Talk:Walt Disney Animation Studios/rewrite

Walt Disney Animation Studios is an American animation studio, which specializes in the production of animated features and short subjects. The studio is a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company's Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group. As Disney was originally founded in 1923 as an animation studio, its animated short subjects and, from 1934 on, feature animation operations were originally integrated parts of the business. During corporate restructuring in 1986, Walt Disney Productions officially became a subsidiary of the company under the name Walt Disney Feature Animation. The division took on its current name in 2007, when it was folded under the same division as Disney's recently acquired Pixar Animation Studios.

For much of its existence, the Disney animation studio was recognized as the premiere American animation studio, and developed many of the techniques which became standard practices of traditional cel (2D) animation. The studio's catalog of animated features are among the Disney studio's most notable assets, and the stars of its animated shorts - Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto - have gone on to become popular figures in popular culture and mascots of the Walt Disney Company as a whole.

Walt Disney Animation Studios, today managed by Pixar heads Ed Catmull and John Lasseter, continues to produce animated features using both traditional animation and computer generated imagery techniques.

1923-1928: Alice and Oswald
Kansas City, Missouri native Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney founded the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in Los Angeles in 1923, producing a series of silent Alice Comedies short films featuring a live-action child actress in an animated world. The Alice Comedies were distributed by Margaret J. Winkler's Winkler Pictures, which later also distributed a second Disney short subject series, the all-animated Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, through Universal Pictures starting in 1927. The Disney studio was set up in storefront offices on Kingswell Avenue in downtown Los Angeles until moving to a new building built on a lot at 2719 Hyperion Avenue.

After the first year's worth of Oswalds, Walt Disney attempted to renew his contract with Winkler Pictures, but Charles Mintz, who had taken over the business after marrying Margaret Winkler, wanted to force Disney to accept a lower advance payment for each Oswald short. Disney refused, and as Universal rather than Disney owned the rights to Oswald, Mintz set up his own animation studio to produce Oswald cartoons. hiring most of Disney's staff to move over once Disney's contract with Mintz and Universal was done in mid-1928.

1928-1934: Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies
Working in secret while the rest of the staff finished the remaining Oswalds on contract, Disney and his head animator Ub Iwerks led a small handful of loyal staffers in producing cartoons starring a new character named Mickey Mouse. The first two Mickey Mouse cartoons, Plane Crazy and The Galloping Gaucho, made only mild impressions when previewed in limited engagements during the summer of 1928. For the third Mickey cartoon, however, Disney produced a sound track, collaborating with musician Carl Stalling and businessman Pat Powers, who provided Disney with his bootlegged "Cinephone" sound-on-film process. Subsequently, the third Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie, became Disney's first cartoon with synchronized sound, and was a major success upon its November 1928 debut at the West 57th Theatre in New York City. The Mickey Mouse series of sound cartoons, distributed by Powers through Celebrity Productions, quickly became the most popular cartoon series in the United States.

A second Disney series of sound cartoons, the Silly Symphonies, debuted in 1929 with The Skeleton Dance. Each Silly Symphony was a one-shot cartoon centered around music or a particular theme. In 1930, disputes over finances between Disney and Powers led to Disney's studio, reincorporated the year before as Walt Disney Productions, signing a new distribution contract with Columbia Pictures. Powers in return signed away Ub Iwerks, who began producing cartoons at his own studio.

Columbia distributed Disney's shorts for two years before the Disney entered a new distribution deal with United Artists in 1932. The same year, Disney signed a two-year exclusive deal with Technicolor to utilize its new 3-strip color film process. The result was the Silly Symphony Flowers and Trees, the first full-color animated film. Flowers and Trees was a major success, and all Silly Symphonies were subsequently produced in Technicolor. The 1933 Technicolor Silly Symphony Three Little Pigs became a major box office and pop culture success, with its theme song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf" becoming a popular hit song.

1934-1940: Snow White and Donald Duck
In 1934, Walt Disney gathered several key staff members and announced his polans to make his first feature animated film. Despite derision from most of the film industry, who dubbed the production "Disney's Folly", Disney proceeded undaunted into the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which would become the first animated feature in English and Technicolor. Considerable training and development went into the production of Snow White, with Silly Symphonies such as The Goddess of Spring (1934) and The Old Mill (1937) serving as experimentation grounds for new techniques. These included the animation of realistic human figures, special effects animation, and the use of the multiplane camera, an invention which split animation artwork layers into several planes, allowing the camera to appear to move dimensionally through an animated scene.

