Thank you so much to everyone who watched this video! :) If you felt like it wasn't enough, don't worry, I got you. Check out, “What Made the Disney Renaissance Era so Special? PART TWO" th-cam.com/video/aqnUDxxY1qg/w-d-xo.html
I have to disagree with your Bronze Age concept, as a few of the early-mid 60s movies Disney made were great. Keep in mind Mary Poppins was great & won awards, while 101 Dalmations was clearly not of lesser quality even though it was Xenographed. Also I would argue that "Oliver & Company" was the film that started Disney's Renaissance as it was actually able to surpass "An American Tale" by leaps & bounds even though it fell short of the 1st "Land Before Time". Allow me to explain, through "Oliver & Company" Disney managed to recapture the cute animal animated film success the company had in the days of 101 Dalmations & before. They then recaptured the Disney Princess success with The Little Mermaid & were on a roll after that. If Oliver & Company hadn't been successful would "The Lion King" still have been as great as it is? There was far more than Xenography for what made the Bronze Age & "Oliver & Company" managed to start solving those other problems. As for the comment about Disney's Robin Hood, keep in mind Disney has 1 of the worst Robin Hood adaptations. If you want to see a good adaptation look to Live Action, The 2018 Robin Hood Movie is quite possibly the best Robin Hood movie thus far.
@@TheEiasam Are you kidding? Emperors New Groove, Monsters Inc, Lilo and Stitch, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Up. Plus they did many good live action movies. Remember The Titans, Princes Diaries, Santa Clause 2, Holes, Lizzie McGuire, Pirates of the Caribbean, Freaky Friday, Miracle, Teenage Drama Queen, National Treasure, Chronicles of Narnia... Wayyy better than the crap we had in the 70s and 80s.
It's a little frustrating that, in one breath, you say that Disney HAD to start xeroxing their drawings in order to LITERALLY SAVE THE COMPANY BECAUSE IT'S TOO EXPENSIVE TO MAINTAIN OTHERWISE, and that this decision kept the entire studio from going under .... and then ... a few moments later, you say "disney changed man, now it's all about makin dem profits" ... can we accept that not EVERY cost-cutting decision made by a company is done with ill will and greed?
Why? Does it really matter? It's a very subjective thing. Your generation may call it the dark era, but to many people who grew up during that time they are the BEST Disney movies, because they are ours. Stop pitting one era against another, and just love it, like it, don't like it based on your own personal preference. I'm not a fan of Frozen, or Tangled. It doesn't make them less. It just makes them not to my liking!
A big part of your argument is that Disney's dark ages began because they chose to use xerography, which compromised the quality of the animation. But while you make that claim, you don't actually point out any ways that xerography compromised quality. 101 Dalmatians is a fantastic movie, not because it made a lot of money but because it has a wonderful and entertaining story, fantastic characters (not to mention one of Disney's best villains), and absolutely gorgeous animation. I'm just not sure I buy your argument that xerography played much of a role.
The only reason is that some people aren't fond of the style since it makes it look scratchy and lack the attractive, smooth, and distinct animation of films released before. One of my family members says that's the reason they didn't like the films of that era, but while I found it noticable, I don't really mind it.
Aside from what Kenya pointed out, another big reason people criticize the Xerox Era of Disney is because that's when you started to see what a lot of people refer to as "recycled animation" -- AKA, those comparisons you see all the time between certain scenes in Disney films where the animation looks very similar (the dancing animations in Robin Hood and Aristocats, the interaction between Mowgli and the Wolves in the Jungle Book vs. Wart and Sir Kay's dogs in Sword in the Stone). Xerography allowed them to basically recycle previously used animation and make slight alterations to the character designs, which resulted in those "copy-cat" scenes and that scratchy, rushed look. I'm guessing the creator of the video didn't go too far into it because you can find those comparison videos all over TH-cam, but would have been good to at least touch on briefly. Don't get me wrong, I loved quite a few movies from the Xerox and Dark Ages (Robin Hood, Aristocats, Sword in the Stone, and The Great Mouse Detective especially), but I can see why Don Bluth (one of my favorite animators of all time) was disappointed with the process.
Another one of my family members actually considers Sword in the Stone to be his favorite. Also, thanks for acknowledging this. He probably should have touched upon this, considering that was something common in the era. Additionally, the films were reusing animation from the Golden Age, such as Snow White's clapping animation.
I’ve met Don, he’s still alive and puts on plays in Arizona. He’s a brilliant man with clear vision, unbelievable talent and a serious work ethic. We’re blessed to have him.
He is absolutely marvelous, I’m hoping to study under him in Don Bluth university, he chooses 21 students to teach everything needed to know about traditional animation :)
You won't be seeing a 2D animated feature from Disney for quite a few years, if ever. The problem with what you're suggesting is that Disney already tried it, and it didn't work. As soon as Chicken Little hit theatres, Disney fans were screaming for 2D. They demanded that Disney make films like the ones made during the Renaissance period. Disney listened and made such a film, it was called The Princess and the Frog. The problem? No one saw it. The Princess and the Frog grossed 271 million at the box office, including international sales. Out of the 10 films made during the Renaissance, only two films grossed less than The Princess and the Frog. Disney gave the audience what they asked for and they simply didn't show up and put money down for it. You can chalk up to external matters like marketing or the release of Avatar, but the fact is that Disney isn't going to throw money into a bank that has failed them before.
I agree. It was fun in the beginning when it was a novelty, but I'd rather see drawings. Maybe if they created something really beautiful with cgi but usually it looks just like something could have been drawn.
I think you mean bad cgi. Like most cgi movies today is pretty bad + gci and drawings should be used for different movies. Some movies with cgi today should have been made with drawings imo
Honestly, stuff like Chicken Little was far worse than anyhing released during this so-called "dark age". So yeah, "bronze age" sounds like a more appropriate name.
Chicken Little was sad in a way. It tried to make picking on people look funny and played up that popular kids being entitled to be treated like God's and unpopular kids getting treated like shit is the way it should be. I actually couldn't finish watching the movie because it just rubbed me the wrong way. It was just plain mean spirited.
I feel like we're in another dark age. Maybe not financially or fan base wise, but I feel like Disney is playing it way too safe and predictable and not pushing any boundaries except in cgi technology and buying power.
