual arts. You might not see Disney films as art, but one goal of Disney from the very earliest days has been to change your mind.
They are also a public company, so they have the motive of being profitable in their endeavors. But the goal of that is the same - resonate with viewers, because viewers equal movie tickets or subscribers to Disney+, which is how profit is made. It's not good or evil, it's just also a factor as they're responsible to shareholders.
I get the point but most art needs funding. If we go down that route, maybe we should start with Mozart or Beethoven? Or some prominent classical writers? I guess what I am saying is that this is not a particular unique situation.
Why Beethoven? Wasn't he the first to fund the composition of a significant works with the return of bank shares, which was relatively progressive in that it freed the composer from the whims of the arisotcracy/church dichotomy which existed before?
A long time ago I saw a rather good behind the scenes of Aladdin.
I was quite surprised to see that after writing the script they had stand-in actors do the entire script, which they then did animatics (storyboards times to the recorded audio) to, after which they edited the story. Only then did final actors record. Then redo animatics and editing before doing final animation.
Imagine my surprise watching the documentary on Hayao Miyazaki, where he has a 100 animators working on final animation, while he is still storyboarding, undecided on the ending of the movie and hasn’t even casted the voice actors!
Modern Disney filmmaking (Pixar, WDAS) is much closer to the Miyazaki approach you describe than you'd think. It's very, very iterative; each film goes through 5-6 screenings, during which the story structure can and does change dramatically. People are very definitely working on the final product while the story is still being worked out. One pretty common pattern: with 8-9 months left to go until release, the entire third act has to be scrapped and reworked, and often big chunks of the first and second act reworked to match. Voice actors for the main characters are involved throughout, and often come in many times to record new pages of freshly written dialog.
If all this seems chaotic, it is. It leads to untold stress as the release date looms closer and closer and the ending still isn't figured out, which compresses the schedule for each department to deliver a finished product. Very very rarely, the release date is allowed to slip (see "The Good Dinosaur" for example) but that's really the nuclear option, as it involves shuffling the release schedule and incurs a ton of cost. This is a big part of why these movies cost so much: compressing the schedule means hiring tons of people and paying them tons of overtime.
Source: I worked the better part of a decade at WDAS.
There was a great documentary series about the making of Frozen 2 that shows exactly this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Unknown:_Making_Froze...
I found it fascinating how the team was still developing key plot points (let alone dialog/animation) down to the final few weeks/days before the film needed to be completed!
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I have a few friends in the industry and their whole process just seems nuts. They earn good money from overtime but I'd just be so annoyed doing so much throwaway work even though a lot of it just seems like it could be avoided with planning, time management and more honest pricing when it comes to sub contracting.
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You say chaotic, but it basically sounds like modern agile software development.
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>I was quite surprised to see that after writing the script they had stand-in actors do the entire script, which they then did animatics (storyboards times to the recorded audio) to, after which they edited the story. Only then did final actors record. Then redo animatics and editing before doing final animation
I have no experience in animation, however that process is not unlike the common process in music production: a song is written, a demo is cut by the songwriter, a "scratch track" is cut by the chosen lead vocalist and an instrument or two, then the arrangement is recorded by the band (to the scratch track), then final vocals are cut to the band's backing track, and often after that tweaks to the accompaniment are still made.
Yup. I've recorded several albums, some in small home studios and others in pro environments. It's always been scratch track -> drums (me) -> guitars/bass (bass almost always direct to console) -> vocals.
Its basically like writing code. Aladdin was prototyped, Proof of concept, then put into production. So if anything needed a complete re-write, it wouldn't affect final production.
Hayao seems to doing continuous refactoring, so as long as you don't need to edit too many scenes already drawn you can potentially come out with a good final product while giving production as much time as possible.
I love love love watching animation reference ftg - https://twitter.com/NickTyson/status/1129904441153376256?s=2...
Why even link to the tweet?
https://vimeo.com/336117214
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It might sound odd, but it is not abnormal for a movie to be rewritten deep into production. Some infamous movies for this include Die Hard and Stripes, the endings for which were not written until after filming had begun. Given the much longer process for animated movies I'm not surprised this happens at Disney too.