Snow White cost Disney a then-expensive sum of $1.4 million to complete, and was an unprecedented success when released in February 1938 by RKO Radio Pictures, which had assumed distribution of Disney product from Untied Artists in 1937. Snow White was briefly the highest grossing film of all time before the success of Gone With the Wind two years later. The profits from Snow White were used to build a new Disney studio on Buena Vista Street in Burbank, where the Walt Disney Company remains headquartered to this day.

During the production of Snow White, work had continued on the Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies series of shorts. Mickey Mouse had switched to Technicolor in 1935, by which time the series had added several major supporting characters, among them Mickey's dog Pluto and his friends Donald Duck and Goofy. All three would begin appearing in series of their own by 1940, and the Donald Duckcartoons would eclipse the Mickey Mouse series in popularity. The Silly Symphonies, which garnered seven Academy Award nominations, ended in 1939, replaced by a series of irregularly releasedWalt Disney Specials shorts.

1940-1941: Pinocchio, Fantasia, and the Disney strike
Buoyed by Snow White's success, Disney began developing and producing more features. The second Disney feature, Pinocchio, opened in early 1940 to more mixed reviews and weaker box office returns than Snow White. Toward the end of the year, Disney released his third feature, Fantasia, an experimental film featuring animated vignettes set to classical music conducted by Leopold Stokowski. Initially released as a road show attraction in stereophonic sound, Fantasia was not a success, and would later be reissued in pared-down versions of its original two-hour runtime. While neither Fantasia nor Pinocchio were box office successes in their original releases (the latter took several decades to recoup its cost), both would later be regarded as classics of both American animation and American cinema.

Much of the character animation on these productions and all subsequent features until the late 1970s was supervised by a braintrust of animators Walt Disney dubbed the "Nine Old Men", many of whom also served as directors on the Disney features: Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, Woolie Reitherman, Les Clark, Ward Kimball, Eric Larson, John Lounsbery, Milt Kahl, and Marc Davis. The development of the feature animation department created a caste system at the Disney studio: lesser animators (and feature animators in-between assignments) were assigned to work on the short subjects, while animators higher in status such as the "nine old men" worked on the features. Concern over Walt Disney accepting credit for the artists' work as well as debates over compensation led to many of the newer and lower-ranked animators seeking to unionize the Disney studio.

This resulted in a bitter union strike in mid-1941, which was resolved - without the angered Walt Disney's involvement - in Walt Disney Productions being set up as a union shop. The Disney strike and its aftermath led to an exodus of several animation professionals from the studio, from top-level animators such as Art Babbitt and Bill Tytla to artists more known for non-Disney work such as Frank Tashlin, Maurice Noble, Walt Kelly, and John Hubley, who, with several other Disney strikers went on to found the lauded United Productions of America. Walt Disney himself felt betrayed by the remaining staff members who'd participated in the strike, and would later testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948 that several of the more outspoken strikers were or could be Communists.

1941-1950: World War II and package films
During the strike, the Disney studio was deep in production on Dumbo, an inexpensive feature which became a box-office hit just before the United States' entry into World War II in 1941. The United States Army moved onto the Disney studio lot the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the Disney studio began producing military training films and war propaganda for the armed forces. War propaganda found its way into Disney's cartoon shorts during this period, particularly the Academy Award-winning Donald Duck short Der Fuehrer's Face (1942).

The Disney feature Bambi, in production since 1937, was released in mid-1942 to unremarkable box office, and work on Bambi's intended follow-ups Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan was put on hold. Instead, the Disney studio, in addition to the ongoing theatrical cartoon shorts and military films, began producing inexpensive "package films": features made up of one or more short subjects tied together by live-action or animated framing material. Disney's first package film was 1942's good-neighbor effort film Saludos Amigos

While Dumbo was a box-office success, Bambi, which had been in production since 1937, did not see release until mid-1942 and did not initially turn a profit.