This. So true. All the past 5-6 CGI movies feel so damn same-y in terms of designs and plot development. They ALL recycle the same damn last minute "plot twist" villain bs, they all have "self-aware" lines mocking old Disney tropes, they all try to be subversive for the sake of being different, ending up feeling the same trite crap. And yes, what happened to all the advancements in animation ??? Disney was always pushing for those in the '90s with CAPS, CGI elements blending in or Deep Canvas. What the hell happened to the promise of alternating hand-drawn animation and CGI going hand in hand ? What happened to the Meander animation tool ? They're creatively bankrupt, and they're playing way too safe in terms of everything.
@@Urvy1A To be honest, that's Disney's fault for picking July as release date, for a freaking Winnie The Pooh movie of all things. Disney has picked terrible release dates before that ended up detrimental. The same happened with Treasure Planet.
Idk why you ended the video at 1988. You could have gone into how just how they were able to re-capture the magic, what these new renaissance movies were doing right. This video should just be called “Disney’s Dark Age Explained” or something.
Agree to a step ... I mean it shouldn't be called like that because still to understand the Renaissance you have to understand the dark age. The rest is history
I think it's clear. It's such an obvious thing that everyone already knows. Besides, he DID explain it. "Copy the drawings directly onto cells". And then he clearly shows how ugly it looks. Then follows it up with "Disney animators stormed out". I don't know how much more fucking obvious he can make it for you. It's your fault if you can't add 2 and 2 to get 4.
My question exactly: Not only with xerography but each time he indicated an improvement or issue. The Jaunty Professor knows this is the greatest comment ever but he's not going to give the how or why of it!
Basically it is all his opinion. Disney had a few flops and all of a sudden "this 30 year period was awful." Yea comparing any animated film to Pinocchio, it's gonna look like crap. Even those films from the 90s you loved so much.
It was probably more so the philosophical change than anything, "we can churn out this cheaper product and gain the same amount of profit", this drives out the animation veterans such as Bluth and the history reveals the people left behind were not up to snuff causing the "dark age".
Oh, you left out a lot of stuff. For starters: It wasn't just Disney which stopped making those big expensive movies, the 1960s and especially the 1970s are pretty much an animation wasteland. It simply was too expensive. What changed was that computer technology allowed them to really stretch their artistic muscles. It was first used in The Black Cauldron in a very limited capacity, and then for the clock tower scene in The Great Mouse detective. By the time Rescuers Down Under happened, they had the CAPSystem down. So technology was a huge factor in the Disney Renaissance (and the rise of animation in general). Another important factor was "Who framed Roger Rabbit"....due to a number of factors (including Bluth stealing away so much talent), the animation for this was done out house (and apparently in a gruelling speed). Disney went and poached animators from there, but on top of this, when Disney started to raise again with the little mermaid and DB was still struggling to keep his productions financially afloat, all this combined with the trouble during the production of the Troll in central park, well, a lot of animators went back to Disney in order to work on Beauty and the Beast. Basically after having lost so many talent, Disney eventually managed to find fresh blood as well as luring some lost talent back to the studios. Speaking of talents, let not forget Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. They came to the studio with their concept of an animated musical - yes, Disney had music in their movies beforehand, but they tended to be more filler than something to bring the story forward - and on this concept the whole Disney Renaissance was built. It is no accident that most of those movies because Broadway musicals. So, right technology, talented people and a fresh concept, all this applied to an old idea of Walt Disney, and the Disney Renaissance is born.
I left a lot of stuff out because, otherwise, the video would have been twice as long. In my research I did come across things like the CAPS technology, talent such as Menken and Ashman, and the studio's re-discovery of fairy tales and the incorporation of broadway style music. Because there was so much information out there, I decided to keep this video as just an understanding of Disney's Dark Age. I hope to make a part 2 someday and dive into the rest of this fascinating information! Thanks for the comment
Who Framed Roger Rabbit was absolutely a pivotal project not only for Disney but for the Animation Renaissance as a whole. Things like the Spielberg-produced cartoons and Ted Turner's acquisition of the libraries he'd use to start Cartoon Network feel like direct reactions to what happened in 1988.
I am aware, but even with those it was still a wasteland in terms of movies (shorts and TV is a different matter altogether and most of the Russian "movies" are only 40 to 50 minutes long). Granted, there is a small chunk of Czech animation I still haven't seen due to is not being available, most of it being stop motion. I should know, I did an article series looking for the best animated movies of the 20th century, and I had a really hard time even finding movies to analyse for the 1960s....the 1970s were a little bit better, because yes, that was when Europe and Japan started to rise to the challenge, but the really good stuff turned up towards the end of the 1970s/beginning of the 1980s.
And the fact that it was Frank Wells, the president, who kept an uneasy peace between CEO Michael Eisner and Chairman Jeffry Katzenberg. A likely reason why the Disney Renissance peaked in 1994, the year of Wells' death.