Apocalypse Now was written on the way up the river, based upon the documentary.
This goes back to the days of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty! One of the pieces of old footage Disney likes to show off is animators sketching the movements of a girl dancing around the room and then merging that into the final product for Sleeping Beauty where she's in the dress and it's spinning around.
Japanese anime is dubbed, compared to western animated content which isn't
I'm confused, isn't all animated content "dubbed"? It isn't like the animated characters themselves are talking.
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Go and watch Frozen II BTS docseries, it has the whole thing explained throughly
Plot twist: 6 months prior to the final release date, they are still rewriting the biggest reveal of the entire movie ...
Slight aside, but Encanto is a brilliant film, we watched it together as a family first but my 7yo daughter has watched a few more times since. We have had to listen to the sound track each way on the school run for the last couple of weeks, which to be honest is no bad thing as its so good.
The "Welcome to the Family Madrigal" sequence at the begging of the film is absolutely jaw dropping, if you don't watch the whole film at least watch that sequence to see what is now possible. The fabric simulation for her dress while dancing is so incredible.
I don't have kids at all and I found it a fun movie. It's not a heavy plot (there really is no villain) but so refreshing after a steady diet of superhero movies. Look at the average broadway musical and the plot is even lighter; every movie doesn't have to be Citizen Kane. The movie is a perfect embodiment of the culture (from people who are Columbian, not me), the music is very broadway but still in keeping with the country and well written and sung, and the animation is of course magical. There is no comparison with tripe such as Sing 2.
I wonder what it would be like to work on something that takes 5 years to make, the longest I have ever worked on 1.0 apps (since the 80s when I started) is 14-16 months. Just coordinating thousands of people for 5 years is mind boggling.
i read an article about a month ago about how disney animation has steadily migrated away from a villain, to the self (or some other internal conflict) as the primary antagonist.
frozen moana frozen 2 encanto
during that time there were also traditional "villain" types: big hero 6 zootopia ralph breaks the internet raya and the last drago
agree or disagree, it's an interesting read: https://screenrant.com/encanto-movie-villain-disney-pixar-co...
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> I wonder what it would be like to work on something that takes 5 years to make
Organic is the best way I can put it. At least for software.
The largest project I've been on started in 1998 with a software team of 3 people (me and two others) and shipped V1.0 in 2003 with a team that varied in size over the years. Max was probably about 10 or 15 people. Total team size including electrical, mechanical, manufacturing, systems, technical writers, field service, training and QA was probably 70+.
It's like watching a child or a plant grow: you have this tiny kernel of functionality where you just need something to get started, not knowing how it's going to change and then guiding it in the right direction, growing all the time, as you figure out how to get where you need to go. Pruning the dead branches and rotten fruit and fertilizing it where it's growing right. Then finally it's good enough to take to market. Then ship two major updates each year for 10 years.
It's fun in its own way, but I prefer shorter projects. I get bored easily.
I think we all need to have a talk about what a "heavy" plot is. You don't NEED a villain for a plot to be heavy - I would argue that Encanto's focus on internal, emotional stakes is far heavier (and darker!) than most movies with clear-cut heroes and villains. It also resonates with people in a much more personal way - the vast majority of people can't identify with Aladdin's battle against Jafar (As fun as it is), but I know several people who were on the verge of tears watching Encanto because they could identify with Mirabel's struggle with her place in her family.
> there really is no villain
This is really an interesting callout, because I also found it interesting that there is no "bad guy" for kids to anchor on, but yet seems to have no problem with it.
<spoiler>
I saw the villain as the grandmother's pride.
Well, in every Disney movie there's a musical waiting to come out, and if the movie is successful enough, it will (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_(musical), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion_King_(musical), ...)
> I wonder what it would be like to work on something that takes 5 years to make, the longest I have ever worked on 1.0 apps (since the 80s when I started) is 14-16 months. Just coordinating thousands of people for 5 years is mind boggling.
In software, automotive projects can come quite close to this. Building a modern high-end headunit ECU with software can take a couple of years, 100-150 dev teams, 2k engineers and coordinating with many other groups/departments around it.