Other features in this vein included The Three Caballeros (1944), which featured new innovations in the combination of live-action and animated characters, Make Mine Music (1946), Song of the South (1946), Fun and Fancy Free (1947), and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949). Fun and Fancy Free featured a retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk starring Mickey Mouse, whose series of animated shorts were reinstated in 1947 and would remain in production until 1953.

1950-1959: Return to full-length features
In 1950, Disney released Cinderella, a full-length film based on the fairy tale by Charles Perrault. At a cost of nearly $3,000,000, Disney insiders claimed that if this movie had failed at the box office, then Disney studio would have closed (given that the studio was already heavily in debt). The film was a huge box office success and allowed Disney to carry on producing films throughout the 1950s. Alice in Wonderland was released in 1951. Unlike Cinderella, however, the film met with a lukewarm response at the box office and was a sharp disappointment in its initial release. Disney followed up Alice with Peter Pan in 1953. The film received a positive response and was financially successful.

During this time, the Disney Studios began branching out into television with The Mickey Mouse Club and Disneyland attaining critical acclaim and high ratings.

Lady and the Tramp was the studio's next film project, released in 1955, the film took in a higher figure than any other Disney animated feature since Snow White. An episode of Disneyland called A Story of Dogs aired before the film’s release. Coasting off the success of Lady, the Disney studios began production on their most ambitious project to date: an adaptation of "Sleeping Beauty" set to Tchaikovsky's classic score to be released in 1959. Also, Sleeping Beauty was the first 70mm animated feature. The film's production costs, which totaled $6 million, made it the most expensive Disney film up to that point, and over twice as expensive as each of the preceding three Disney animated features: Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and Lady and the Tramp. The high production costs of Sleeping Beauty, coupled with the underperformance of much of the rest of Disney's 1959-1960 release slate resulted in the company posting its first annual loss in a decade for fiscal year 1960, and massive layoffs were done throughout the animation department.

1960-1984 Decline and Development of New Talant
The feature animation department was downsized considerably after the release of Sleeping Beauty in 1959 and a transition to the use of xerography to help speed up production time. One Hundred and One Dalmations was Disney's first feature to make use of xerography. In 1962, Walt Disney shut down the studio's short subject department, focusing its attention mainly on television and feature film production (the studio would periodically produce featurettes and shorts on a sporadic basis, including films starring Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Mouse, and Roger Rabbit).

Walt Disney produced two more animated features during his lifetime, The Sword and the Stone (1963) and The Jungle Book (1967). After Walt Disney's death in 1966, the animation department continued with the films The Aristocats (1970) and Robin Hood (1973). During the production of Robin Hood and The Rescuers (1977), the aging members of the Nine Old Men began training replacements in anticipation of retirement. Led by Eric Larson, the training program would bring artists such as Don Bluth, Glen Keane, Andreas Deja, John Musker, and Ron Clements to the forefront of the studio's talent roster.

Two films were produced with a mix of the younger and older animators, The Rescuers (1977) and the live-action/animated Pete's Dragon (1978). In 1979, during the production of The Fox and the Hound, 11 members of the new guard of animators, led by Don Bluth, Gary Goldman, and John Pomeroy, left the Disney studio, wanting to produce movies they felt were more in line with the style and quality of movies of Disney's golden years of the 1930s and 1940s. With half of the animators now gone, the release of The Fox and the Hound was delayed six months to June 1981.

Bluth went on to found his own studio, Don Bluth Productions, which produced its first film, the mildly successful The Secret of NIMH, in 1982. Don Bluth Productions became Disney's main competitor in the animation industry during the 1980s and early 1990s. The remaining old guard Disney animators retired after the production of The Fox and the Hound, and the new animators - including newer recruits such as John Lasseter (who joined the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Group after being fired from Disney in 1983) and Andreas Deja - forged ahead on their own (References to Eric Larson's Talent Development program and more animators from this generation should be added).

1984-1988 Rebuilding
Walt Disney Productions underwent a major shakeup in the 1980s after narrowly escaping a hostile takeover attempt from Saul Steinberg. Michael Eisner, formerly of Paramount Pictures, became CEO in 1984, and was joined by his Paramount associate Jeffrey Katzenberg, while Frank Wells, formerly of Warner Bros., became president. After the disappointing box office performance of the 1985 PG-rated animated feature The Black Cauldron, the future of the animation department was in jeopardy. Going against a thirty year studio policy, the company founded a TV animation division, and considered shuttering its legacy animation studio. In the interest of saving what he believed to be the studio's core business, Roy E. Disney persuaded Eisner to let him supervise the animation department in the hopes of improving its fortunes. Eisner agreed, making Roy E. Disney chairman of the newly reorganized Walt Disney Feature Animation. Peter Schneider became the first president of Feature Animation at the studio.