I very rarely comment on TH-cam vids but you’ve made some statements I simply can’t let stand. I was born in '65, was raised on Disney in the “Dark Ages” (which also included the 7-year releases of the classics, tho) I have been a student of Disney my whole life, went to CalArts in the mid 80s and studied Animation with the handful of Disney artists who worked with Walt who were still alive. Hal Ambro was my mentor. Yes, you’re right. This was at the bottomed-out point... mentioning “Black Cauldron” was jokingly forbidden, lol, “Great Mouse Detective” was in production and as students, we watched the story reels. (At the warehouse space on Flower Street.) Subsequently, I have worked mostly in the world of live musical theatre and have studied with the best of the craft (including many of the Renaissance writers, story men and composers. I’ve been mentored by Stephen Schwartz for the past decade.) That is my history which allows me a little bit of authority to make the following observations: Though Disney was in a slump, Don Bluth films were/are NOT great films by any measure; they are mediocre at best, particularly in the area of storytelling. On a personal note, the trippy color design makes them virtually unwatchable to me as a trained animation artist… a style he experimented with in “The Aristocats” but completely overused in his own films. (sidenote: the color design of “101 Dalmatians” is some of the best in the history of animated film. The storytelling in the film is lean and superb. You're correct that Walt didn't like the Xerox aesthetic ... but you should know that many in the animation game, including the Nine Old Men loved the Xerography -- and still do-- because it captures the rawness of the artist’s original drawings, including light sketch lines which give the final animation a vitality that was lost in the overly-slick ink and paint process. You're definitely selling 101 Dalmatians extremely short. As a llfe=-long student of the craft and the history, it remains my favorite of all Disney 2D animated films. i’m not alone. This is why it is never considered part of the slump period.) Having lived through the period and judging it in real time as I learned my craft in subsequent years, one of the MAIN factors that was lacking until the Renaissance was in the quality of the music. I don’t feel “An American Tail” holds up any better than the other films of the era, however, the inclusion of “Somewhere Out There” elevated the film. Disney didn’t have a song that effective until “Little Mermaid.” Another huge factor was the advent of computer-aided, then computer-generated animation. Remember “Mary Poppins,” Disney’s biggest hit until the Renaissance, was in ’64 - was structured like a musical AND was using experimental special effects in animation which had been building to that point. This was the magic formula. It took 20+ years for the technology to develop and for artists to figure out how to use computer-aided animation to best effect. The film “Tron,” (’82) The Big Ben chase in “Great Mouse Detective” (‘86) and the spectacular moving backgrounds in “Rescuers Down Under” (’90) were huge strides forward, but the storytelling was still lacking, usually suffering from overly long sequences that had little to do with the overall thrust of the story…and no truly great songwriting. It is true that judging art is completely subjective and depends on personal taste, but please understand that the “Dark Age” was NOT about the quality of the animation. The animators, including the celebrated Nine Old Men and others were at their prime in this period, continuing to produce amazing draftsmanship and character-acting-via -pencil until their retirements (in the 70’s mostly.) Some of their finest work was done in these years. (I point to Marc Davis’ Cruella De Vil, in ‘61 and Milt Kahl’s Madame Medusa in ‘71 which are their respective masterpieces, as recognized by all students and practitioners of hand-drawn animation.) The quality of the animation didn’t drop off until the 80’s as the new blood took over, with only a small handful of supremely talented new artists leading the way surrounded by scores of newbies. Some of the work in “Little Mermaid,” “Aladdin” & “Beauty in the Beast” is FAR, FAR inferior to any single, random frame of “101 Dalmatians” you can pull up. js. It was the storytelling that fell off when Walt’s focus shifted to Mary Poppins and Disneyland, not the quality of the art. (and, sorry, Don Bluth’s storytelling wasn’t much better) In truth, Spielberg was the Walt Disney of that era in terms of storytelling & George Lucas in terms of innovative thinking. This was pretty clear to everyone in the business back then. In his day Walt was considered one of the best story men in Hollywood. When he bowed out during “Sleeping Beauty,” it wouldn’t be long before the lack of a single, great story man started to affect the department’s output. It was storytelling -- dramaturgy -- nothing to do with the quality of the actual animation. (and Xerography simply coincided with Walt’s waning interest in the art form.) What brought about the Renaissance in my opinion? It was that formula stumbled on in “Mary Poppins.” When the use of Musical Theatre storytelling conventions, Broadway-quality scores and computer-aided visuals for backgrounds finally hit their stride together in “The Little Mermaid” -- that’s what truly changed things. (and the shift to screenwriters instead of numerous scene directors) I believe the REAL catalysts for the Disney Renaissance were Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. This is already too long, but I have to also add that Walt NEVER made decisions based on finances. (His brother did.) Walt simply got tired and bored with animation. Plain and simple. The REAL money-hungry people in the org came during the Dark Age… Eisner and Katzenberg. Roy Disney jr. should also be credited with getting Eisner’s power-hungry, money-hungry, non-art-minded ass out of there and SAVING the animation department in 2005 when Eisner had reduced it to straight-to-video rubble and run off most of the truly talented animators left. This was the same time as great talent was emerging (and sometimes migrating from Disney) at Pixar…. but all that’s another story. lol The Animation Dept never fully recovered but Roy is a hero to animators everywhere, Eisner?…no thank you. Sorry for the long diatribe. I simply wanted to set the record straight on a few things from an insider’s perspective. Thanks for taking time to shine light on this history though. Onward and Upward!
Excellent retort! I agree that it was lower quality storytelling that nearly did in Disney, not animation. You can get away with some pretty poor animation if the storytelling is good. Just look at South Park!
Brilliant reply. Thanks for sharing! Ed Catmull has further details on the second dark age in his excellent book "Creativity Inc". Basically he points to the fact that the people waiting to step into the shoes of the master animators/storytellers as they retired were incorrectly promoted. They didn't have the talent or the chops, but they had just been there long enough that they'd EARNED their new positions. It makes sense in a way, and I wonder if that's what resulted in The Black Cauldron, etc.
This presentation is a good example of the dangers of the internet: poorly researched, lacking in knowledge of the industry, no underdtanding of the impact of the opening of the global marketplace etc. It is merely a set of incorrect statements placed in a very particular order to create a "new understanding" of a well known series of events that most people experienced...just not the creator of this drivel. Here's a thought....read some books and learn something before attempting to be an "authority" on a topic. Those commenting have been trying to correct you for 10 months.
The films from the "Dark Age" rule. Art changes, even at a macroscopic level like Disney, 100 Dalmatians, The Jungle Book, Robin Hood, The Rescuers etc are amazing.
This Charming LoveHound I was thoroughly disappointed in the Black Cauldron but to be fair I’m always disappointed if I read the book first and I loved loved loved that book series.
I feel that a lot of the time, people mistake the actual drawing for the animation. Animation is the process, the flow of the character movement, the repeated drawings of characters in a sequence. The drawings in the 'Dark Age' were sketchy and you can see the pencil lines. I personally like this (can you tell?), but I can understand why some don't. Its looks messy. But it is not the animation itself that is messy. Disney are pioneers of animation. They learnt how to animate humans realistically, which is so damn hard. Even the best drawers had steep learning curve when it came to drawing the human form. So while its all well and good saying that xerography sucks, what they seem to be referring to is the 'sketchy' quality of the drawings which starting with Dalmatians and ended with Mermaid. The animation is still incredible. Sorry for long comment!
I just watched The Great Mouse Detective last night! I like the "Dark Age" Disney movies, especially TGMD, Robin Hood, The Aristocats, and The Rescuers. Are they great movies? Not if they are compared to Snow White, Fantasia or Alice. But why compare them? Why not just like, or dislike them on their own merits?