> I wonder what it would be like to work on something that takes 5 years to make
The active departments and the size scale a lot along those 5 years. The first few are usually a very small group of people. The weirdest part is that if you're targeting 5 year olds, they are just being born when you start the project.
To be totally honest - I think in this day and age, for right now anyhow there is a desire for less Citizen Kane, and more Music Man.
It’s a massive hit in our house for all of us (mom, dad, son, daughter). We have watched it together probably a dozen times now. That never happens.
And for weeks, sung every song, played along with it on the piano while the instrumental versions play, etc.
Glad I am not the only one. Have even watched it without my kids and listen to the soundtrack when they’re not there! Haven’t done that with a Disney movie, aside from maybe Moana with the soundtrack, probably ever.
Aside on your aside, Kubo and the Two Strings is also really impressive. Until I saw the behind the scenes short video I had no idea it was done stop-motion.
Oh my goodness, the cloth animation is amazing. Watching "We Don't Talk about Bruno" again and again, watching how the skirts move as they're grabbed, tugged, and swirled. Even Mirabel's sleeve as her father gently pushes her aside to look at the vision, is amazing. (Yeah, I'm a hetero male, but that isn't the main attraction. At least I don't think so.)
That's my problem with Encanto: technically it's very impressive. All the rest: standard Disney movie with forgettable songs, forgettable characters, forgettable story that rushes from plot point to plot point with no time to breathe.
And given all the magic in it it's so highly unimaginative with it.
Isabella's lament was the best part of the movie (filled with emotion, meaning and imagination), but it's literally just a "meaningless stepping stone to discover Bruno" within the movie.
I kind of disagree. I found the elder sister being physically strong and an impressive leader and yet still a woman and also have vulnerability to be pretty new. Her arc didn’t involve her marrying a man or finding absolution in becoming less independent as is common when a strong independent woman has a character arc. The lack of any big bad and instead implications of danger because of complex family expectations and dynamics are also new. When I was young there was always some big evil person (scar in lion king, Ursula in little mermaid). Even more recent but older movies like Tangled had bad/evil people with no nuance. Now a days childrens movies are much more nuanced in good and evil and I really liked the diversity of characters in Encanto and the diversity of how these characters get validation.
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Catching up with a couple of friends recently, it came up that our daughters, all of similar ages, are crazy about watching Encanto and even more keen on the songs. It's perfectly reasonable to have normal movie-criticism opinions about the film, but for the target audience, it's a smash. Another 'Frozen'.
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> forgettable songs
Opinions of Encanto aside, I think it's fair to say "We don't talk about Bruno" is a legitimate earworm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earworm)
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> forgettable songs, forgettable characters, forgettable story
Strong disagree on all three. IMO this group of songs are some of the most memorable Disney animation tunes since Frozen, and maybe even since the mid-90s— don't ask me, look at how they're exploding all over Tiktok right now. For characters, I felt the movie does a pretty decent job of giving depth and personality to most members of a really large ensemble cast, particularly those closest to Mirabel. And even those with a lighter presence (Dolores, Camilo) still get their little moments that endeared them to me.
And as to the story, it's unique within the Disney canon in a number of ways; chief among them is that it doesn't have a conventional villain. Yes there is a character who is the "main" problem, but the real antagonist is the family dynamics and the grandmother's trauma. These are issues that are super relatable for a lot of people/families, much moreso than the over-the-topness of a clearly antagonistic and unredeemable character like Mother Gothel (Tangled) or Prince Hans (Frozen). The comparison is even more stark if you go back further to classic villains like Scar, Gaston, or Ursula.
> Isabella's lament was the best part of the movie[...], but it's literally just a "meaningless stepping stone to discover Bruno" within the movie.
Isabella's song ("What Else Can I Do") is pretty much the opposite of a lament and takes place after Mirabel has found Bruno. I don't know what "lament" you could be talking about, maybe "Waiting On a Miracle" which is Mirabel's classic Disney "I Want" song, in the same vein as "Part of Your World" or "Let It Go".
My kids have basically listened to the soundtrack on repeat for two months now and I assure you the songs are anything but "forgettable".