At this time, the entire animation staff was moved out of the Animation building on the Disney studio lot in Burbank, which was instead occupied by management and television production staff. The animation staff relocated to the Air Way complex, a former air hanger 3 miles away in Glendale.

The next feature for the restructured WDFA team was The Great Mouse Detective, begun by John Musker and Ron Clements as Basil of Baker Street after both left the Black Cauldron production team. Released in 1986, the film was a moderate box office success. Later the same year, Universal Pictures released Don Bluth's An American Tail, which outgrossed The Great Mouse Detective at the box office and became the highest-grossing first-issue animated film to that point. Two years later, the studios released Oliver & Company and The Land Before Time on the same weekend. The latter's opening weekend gross of over $7,526,000 broke all records, becoming the top grossing opening weekend for an animated feature. The film out-grossed An American Tail and became the highest-grossing animated film at that time.

In 1988, Disney collaborated with Steven Spielberg, a long-time animation fan, to produce Who Framed Roger Rabbit a live action/animation hybrid which featured animated characters from several 1930s/1940s studios interacting with live actors. The film was a significant critical and commercial success, winning four Academy Awards and renewing interest in theatrical animated cartoons. Several WDFA members were loaned out to Richard Williams and Dale Baer's animation teams in London to work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

1989-1994: The Second Golden Age
Disney had been developing The Little Mermaid off and on as an animated property since the 1930s. By 1987, after the success of Roger Rabbit, the studio decided to make it into an animated Broadway-like musical. Lyricist Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken, who worked on Broadway productions such as Little Shop of Horrors wrote the songs and score for the film, with Ashman also producing and heavily involved in the story development process. The film was released on November 17, 1989 and garnered a higher weekend gross than Don Bluth's All Dogs Go to Heaven, which opened the same weekend. It went on to beat The Land Before Time's record and became the highest-grossing animated film at that time, earning $89 million at the US box office. Little Mermaid was a critical and commercial success and received two Academy Awards, for Best Song and Best Score.

The Rescuers Down Under was released one year later, a sequel to The Rescuers, the film was not a box-office success and was the least successful film of the Renaissance era. The film is notable for its extensive use of CAPS, an ink & paint and post production software suite developed in cooperation with Pixar, which had previously been used for some shots in Mermaid and the first film to be created in an all digital process. Following Rescuers, the system would be made standard in all subsequent Disney films.

Then came Beauty and the Beast, released in 1991. It was the first animated film nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, an accomplishment which has not been match since Pixar's 2009 film Up although it lost out to The Silence of the Lambs. However, the film won Best Picture (Musical or Comedy) at the Golden Globe Awards and won two Academy Awards for Best Original Song and Best Original Score. The film was dedicated to Howard Ashman, who died earlier in the year, before the film's release. It became the most successful animated feature in motion picture history up to that time, with domestic box office revenues exceeding $140 million. As of 2009, ties with Disney/Pixar's WALL-E for the record of animated film with most Academy Award nominations (six).

Aladdin and The Lion King followed in 1992 and 1994, respectively. Both films were highest worldwide grosses of their release year, but The Lion King became the highest-grossing animated film ever at the time and remains the highest grossing traditionally animated film in history. Along with that, the films won Academy Awards for Best Original Song and Best Original Score in the footsteps of Beauty and the Beast. Howard Ashman wrote several songs for Aladdin before his death, but only three were finally used in the film. Tim Rice joined the project and completed the score and songs with Alan Menken. Tim Rice went on to collaborate with Elton John in The Lion King.

1995-2002: Post Katzenburg Era
(Expand) Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame were also in the Disney Renaissance. (Jesus - rewrite!) Despite mature subjects and appealing more towards adults than children both were box-office successes and received general approval and acclaim. Pocahontas received two Academy Awards for Best Score and Best Original Song for 'Colors of the Wind'. Both were successful with songs written by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz. (Pocahontas was nto a critical success, Hunchback was not a commerical success) Disney continued on with successes from Hercules with songs by Alan Menken and David Zippel, (Hercules was not a success) Mulan with score by Jerry Goldsmith and songs by Matthew Wilder and David Zippel, and Tarzan with songs by Phil Collins.