Walt Disney literally donated enough money to save what is now known as "The California School of Arts" and had an entire student body trained to work on his movies. All learning how to do things like animating humans, and all new art styles that had never been attempted before. Learning about the Disney of the 50s-60s is so amazing to me, as someone that was born in the 90s, I am so envious. I have a lot of Old Disney mock art, sketches, etc for their parks. Walt and Roy had an amazing vision.
Halfway through watching, paused for comment.Disagree: xerography looks better. I love seeing the animators’ original drawings. For me, the dark ages start when the STORIES got bad.
literally every animator's opinion, i saw him dissing on it, and I just ha such nerd rage uuughghghghhh, and not to mention, Walt hated it, but to see Milt kahl's and the other 9 old men's direct work, not a clean up artist, preserved on screen was more than we deserved. That's the struggle just like animators thought the tale of princess kagua was stunning, and moviegoers thought it was ugly.
I completely agree that 101 Dalmatians is a fantastic movie and one of Disney's best and this is partly because of its unique art style. I want to bring attention to what someone else mentioned in the comments that with every new era in Disney animation, there's a "proto-period" that preceded it. A period, though a part of the era before, still contributed to the visible transition of the next era. A great example of this is The Great Mouse Detective, though a part of the Bronze Age, it clearly shows promise for what was to come in the future. Same could be said for 101 Dalmatians. The animators used xerography to the best of their creative intentions but the tool would ultimately be used to create compromised cost-cutting productions.
+James Harold It really isn't too much of his opinion. After 101 Dalmations, the Disney Dark age actually did intensify. But tbh, the real beginning to the dark ages was after the failure of Sleeping Beauty. Disney neglected animation, live-action movies were being shifted to as the primary output, animation in the company was getting lower and lower budgets, animation was being recycled from movie to movie, etc.
As someone who was born in 1970, I find that lots of younger Disney fans really don't understand what it was like to grow up during this extended low point for the Disney company. I see opinions on line that seem to indicate that the company's animation output would be nothing without the Renaissance films, but I can tell you that even though they were mostly a well-loved museum piece by the time I was in my teens, the constant re-release of their classics onto the big screen each year helped to continue to make them very relevant to kids. My family owned a Disney Songbook that was published in 1972 and it was already a treasure trove of wonderful songs even before the amazing Menken and Ashman compositions helped launch the renaissance. I was in college by the time that happened, and it was an amazing thing, but I just want younger fans to realize that as great as the Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin and others are, that they are simply excellent films that deserve their spot on the shelf next to Snow White and Pinocchio and Bambi, etc. They should never be allowed to shove those movies that established what Disney is off of that shelf. Classic characters and songs should always hold firm as cornerstones of what Disney means.
Thanks for sharing your story! I agree, every Disney animated feature holds a special place in my heart and young children shouldn't forget about where it all began in movies such as Snow White, Bambi, etc
I totally hear you, I was born in ‘78. I work at a movie theater with a lot of teens and twenty-somethings. One day we were all talking about Disney animated movies and they just couldn’t believe that I never got around to seeing a great deal of the Renaissance classics. Of course I saw the big ones (Lion King, Aladdin, the Little Mermaid) but somehow missed several others (Hercules, Mulan, Pocahontas, and Tarzan).
Pinocchio, Bambi and snow white belong to the Golden era though, also the silver era deliveref probably the most iconic movie during Walt 's life .the dark era is after the jungle book and before the little mermaid
Xerography didn't degrade Disney animation, it just changed the appearance of the line work. It's not as pretty, but as long as the stories are strong it can work. And color xerography and computer manipulation has brought back a lot of what was lost, plus added new possibilities. What killed Disney for me was the loss of stories. There's now one story: Girl meets roguish and handsome wisecracking crook, they have adventures. Hero and or hero's sidekick is in mortal peril, villain stands triumphant, and a last effort defeats him. Hero kisses girl. The end. Cue repeat with different names and settings. The Black Cauldron was the worst of these. The main characters spend the entire movie bickering, then the end of the movie gets too close so out of nowhere the writers have them kiss and live happily ever after. What did Disney learn from that failure? "Not enough songs. That's it. Let's have forest animals do big, splashy Busby Berkeley numbers in the middle of the jungle."
I don't even know if I'd call the line work not as pretty. If you look at Snow White closely, for example, the lines are so inconsistent. It creates an unsettling flickering effect.
Claude i loved the coarseness of the linework from xerography. In fact, for me i actually appreciate the unrefined human quality and rawness of the drawings! It was super economical and added a clear distinct line weight and energy that u don't see in refined contrived cells. Looking back at films like Aladdin and Lion King... The quality was overly polished. Disney Dark Ages all day! And Big Hero 6 is my fave modern disney animated film!
I mean, classic Disney stories weren't much more complex though. I could summarize Snowhite with "girl is born from royalty but gets run out by a jealous witch who demands her death, but the man she hired to kill such girl gets cold feet and lies about actually killing her while she goes living with dwarves. Witch realizes this and goes to kill the girl herself but fails, the end." The Sleeping Beauty might even be simpler: fairy curses little girl to fall in an eternal slumber unless True Love's KissTM wakes her (and like that's such a stupid line of action too, why not just kill her, why add an explicit loophole to the spell if you want her dead as punishment for not being invited to a party?), plan fails when True Love's KissTM happen, everyone lives happily ever after. If you want to summarize Frozen, as many problems I have with that story, it would get a bit more complicated, because there's layers to Elsa's trouble and there's layers that need to be undone to fully understand what's going on, and that's while ignoring the whole trolls subplot. But you don't see me dismissing any of the "simpler" plots. Because you know, a good plot doesn't need to be convoluted and complicated, that notion is actually what I hate about modern storytelling. Lost destroyed storytelling in this sense, because no story needs to be that complicated and forcibly cryptic to that level, just like true tragedy doesn't need to be forwarded by endless deaths (looking at Game Of Thrones and The Walking Dead here). A good story is a story that stands on its own two feet WITHOUT needing tons of crutches and plot devices to be kept up. Less is more in this context as well. Basically, fuck this idea that good stories are necessarily complicated and brainy. As a story, Big Hero 6 holds up pretty well. So does Wreck-it Ralph, so do Wall-e, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Ratatouille, Inside Out, or Atlantis which is a CRIMINALLY underrated movie. They're just stories that work, and they're animated well, and they have good music and artistic ideas.