After finally watching the movie, well, the best description on the "problem" is that it's childish.
But we are talking about a children movie.
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I am not sure why you are getting downvoted. It is subjective. Hard disagree, though.
Yes, the eye candy on the average cereal box marketed at children looks impressive too, for some definition of "impressive". A movie needs more than just good graphics.
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I really enjoy that Disney puts a lot of effort into making the "behind the scenes" edutainment to the point where it's a natural part of their brand.
I remember watching the making-of videos for the Lion King when I was little and being blown away that the artists went and watched actual lions and live-sketched them to try and capture the physical motions and emotions of the animal.
These kinds of steps are obvious to an adult but as a little kid it really helped me understand that movies like that are made through more or less obvious steps (want to draw a lion well? go look at a lion!) vs. magically coming into being.
> These kinds of steps are obvious to an adult but as a little kid it really helped me understand that movies like that are made through more or less obvious steps (want to draw a lion well? go look at a lion!) vs. magically coming into being.
I think I know what you mean. As a kid I sometimes felt really intimidated and dispirited by things that appeared to be overwhelmingly hard or seemed to require rare talent to accomplish. Kind adults breaking down how it's done and how many people or what level of preparation it takes made a huge difference then. Understanding how an average person in the normal range of abilities can do it, and that an accomplished professional has worked hard but is only "cooking with water", too.
An example: As a young kid I took guitar lessons. I was struggling with keeping time, I was very frustrated and I concluded I'm just no good at this and gave up. Later on I told this story to a professional orchestra musician and he told me that keeping time is simply hard for humans, and he still has to practice it every day and will practice for the rest of his career. It's just something he accepts as a part of what he likes to do. This completely reset my expectations of what playing music should be like, and allowed me to work on the skill and progress further.
Unfortunately I think a lot of professionals try to shroud what they do in a certain level of mystery instead, because they enjoy being looked up to and consider it the reward for their toils and hardships. Programmers are frequently guilty of this - when non-IT people naively assume every programmer is a math wizard and programmers do nothing to correct this idea, for example. I tell people that if you wake up in the morning and sketch out the steps of an algorithm for how you get from there to your cup of morning coffee, you're essentially doing what programmers do. You could do it too if you choose to dedicate the time. It's fun to see how this sometimes makes people's level of genuine interest bloom.
We recently took our daughter to see the Harry Potter Studio Tour. With the magic of movies, it's easy to forget what goes into a film. It was eye opening the amount of detail and thought that goes into every little thing. No wonder they can be so expensive to create.
This is really nice. Although Disney is only currently producing 3D animation films, it's a bit of a shame that nothing about 2D animation is included.
The 3D animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) has a refreshing 3D/2D hybrid visual look that breaks away from the 3D aesthetic common across the industry. I suspect in the future we'll see more animated films with a 2D aesthetic but created with 3D software.
Aside: Disney produced lots of behind-the-scenes for their 2D animated films in the 50s and 60s. Here's one on the MultiPlane Camera - a camera setup that gave 2D animation greater depth:
Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (1957): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdHTlUGN1zw
I own an amazing coffee table book called the illusion of life. It essentially lays out the history and key techniques of cell animation. I haven't opened it for a few years now, but it still has pride of place within my design books.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Animation:_The_Illusi...
It's interesting hearing the Illusion of Life referred to as a coffee table book, since it's actually a learning resource and reference book for those in animation. I know it wasn't meant as a diminutive etc... It just caught my eye because it made me think what the delineation would be between a coffee table book and a reference book
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This is likely because the approaches and techniques are not measurably different with a "2D" animated movie in 2022 or recently, unless they're doing some retro cel animation.
Disney's last was The Princess and The Frog (which is a very good one that predates the story-in-a-box Pixar plots), which of course was still partially made in the same animation software used by others at the time.
If Disney made another traditional animation movie I suspect it would be a lot like spiderverse: mostly an aesthetic change to the existing process.
> I suspect in the future we'll see more animated films with a 2D aesthetic but created with 3D software.
The Arcane series has that look too and it's gorgeous.
