Saturday, August 16, 2003

Pencils down. Disney terminates traditional animation

Unfortunately, the latest installment of Survivor doesn't take place at some remote tropical island. It takes place a lot closer to home… in beautiful downtown Burbank, under a giant Sorcerer's hat, at the Walt Disney Feature Animation building, where last week another group of stressed-out castaways were voted off the show.

Forget the official Disney line that Feature Animation boasts a staff of 1,000 to 1,500 artists. In Burbank, there are only about 60 traditional “2-D” animators left who actually pick up a pencil or a paintbrush, counting Layout, Animators, Clean-up and Background artists… and Disney has no 2-D projects currently in production for them to work on. (Disney has a like number of survivors holding on in Florida, where a half 2-D/half-CG (computer graphics) project tentatively called My Peoples is underway.)

The vast majority of Feature Animation's artists have been reassigned to a computer or shown the door. It all points to Disney's next two animated features (this fall's Brother Bear and next spring's Home on the Range) being their last.


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