I strongly disagree with your chronology but more importantly with your assesment. The downfall of Disney on those years was not due to technique, nor a resullt of xerography, but due to the competition of tv and more importantly because its limited thematic variety. "Animal tales" were derided as the stuff of saturday morning cartoons, and Amblin didn't fire better either. Also, you left out a lot of stuff, like the importance of who framed Roger Rabbit, and the exodus of a lot of talent when Katzenberg got in.
Yeah, I feel like people need to realise that unlike an actual documentary, any buffoon with a microphone and decent editing skills can make one of these. Too often random videos or opinion pieces on TH-cam are taken as gospel because they think that because someone had enough spare time and dedication to make an entire video about a topic then clearly they must know what they are talking about. Unfortunately that is just not the case all of the time and we get stuff like this, a video that says it's talking about the cause of an era in Disney's history but is actually a well disguised excuse to say that Disney's old style was great and xerography is an inherently lesser form of creation. There are certainly nuggets of good information here but it's clouded with this bold statement and lack of a lot of crucial information that you have listed above which would be necessary to include in the video leading people to believe it was the quality of the movies themselves that caused the downfall and not other factors.
mate, i had to stop watching after 3 minutes. you don't have a clue what you are talking about. the animation is the MOVEMENT. the quality of animation has been compromised in some disney films, when they used rotoscoping over film of actors (such as snow white) or recycling animation. the animation of 101 dalmations onwards is great, any animator would tell you so. what you don't like is the less polished look. actually its more graphical. the whole style of 101 dalmations is a high point in animation for its flat graphical style. and animators really like the look of these less polished films.
Lists/cites xerography as the cause of the Dark Age. Shows The Black Couldron as the pinnacle of said Dark Age. But the failure of The Black Couldron has absolutely nothing to do with the xerox method.
I really appreciate this video but disagree that the dark ages films are lesser. They are darker in content, but the stories are sometimes richer because they are heavier, but kids and parents of young kids don't go to Disney for thought provoking and heavy. They want lighter and sweeter lessons.
Fox and hound might not be the best adaptation (though I haven't read the book) but it works as its own very well. If my memory serves right it was not only Disney films but other animations overall having kinda melancholic base-rhythm.
I was never to fond of the "Dark Ages" title. Too dramatic and overreaching. If I was to rename it I would call it the early modern animation era. That bridge between the stiffer, super clean early animation and the smoother and more relaxed modern style we see today. Furthermore "Dark Ages" implies an era of no advancement or some type of regression, when in reality this was an era for major development in animation. Notably the beginning of computer animation, but also a shift between using animation as a medium for children's story telling to a medium which could be used for adult story telling.
Kristie Puffen I like to just forget about the "ages" altogether because I like so many of the xerox films. Personally, I arrange it as classic-xerox-CAPS -CG, that way there's a much more clear distinction.
I like overly dramatic titles like "The Dark Ages". It brings a bit of, well, drama to what would otherwise be considered kiddie fodder by many. And that's just depressing. Still, to be fair, Fantasia is darker than anything produced in the "dark age", so you could argue that it started, albeit periodically, a lot earlier than the 60's. Hell, even the donkey scene in Pinocchio or Bambi's mother is darker than the later stuff.
Well the Dark Ages doesn't mean the tone of the movies during the 60s-80s, most would be classified as rather light-hearted fare. It simply means an era when Xerox eliminated the need for manually inking (which made the overall cost cheaper) and the era without Walt Disney at the helm. If I was to say one HUGE shift as far as movies from this era vs the previous era was the emphasis on character development. Previous films we very visual oriented, this era became dialogue oriented. The "renaissance" films combined these two elements thanks to technological improvements.
You're not wrong, Kristie, but I don't think it's inaccurate to notice the influence the 70's had on Disney films, just as that decade's visual and cultural aesthetic had a strong influence on most everything produced at the time. Plot lines were more serious and character-driven (as you said). And the Xerox method contributed to making the visuals look rather stark and bleak, in my opinion. And combine all that, and you're a long way from the happy, colorful singalongs of earlier times. So while the term "Dark Age" doesn't officially refer to the look or feel of the films produced during this era, to me, about half of the films do correlate with this darker perception I have of the decade's cultural themes of introspection and psychological drama and horror. Other people may think of disco and lots and lots of orange colors when they think of the 70's. I think of Bergman, The Exorcist, cocaine and lots and lots of plane hijackings... :)
he sounds critically dehydrated... i only made it halfway and couldn’t finish his video. hope he learns from this so his future content can thrive cause he seems to present decent ideas.
If you ever get a chance to watch the special features in 101 Dalmatians, they have some good interviews with some animators on the movie. They talk about how Mr. Disney didn't like the new way to animate, preferring the affect of Sleeping Beauty. The style was too modern. The art director of 101 Dalmatians and Mr Disney had a rocky relationship afterwards, and it wasn't until close to Mr Disney's death, that Mr Disney gave the idea that he forgave the art director for the animation choice. And using a xerox for all those dots on those dalmatians? Probably a lifesaver for the traditional animators. So from a corporate level, sure, it's a money thing. From an artist level, sure it gave a distinctly different style, but it was much better for production and continuity.
+MikaelaWorks Disney really did completely change his tune. I remember 2 stories from the 60s. One was during the development of the animated sequence in Mary Poppins. Late at night, he would go looking in trash cans and pulling out dis-guarded artwork that he believed was NOT like a traditional Dumbo style and pin them up on the designer's desk. The other story I heard was that he believed/wished that he was doing the Yellow Submarine feature.
How can anyone with a straight face say, that the animation quality in 101 Dalmatians is worse than the one in Cinderella, Peter Pan or Lady and the Tramp? The Xerox-movies are different, but very beautiful as well, especially 101 Dalmatians where they picked a style that works perfectly with the movie setting and the Xerox characteristics. In my opinion it's visually way more stunning than the flat, boring, lifeless and bland Silver Age films (excluding Sleeping Beauty). If you want to have a look at real bad Disney animation, maybe take a closer look next time you watch "Beauty and the Beast". At times it looks like a Saturday morning cartoon. But hey, it's a renaissance film, so it has to be top notch.
Agree, I love the style of 101 Dalmatians and would not class it as a part of the dark age... I almost agree with everything you said with the exception of Beauty and the Beast, I think the animation is gorgeous.