If this kind of stuff interests you, there is a good documentary on Disney+ about the making of Frozen 2. They filmed the documentary from the beginning of the process to the end with the intention of making a deeply detailed doc. The directors had a lot of access.
It's really interesting and I recommend it (but also make sure you watch Frozen 2 before you watch it if you aren't already familiar because it's more interesting if you can recall the scenes they are talking about).
https://www.disneyplus.com/series/into-the-unknown-making-fr...
I hate hate HATE this style of web site design. Great content but why does it all have to be scrollbar-triggered-dynamic? It never works right for me. It's completely unusable on mobile and incredibly tedious on desktop.
I found the Disney video on path tracing quite interesting too! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frLwRLS_ZR0
Now _that_ is how you ELI5.
Could you imagine if Disney decided to open source one of their 3D films? How much fun would that be to play with?
It would be like when Doom was open sourced (I pick Doom because it's one of the first major video games that I can remember being open sourced, and the creative results have been vast)
I'd like to see Toy Story 1 re-rendered using the Toy Story 4 models (assuming Disney also made those available). Imagine all the technical challenges you'd face to do that: Write code to convert the models, sets, skeletons, animations. Upscale/create new textures, etc.
Pixar has already released production ready, rigged models of the toy story characters as well as the kid’s bedroom. You can download them into blender or maya as assets and animate them into scenes.
They have open sourced some assets: https://disneyanimation.com/data-sets/. Obviously not a full movie, but enough that a researcher/developer could begin to experience the kind of technical challenges that arise at "Disney-scale". IIRC a single frame from the movie Moana used something like 100GB of assets.
I can imagine. And I am pretty sure I know the industry which - as usual - will move first to new technology/data. And I am pretty sure, Disney will not like that.
I'm curious how do film studios manage this process using software. Do they have something similar to jira?
When I was working in the industry around the turn of the century it was mostly just folders. One per scene. They'd start with just the scene number and the storyboard panels on them; they'd go off to layout and get drawings of key poses and background roughs, then go back to the set of shelves designated for that episode. After directorial approval they'd go on to further parts of the process - we were a Flash studio so the layout drawings would get inked, get approved, get scanned and cleaned up and put into a file (with a studio-wide standard for naming both the file and every single piece of art in the file so as to avoid conflicts when putting the final file together), get colored, then get handed off to the Flash crew who would make the animation happen.
If you had wanted to sabotage our process, the set of shelves that held all the scene folders would have been a great place to go. Every scene lived there when it wasn't being worked on by someone.
If you want a glimpse at the modern process for 2D animation, have a look at Toon Boom's suite of software. https://www.toonboom.com - not everyone uses it but it's pretty widespread.
Though realistically? I'm not in the industry any more but the bits I see of the process from my friends who are directors lead me to believe that it's still not uncommon to have a checklist that lives on a wall in the director's office, tracking the journey of every scene from storyboard to finished shot.
Each studio has their own (usually crappy) tools. Sometimes it's just spreadsheets.
One thing I hear Netflix is doing right now is focusing on making better studio tools so that creatives prefer to work for Netflix because they have better tools.
Its not the tooling keeping people away from wanting to work for Netflix though. People want to work where they have creative freedom and reasonable expectations.
This is exactly what I was looking for in it too. I've come to be a believer in custom tools and building your workflow so you can make your best product (bye Jira) and Disney did not disappoint on this front: here's a screenshot from their production management tool hidden deep in this website: https://disneyanimation.com/img/uploads/pipeline/production-...
Does anyone else enjoy the 2d storyboards almost even more than the final 3d film?
Even with the old 2D movies, I've always liked the rough sketched animations even more. That rawness really makes you feel close to the artist and their process and is the most magical for me.
Beauty and the Beast has a feature on DVD (Blu ray too?) where you can watch the entire movie in animatic form. It's great! I don't know if Disney ever did that again with any of their other releases.
I really liked the artwork at the end of The Mandalorian, which I guess was meant to look like Ralph McQuarrie concept art.
Cool page (although I had to disable uBlock Origin to be able to see it correctly).
> There are 24 frames in one second of animation.
Why don't they target 60fps now?
