A lot of people talk about the problem with Disney.
Wanna know what is the real problem with Disney?
There is only so much a corperation can do.
Creative art needs artists!
I might add that corperations go through cycles, including difficult times when they are badly run. Disney is coming off of a period of massive success, but right now, in 2024, seems to be in the down side of its current cycle, like perhaps Boeing maybe 8-10 years ago, and is not very well run right now. When Moana was put out they were still a model corperation, led by (and supporting) great artists. Things went down around the time The Owl House was cancelled. Disney as a business in 2024 somewhat resembles western Rome at the end of the 4th Century, following Emperor Theodosius's death- going through the motions without understanding the ideals, keeping up appearances while being misled by incompetence, with massive wealth and good ideals, entering the equivalent of the decay of an Empire, saved from Rome's fate simply through the fact that it is far easier to maintain a business than to maintain an Empire the size of a continent.
There is only so much that a corperation can do. The ideals of course were always more associated with the art and the creative side.
The rest of this page will be devoted to the creative side.
Disney was the personal project of an artist, a man named Walt.
Walt Disney died in 1966.
In the early 1970's, the animation directors who worked with Walt decided to develop a new generation of animators.
The Disney Renaissance of the early 90's and the second Disney Renaissance of Tangled, Moana and Frozen was the time of this new generation of talent.
Disney the corperation cannot be creative alone.
They rely on artists like Ron Clements and John Musker to be creative for them.
That's the problem with Disney.
We are simply expecting a corperation to continue doing what a corperation simply cannot do!
The Disney Renaissance was the product of artists like Ron Clements and John Musker, the second Disney Renaissance was the product of John Lasseter, the creative head of Pixar, reorganizing the Disney animation department so that people like Ron Clements and John Musker were willing to return!
The Disney Renaissance was the product of these individual artists, and the effort of Disney's animation directors to try to find and train the next generation of animators in the 1970's.
Once those artists are gone, the Disney Renaissance is gone with them!
The corperation cannot be creative by itself!
It takes artists!
When Disney bought the rights to Star Wars, it worked for one movie because they had Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote the script for two thirds of the original Star Wars trilogy, including The Empire strikes Back, to write one more Star Wars script- but Lawrence Kasdan was bored writing Star Wars scripts and was only willing to write one more!
Without him, they did not have the artists to create real Star Wars!
A corperation cannot be creative by itself!
It takes artists- like Lawrence Kasdan!
Perhaps the next generation of artists will have nothing to do with Disney!
But they will emerge!
In animation, it is now the time of studios like Illumination, younger studios whose creative leaders are still there and still yearning for more!
That's the present (2022; I'm writing this in spring 2023 (though as you can see, I edited it in 2024)); who knows what the future is?
The new artists are somewhere!
They are coming!
Who knows where?
God loves you!
Sincerely,
David S. Annderson