I admit the part with Beauty and the Beast was exaggerated, though there is some truth to it. The towns people are really sloppy animated and designed and there is one shot of the castle (I believe it's from when Belle finds it first and is looking up to it) in which they totally fucked up the perspective. You can definitely tell from some parts they really had to rush it to get it done in time for the release date. Anyway, I still like the movie very much, even though I appreciate it way more for its great music, characters, dynamic camera angles and the staging of the musical numbers than for the animation itself.
Agreed. I'd still consider the death of Disney and post-Jungle-Book films to be the start of the dark age. I think the prof has a bee in his bonnet about xerography, but I also think the effect he sees is is compounded by the shift to a more graphic rather than realist style, started with Sleeping Beauty. I'm not really sure that _not_ scribing a single flat line around the drawings of the likes of Milt Kahl, Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston etc. etc. killed them dead. Growing up watching Disney's xerographed films, especially The Jungle Book, I don't mind the look. I thought the ocassional hairy line [halfway to a 'boiling line'] gave it a little life and interest. There were a number of problems that contributed to the dark age, IMO. If xerography was one, it was a little one.
You just said that Disney were about to shutdown the stadio because of money loss over sleeping beauty and the cost of making them. Then they find a cheap alternative that left them stay open and apparently they only care about money?
Although I was born in 1997 and didn't grow up in disney renaissance era, I still remember watching them growing up in the early 2000s. So sad disney doesn't make their movies the way they used to make em. It's now frozen that's becoming more popular. It's really overrated
I recommend reading Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination Book by Neal Gabler. In 1919, Walt Disney was working for Grey advertising and met Ub Iwwerks. Their friendship helped Walt Disney Studios succeed. Disney had the vision and Ub Iwerks with brilliant talent as a cartoon artist in the studio.
The new animators weren’t mentioned. In the early eighties, all of the original animators were retiring or had already retired, and new animators were coming in. The new animators were anxious to please and tried very hard very eagerly, but their eagerness and innocence and lack of experience was a huge factor in the creation of The Black Cauldron.
Great video! The renaissance gets a lot of shine, but that period leading up to it is just as important in understanding the renaissance. This video deserves more views
I think it's a little unfair to say that Xerography was as bad as you say it was. When you're involved in a commercial art, you have to accept that experimenting with new technology isn't always going to yield perfect results, especially when you don't have someone with a big, creative vision directing how you're going to use it best. Sure, the "Dark Age" quality wasn't as good as it's forebears and certainly not as good as the Renaissance, but it's still great animation and art design, albeit their storytelling would take a while to recover, but that's why we need better writers in the first place. Dalmatians encapsulates that by trying to figure out how to use Xerography and a few other technologies (I think rotoscoping was used for the overlapping/repeating movement of the puppies) and if it meant finding a cheaper way in order to still be making film the next day, I think that's fine. For a time. I think the animators were perhaps impatient (although Bluth leaving was good and got animation out of a small monopoly), but also the execs didn't give the animators enough leeway to see how they could push the technology and make great films instead of mediocre ones. Flaws on both sides, really. Now, one could argue that Pixar's films (particularly the older ones) were very experimental e.g. Monsters, Inc. for hair, creature movement and textures, Finding Nemo for its water effects and atmosphere, or even A Bug's Life for naturalistic things like tree bark and grass. All experimental, all good films, in my opinion. But the difference between Pixar and Disney back in '61 was youth and vision. Pixar had the freedom to push their new tech further AND make great stories built around that. Disney execs had neither youth nor vision, so all they could do was keep the company ticking over to keep investors happy. In conclusion, I see your point, but just think it's unfair to see the melodramatically named "Dark Age " as the worst thing in the world.
Infatti dagli anni 70 sono cominciati ad entrare nuovi animatori che hanno portato mano a mano una ventata di freschezza e preso in mano l' eredità degli artisti storici. XD All' epoca Reitherman e co. temevano che dopo di loro il reparto animazione avrebbe chiuso. Meno male che sono corsi ai ripari. XD
Every animated company if you think about it goes through their Dark Ages and come out better for it although there are some that you just wonder how are they still in business look at all the Disney knock off movies and you'll see what I mean.
True. Bluth didn't stand a chance throughout the 90s. His only comeback was Anastasia in 1997 and then disappeared from the studio in 2000 after Titan A.E.
I miss Don Bluth. I know he's still around, it's just that we haven't had a Don Bluth film since Titan A.E. back in 2000. The world needs more Don Bluth animation.
I think the issue with the Dark Ages starting with Xerography in '61 is that it ignores the consistency in storytelling that continued with Walt's personal involvement up to the Jungle Book. Sure he was busy with other projects but he was still widely influential in the production of the post-'61 features. Xerography/technology wasn't the issue, it was the storytelling. Walt Disney's pipeline, which was purely storyboard driven, wasn't exactly a traditional studio pipeline and didn't work if you didn't have a strong story editor to oversee things, which Walt was. When he died, the studio kept doing it his way, which resulted in the widely known dark ages films. It wasn't until Katzenberg/Eisner stepped in and forced proper screenwriters to collaborate with the animators and provide structure that the renaissance really began to take shape.
+stitchcastle i think there is some truth to this. As I understand it after Disney died the studio began making decisions by committee based on what they thought Disney would do. They became too safe, and there are a number of examples of bad choices as much for the live action as for the animation. Smith! is a good example. The film had a timely theme, and it's the adult relationship between Smith, and his wife was handled in a very adult way. But apparently, a board director (who has never been named) took one look at a scene where the white man (Smith) ends up in a fight wrongly accused of being racist and ordered the film go out with minimal promotion. This was also the period where they began cutting scenes from films like Treasure Island. Even films make by Disney were not safe!
Some of the best Disney films were made during the so-called "Dark/Bronze Age" but I agree that the quality of the animation was (sometimes) poor. As far as story is concerned, though; The Great Mouse Detective, The Jungle Book, The Aristocats, Robin Hood, Oliver and Company, 101 Dalmatians, The Fox and the Hound, and Rescuers are some of my favorites. (I personally thought that both The Black Cauldron and Sword and the Stone were beautiful, but boring story-wise.) Also, I think the Xenography style was perfect for "The Many Adventures of Winnie The Pooh" and "Robin Hood" which both intentionally have a illustrative "folk art" vibe, and would not have made as much sense if the were created using the traditional Disney animation style.