We absolutely experiment with 48, 60 and even 120fps. We’d use them if they looked good. They don’t, they make any content look atrocious. adding more (temporal) detail does indeed improve the realism but improving realism isn’t good when you’re delivering Impressionism.
Your question is very analogous to asking “Van Gogh’s work is great and all but it needs more (spatial) detail. I can’t believe he’s still using those broad brushes when now days you can buy fine brushes. His work would have much more detail and would look more realistic!”
Once you seriously ponder how naive such a statement is, you’ll understand why filmmakers stick with 24fps. It’s not reality. It’s not what our eyes see. Just like an impressionistic painting is not what our eyes see. And that’s a good thing.
There seems to be a lot of evidence that audiences that prefer 24fps do so because they’re so used to it, and for that reason, expert film makers seem to be even more strongly biased than general audiences.
24fps wasn’t chosen by animators, and wasn’t decided on for it’s Impressionism, right? If you want Impressionism, 1fps is better than 24, no? Disney used to animate on 1s, 2s, 3s for both economy and style reasons, and no longer do. Live action films are also 24fps, because all films are 24 by default, and many people complain about live action in higher frame rates. Suggesting that Disney consciously chose 24 for it’s impressionism seems revisionist and inaccurate.
Kids watching modern TVs, however, don’t seem as bothered by 60fps video, because they’re much more used to it.
BTW I used to prefer 24 fps categorically, back when I worked in film. Personally, 60fps looks weird to me, but it’s becoming better. I’ve started really disliking 24fps when there are horizontal pans, that kind of shot is now unwatchable for me, it’s awful. I don’t know why it used to seem tolerable.
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Higher frame rates do result in smoother motion and animation.
The reason viewers prefer 24 FPS is that film is traditionally 24 FPS and video is 30 FPS (60 half-frame fields per second in NTSC). That has trained a generation of viewers to associate higher framerates with "cheap". The aesthetic carries an association that is counter to its actual quality.
Sort of like how people prefer "rustic" furniture because that implies "handmade" which implies "expensive" even though roughly-made things can often be mass produced more cheaply.
If it wasn't for the historical quirk that video was based on halving the AC rate which ended up being a few FPS faster than film, we'd all prefer higher framerates.
I suspect that thanks to the rise of gaming, that association will fade and eventually we will use higher framerates for movies. You already see trends in that direction: YouTube will stream 60 FPS because a lot of what people are watching on YouTube is gaming. But because of that, people get used to it, and I now see more non-gaming videos at 60 FPS too.
The low FPS also helps in disguising the theater. Lots of things in movies are fake, and if it was in 60 FPS you’d be able to see clearly what is happening. Additionally it helps in making still things stand out, like scenery or the main character in a crowd.
For real things like sports and esports, more FPS is used because instead of hiding things you want to show things.
For live action I believe this is the case. For example the 48fps version of The Hobbit was very uncanny, and the makeup and SFX were too obvious.
But for purely animated films I don't think this is the case; there's no makeup or SFX to hide. The bigger issue would be budget I think, and tradition.
1) very expensive to do more in betweens
2) 60fps looks uncanny to viewers. we’re culturally accustomed to associating 24fps with feature films
> 1) very expensive to do more in betweens
That's maybe a bit native, but for an animated movie, I think that the intermediate frames could be computed automatically, for a small additional cost.
I don't dispute that there might be a bit more work (I guess some frames might need to be adjusted manually), but I am not convinced that it is that much expensive to do 60fps rather of 24fps.
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I saw The Hobbit in a theater playing at 60fps in 3D and several people in the theater laughed at points in the film that were not supposed to be funny just because how odd certain things looked. Although I personally enjoyed the unique presentation it kind of made me realize that 60fps would never take off.
On a similar note, I highly recommend the documentary "The Sweatbox", which is a behind-the-scenes look at the process behind the creation of "The Emperor's New Groove". It was originally meant to be a very different, more serious film, but despite all the effort into creating the storyboards, characters, music etc the producers rejected it and they had to change direction. The documentary was never supposed to be released, but it eventually was leaked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sweatbox
https://archive.org/details/SweatboxDocumentaryUneditedVersi...