2003-2006: Transition to CG Films
Rewrite in progress

2006-Present: Lasseter/Catmull Era
(Rewrite in progress)

Management
From 1985 until his resignation in November 2003, Walt Disney Feature Animation was officially headed by Chairman Roy E. Disney, who exercised much influence within the division. Most decisions, however, were made by the WDFA President, who officially reported to Disney but who in practice also reported to the Disney's studio chairman as well as its corporate chairman and CEO, Michael Eisner. From 1985 to 1999, the President of WDFA was Peter Schneider.

As of 2007, Ed Catmull serves as president of the combined Disney-Pixar animation studios, and John Lasseter serves as the studios' Chief Creative Officer. Catmull reports to Walt Disney Company President & CEO Bob Iger as well as Walt Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn. Lasseter, who has greenlight authority, reports directly to Disney's President & CEO Bob Iger and Vice Chairman Emeritus Roy E. Disney.

Andrew Millstein has been named general manager of Walt Disney Animation Studios. In this new position, Millstein is in charge of the day-to-day running of the studio facilities and products.

Locations
(Should this section indicate the former locations of the main animation studio (Disney Studios Lot, Glendale)?)

Walt Disney Animation Studios is headquartered in Burbank, California, across the street from the original Walt Disney Studios in a building designed by Robert A.M. Stern and completed in 1995. Satellite studios once existed at Disney's Hollywood Studios in Lake Buena Vista, Florida (1989‚Äì2003), Paris, France (1995‚Äì2002), and Tokyo, Japan (1989-2004), but those studios were closed in an effort to revive lagging profits by restructuring and recentralizing the division to produce fully computer-animated features solely in Burbank.

Feature Films
Walt Disney Animation Studios has released 52 feature films in what is known as the "Disney Animation Canon." Each film is assigned a number that denotes the chronological order that that film was released. Films in the canon include Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Cinderella, and Aladdin. Recent films released by Disney Animation include 2010's Tangled and 2011's Winnie the Pooh. Walt Disney Animation Studios newest feature is Wreck-it Ralph, a film about the world inside arcade games to be released November 2012 and Frozen, a musical adaptation of the Hans Christian Anderson story The Snow Queen for November 2013.

Short Films
From the beginning with the Alice Comedies in the 1920's, Walt Disney Animation Studios has produced animated shorts throughout its existence. Shorts often would be part a series that revolved around a character like Mickey Mouse, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit,Donald Duck and Goofy or a in the case of the Silly Symphonies, a theme like music. Shorts also provided a medium for the studio to experiment with new technologies that they would use in their filmmaking process like the Multiplane camera in 1937's The Old Mill, Xerography in 1960's Goliath II, and 2D/CG Hybrid animation in 2012's Paperman.

Collaborations
Walt Disney Feature Animation has occasionally joined forces with Walt Disney Imagineering to create attractions for various Disney theme parks around the world that requires the expertise of Disney animators. Among this select number of attractions are:


 * Mickey's PhilharMagic at the Magic Kingdom and Hong Kong Disneyland
 * Stitch's Great Escape at the Magic Kingdom
 * Stitch Encounter at Hong Kong Disneyland
 * Stitch Live! at Walt Disney Studios Park
 * WDFA and WDI also collaborated with the in-house entertainment studios at Disneyland and the Disney-MGM Studios to develop the nighttime Fantasmic! show.

WDFA did the Sprites and backgrounds for the Sega Genesis, Commodore, Amiga and PC versions of the video game for Disney's Aladdin, and the Super Nintendo, PC, Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, Amiga versions of the video game adaptation of The Lion King

Achievements
(this should not exist. all mentions should be moved into prose. Once moved into prose, please delete them from this list. Thanks.)--> The Animation studio is noted for creating a number of now-standard innovations in the animation industry, including:


 * The realistic animation of special effects and human characters (for Snow White)
 * The first major motion picture in stereophonic sound (Fantasia)
 * The first animated feature in CinemaScope (Lady and the Tramp)