FINALLY ! a video recognizing what Eisner did to save disney and push it into a new era. He took a ton of risks in his time at disney, and while not all of them paid off, disney wouldn't have survived if he hadn't. He greenlighted so many movies that built the foundation of what disney is today. If only Iger could stop ruining everything. -___-
You forgot the fact of the global situation. Globalization became a thing and make Disney films reach world-wide making so a lot of money. The first Disney film showcase at a theater in my country was the Little Mermaid, which became a great success. Don't get me wrong, Disney is great and makes greats movies, and there was and improvement, but I believe it was the fact that Disney films started shipping worldwide that made de comeback of the company.
I somewhat agree however I would actually say the worse era at 1942 to 1949 between the Golden Age ( ending Bambi) and the Silver age , the Wartime era. during that time many of the animations weren't even really movies and due to government control during World War II the quality of them were pretty terrible and this led to Disney almost going bankrupt until Cinderella happened. I would consider this more of a Bronze Age due to the it brought new cheaper animation technique that kept some quality in a time when most animated media we're getting price dropped due to the creation of television pre 3D techniques. Also I don't want to say Winnie the Pooh from the Dark Ages
IMO Emperor's New Groove is its own category and i wouldn't call it the greatest. I love that film and i still make references to it whenever i have a Disney-related conversation but it doesn't add up to the Renaissance because it feels like it was a one-time thing made for laughs that the production nailed in effort and let go. i haven't seen much marketing for that film and the Renaissance had a Disney magic aesthetic.
If you can find it (and I admit that it's really hard) check out a documentary called THE SWEATBOX, which is about the making of the film and it's near disaster.
Patrick Hogan the renaissance, if I’m correct, was all of the 90s Disney animated movies, and The Little Mermaid. Emperor’s New Groove, while fantastic, was released the year after the renaissance ended.
The ACTUAL "Dark Ages" of Disney were at the time of the "Golden Age" of PIXAR... While Pixar was nailing it, Disney was releasing crap like "HOME ON THE RANGE" and "CHICKEN LITTLE"
It is so easy to be a purist in anything, all you have to do is to ignore reality. Would you really have preferred that Disney had gone under than continued to create less that magnificent animated movies. If you had had your way there would have been no renaissance.
While I am personally not a big fan of the Xerography-process, there is in fact a case to be made for it from an artistic standpoint, which is why I am objecting to your claim that the "Dark Age" (a rather sensationalistic term, in my opinion). Many of the animators were really happy with the xerography process, because for the first time, you could see their real drawings come to life. They were not cleaned up and processed by other artists, but you got to see directly what Davis, Johnston, Kimball etc were drawing directly on the screen. So you could in fact see their drawings and the power behind them, the weight, the movement, all the little details. It was Disney himself who was very disappointed by the process and did not like the result, because it destroyed the illusion he was aiming for: The creation of a painting coming to life. So, in many ways, it is a matter of taste. Do you want to see the illlusion of a painting that comes to life in front of you or do you prefer the real force of the drawings the artist has come up with without someone tempering with it? Personally, I think the artistic decline should rather be measured by the wildly increased use of re-used animation or the increasing lack of depth in the screenplays rather than just the use of xerography. I prefer to use "Bronze Age" (if one had to classify it at all) for the era after Walt up to "The Great Mouse Detective". If one had to use the term "Dark Age", I would only use it as a sub-classification for the movies from "The Reasuers" onward, when the studio was nearly falling apart and losing its grip.
I loved A Troll in Central Park as a kid. Haven't seen it since so I don't know if it holds up, but I remember thinking the final showdown being a thumb-wrestling match was a ton of fun
Maaan I was always amazed at how realistic the movements of the human characters in early Disney cartoons were, it just shows how much effort the animators back then put into their work,drawing the scenes frame by frame getting every single detail of the characters movement correct. Hats off to walt and all the other animators back then who made animation really come to life with their hardwork.
Never mind the FACT, the so called 'dark ages' you refer to, produced the most ICONIC Disney films. The Jungle Book, The Sword and the Stone, 101 Dalmatians, The Rescuers, and yes even The Great Mouse Detective (which actually kicked off the rebirth of the animation studio, before The Little Mermaid).
That's funny how Disney lost making "NIMH" because it was "too dark" for them. So much of the stuff Disney puts out is a lot darker than "The Secret of NIMH"! XD
If Disney didn't scrapped their Rats of NIMH adaptation, I wonder if they will make it more light-hearted and more family friendly than the original novel version? I'm very glad Don Bluth decided to adaptated it instead and kept the dark themes for his movie adaptation. Disney has adaptated a lot of stories that were originally too dark and changed them to more family friendly adaptations. There are also other non-Disney adaptations of the stories that Disney have adaptated that are a lot darker and more faithful to the original versions than the Disney versions. Of course, Disney have made some movies that were very dark like Hunchback of the Notre Dame and the Black Cauldron. Well, I remember that I have watched a non-Disney HoND animated adaptation where Quasimodo actually died (I think I heard that he died in the original novel too) at the end of the movie and I also remember not being very happy with the ending. I also have seen various other animated adaptations of The Little Mermaid that were very faithful to the original fairytale and in some of them that I have watched, the Little Mermaid died and dissolved into seafom at the the end just like in the original version of the fairytale. I have heard that Walt Disney originally planned to use the original sad ending for his animated adaptation before the other people decided to change it to a happy ending after Walt Disney's death, but I'm not sure if it was true.
i imagine that the black cauldron was disney's response to the favourable response to NIMH. "oh geez, kids like the dark stuff. pull out the concept art for the cauldron idea!"
Animation in general had been in decline since the early 1950's. At that time, it didn't make sense economically to produce the quality animation that was prominent in the 1930's and 40's, largely due to increased production costs and the rise of television. Hence, producers cutting corners or the closure of many studios. The xerox photography did compromise quality animation in the short run, but brought it back as technology advanced in the long run.