Film is ridiculously expensive and time consuming, and at the end of a film you throw everything away just to do it all again later. (I painfully know this as I've made films.)
With the GPU and ML revolution, this entire industry is ripe for automation and disruption. Everything from scripting, camera work, location scouting, set dec, editing, and effects. 2D animation, 3D animation, and live action.
In the future, kids will be making their own Star Wars films in their basement over the weekend. This will put a big dent into IP as well.
(I'm working on this.)
i guess 3D animation costs 1 million per minute, while 2d animation costs about 15k a minute.
could AI help reduce the costs in the future ? imagine making a movie in a short time and also x0.1-0.001% costs
here's a good read too: http://web.archive.org/web/20201121143218/https://arr.am/202...
I don’t know where you get those numbers from, but obviously animation price for both 2D and 3D are dependent on level of detail.
Naive calculation says that princess and the frog (disneys last 2D) was 100mill for 97 minutes, while Up (released same year) was 175mill for 96 minutes.
I don’t think either movie had particularly bigger stars than the other, so i think the overall budget ratio gives an okay idea of how far your estimate is off for cinema animation.
3d movies require a lot more technical r&d, experimentation and tool development.
This was true for 2d in the past, but Princess and the Frog was made in more or less off the shelf 2d animation software.
The biggest challenge to doing 2d though is finding the talent and the justification. Take a look at what most art school are offering as far as animation goes...
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As someone who recently began producing 2D animation, it seems like 2D has only gotten more rare and expensive as 3D/CG animation continues to proliferate.
But could be a "grass is always greener" thing.
"Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life" is also a great read. Here is short video demonstrating 12 basic principles of animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiGY0qiy8fY
This was a super cool read. I miss the days of when of when I would spend hours trying to build models in 3ds max.
Imagine if DIsney+ allows access to 65,000,000 assets from Disney Animation's nearly hundred-year history...
This was really interesting to see, and update our knowledge on production techniques. But, Why? The big heads?
This is really cool
Not to denigrate the fine work of many great animators and storytellers, but the missing element from this Disney filmmaking story is also the worst part of Disney: its commercial and political choices over why films get made and stories bent and subjects avoided and to what end and whose benefit. Tell that story.
Many of us, or most of us, are probably not sure what you’re referring to, so it might be more useful to offer some focus to your argument rather than the vague suggestions you’re making.
Disney make films - as part of a filmmaking process we might want to know why they make film X and not Y, why they depict characters a certain way and not others. Are filmmakers limited or directed in any way? Enquiring minds would like to know. Presumably if you were to view Soviet or Nazi propaganda films, you wouldn't consider it off-topic to ask about their provenance, or if the political orientation of their sponsors was evident, and if that is morally acceptable. Do you think Disney is immune?
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Disney has no other motive but to tell stories that resonate with as many people as possible, because this alone will drive profits.
In the case of movies, motives are purely to maximise the appreciation by the broadest audience.
I really don't agree. Just look at the history of Disney, and Walt himself.
Disney has a history of promoting socially conscious narratives and trying to promote peace and harmony. It's kitsch, but look at the message of 'It's a small world'. This is what Disney has always been about, from promoting animal welfare and an appreciation of the natural world, to telling stories of people from a variety of races and cultures and focusing on what should unite us.
The other thing that Disney is (and has always been) about, is pushing the boundaries of the visual arts. You might not see Disney films as art, but one goal of Disney from the very earliest days has been to change your mind.
They are also a public company, so they have the motive of being profitable in their endeavors. But the goal of that is the same - resonate with viewers, because viewers equal movie tickets or subscribers to Disney+, which is how profit is made. It's not good or evil, it's just also a factor as they're responsible to shareholders.
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I get the point but most art needs funding. If we go down that route, maybe we should start with Mozart or Beethoven? Or some prominent classical writers? I guess what I am saying is that this is not a particular unique situation.
Why Beethoven? Wasn't he the first to fund the composition of a significant works with the return of bank shares, which was relatively progressive in that it freed the composer from the whims of the arisotcracy/church dichotomy which existed before?
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