It is 2025, and Disney is looking a bit like the Roman Empire near the end of the 4th Century AD, just before the Huns and the Goths came in.
We look back at a magnificent creative run, and perhaps we can remember that Disney is only a corperation, and that it took people, artists, to create beauty and wonder.
This is my tribute to those artists.
This is my tribute to people like Ron Clements and John Musker, and Howard Ashman, and of a whole generation of great animators with them, who gave us such magic as The Little Mermaid and Disney's Aladdin, The Lion King and Pocahontas, Tangled and Frozen and Moana.
It was the 1960's, and Disney was not just a corperation.
It was the personal project of one man.
Walt Disney.
But this is filmmaking, and filmmaking is collaborative.
Walt had a whole team around him.
When Walt died, that team tried to continue that legacy.
And Walt was an innovator.
Walt had all but invented, among other things, animation.
And no one else was making sophistocated animation, animated movies to be more than just a 'cartoon'.
And in that team were the animators who had worked with Walt for years, some of them for decades.
And the leaders among them, the animation directors who had worked so closely with Walt, the ones known as the 'nine old men'.
And those animation directors decided to keep the art form alive.
And to do that, they set out to train the next generation of animators.
Among those were such people as Ron Clements and John Musker, and Mike Gabriel, and in time people like Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, and finally Chris Buck, Nathan Greno, and Bryan Howard when their brilliant new team, led (in spirit and in artistry at least) by Ron Clements and John Musker, was at its very peak, and the original school of animation still intact.
These were the brilliant individuals who emerged to bring us the Disney Renaissance, to along with Alan Menken and Howard Ashman create the likes of The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, The Lion King and Pocahontas, Beauty and the Beast and Mulan, who would be brought back together as a team to give us the Second Disney Renaissance long after the days of that great school of animators were past, to give us the likes of Tangled, Frozen, Encanto and Moana.
This is my tribute to those brilliant individuals, and to their legacy.
To all the beauty and magic and brilliant storytelling that they brought us.
Thank you all!
God loves you!
Sincerely,
David S. Annderson