@Vimacone, since the 1950's? Sorry, but that's complete B.S, especially where there's proof that this isn't the case, when we got back to back Disney quality in the 90's like Beauty in the Beast, Pocahontas, Aladdin, Lion King
@Warjay, Simply look at the Warner Bros. cartoons produced in the late 50s and early 60s. The art and animation quality in them is well below that of the 40s and early 50s. The storytelling in them is awful, too. Mostly recycling gags (if not outright footage) from earlier cartoons. WB closed its animation studio in 1963, and not because of one bad year. Google "the 50 greatest cartoons" Except for "What's Opera Doc" (1957), there isn't another cartoon on the list between 1955 and 1969 (where "Bambi Meets Godzilla" makes the list) Fritz Freling went on to create the studio that made the mediocre Pink Panther cartoons. The late 50s saw the rise of Hanna/Barbera (who had produced the Tom & Jerry cartoons for MGM) and their super cheap style of animation designed to fit into TV level budgets. Disney actually copied some of their techniques trying to reduce production costs. Watch Scooby Doo or Flintstones and then watch Robin Hood sometime and see if it doesn't look an awful lot like a Hanna/Barbera production. The 1950s saw Mister Magoo wining Academy Awards for best animated short. Rankin and Bass outsourced all their animation to Japanese studios because they couldn't get the quality they wanted for the budget they had in the states. So, yeah, it wasn't just Disney animation going through a dark age, and that decline started before 1960. But it wasn't just about art quality. There was a tiredness to the whole medium, a dearth of originality. Some of it was the rise of Television, some of it involved the aging animators still coasting on stuff they'd done 20 years ago, some of it involved the time-intensive (and therefore expensive) methods of producing cartoons, some of it involved the changing tastes of the new audiences in the '60s. Disney was capturing that audience with his TV shows (like Zorro and Davey Crockett) and live action movies (like Mary Poppins) by that creativity didn't really reach his animation department. The late 60s and early 70s was a low point in the movie industry as a whole.
@lilenborg, so you don't feel like the 90's and early 2000s were a great time for cartoons? There was far more variety in TV cartoons than there is now.
Oh yes. I'm old enough that I was there when Smurfs, Transformers, & He-man hit television. Heck, I remember when you could still catch Johnny Quest, Herculoids, Superfriends, and the pre-He-man Filmation versions of Star Trek, Batman (with Bat-mite), Flash Gordon, and Tarzan on Saturday morning. My first date with my wife was going to see Little Mermaid. That's what I meant when I said that the 60s and 70s were a "dark age" for animation generally, not just for Disney. In the '80s a number of things began to change; one was Star Wars creating a demand for sci-fi programs and animation was a much cheaper way to produce sci-fi than live action was. For Disney, their revival had to do with new leadership and a general focus on quality, not just in the art and animation, but in the music, and scripts, too. Using the computer for inking, coloring, and special effects, also reduced the production time and costs. On television it had to do with FCC deregulation allowing alliances between animation companies and toy makers that made it profitable to put in the time and money to make cartoons since they would essentially serve as half-hour commercials for a toy line. "Moichendizing! That's where the real money of the movie is made!" - Yogurt
Actually, I consider the Golden Age of Disney to be from Snow White to Lady and the Tramp. Silver Age to be Sleeping Beauty to Aristocats. And Bronze Age to be from Robin Hood to The Black Cauldron. I personally believe the Renaissance started with The Great Mouse Detective, but no one seems to care.
Just one thing - I lived in Britain for many years & never heard about the Black Cauldron being a failure - it is a Welsh legend and, as I remember, the Disney version was wildly popular in all parts of the UK - my family loved it & one of my teenaged nephews saw it 6 times with his friends!
Everyone always loves to point to The Black Cauldron box office performance as an indicator of its worth as a movie, but it's honestly unfair to do so. The fact is it premiered at one of the most inopportune times in movie history. It went squarely against Back to The Future which premiered two weeks before.Then it had to contend with National Lampoon's European Vacation, and Pee Wee's Big Adventure just a couple days later. If you look at all the movies that came out in July 1985 the gross box office for every movie, but the ones mentioned were not the great. With the exception of Mad Max and Silverado, but those are far from family flicks. I remember seeing European Vacation while being PG-13 at the age of 7 and I was by far not the only kid there watching it. After watching EV we went right back in and watched Pee Wee.
summersophia29 oh baloney. I live in Utah, and no one thought it was too scary to be shown. Maybe too scary for little kids, but not too scary for kids 9 and up.
jason c maybe in utah, but it was pulled very quickly from southern theaters. I still have my promo Burger King watch somewhere. It was the first PG 13 Disney movie and they made the cauldron born scene scarier than normal for a Disney film to attract teenagers. But alas, Care Bears beat their asses!! Lol.
When I saw The Black Cauldron, I thought it was just dull and empty. The pacing was terrible (I remember thinking, about 20 minutes in, "jeez, when is the movie going to actually start?") and it just... it's hard to find the words for it, but it just felt like it was missing some vital spark that actually made it come alive. It's like they sewed all the pieces together, but didn't zap it with the lightning bolt to make it stand up and start lurching about on its own. I've never seen another movie where the only reaction I had to it was "Well, I guess that happened." It didn't even make me mad, that's how bland an experience it was.
For the looks of it, this channel is just starting up (and this is my first video here). Keep with the quality of this video and you'll have a huge channel one day. I'm suscribing.
You're on point with this. One other thing to consider is the "limited animation" that destroyed most animation from the 1950s until the Disney Renaissance (and currently hurts post-Renaissance 2D American animation).
Great video! This is rife with interesting history and compelling facts and reasoning as to how the Dark/Bronze Age came to be and Disney's struggle to get out of it. However, I do have a few gripes with this video. For one, you mention at 2:20: "Because the losses were so devastating, he had to consider shutting down the studio's animation division." And then you explain how they discovered xerography, which allowed them to continue making animated features. But then at 3:42 you say: "And deciding to do that showed me that Disney was no longer concerned in expanding the animation industry..... ....And were more concerned about making a profit." Wait, what? You admitted that he had two choices, use xerography or be forced to not make animated films anymore. How is that in any way indicative that they were more concerned about "making a profit"? Now, to be fair, later in the video you say that they used the xerography process for the next 28 years, which I would say you could make an argument for that being a compromise of their integrity in favor of higher profits, sure. However, with the way the video's structured as it is now, it doesn't come across that way. The sentence about Disney being more concerned about making a profit comes right off the heels of your "I don't care about 101 Dalmatians" spiel, so it gives the effect that you're saying it in reference to that film, which is patently false and undermines your point unintentionally. Also, you're incredibly vague about why the process of xerography is even compromising the animation quality at all. You barely mention its weaknesses, and instead say super nebulous things like "The movies they made just lacked the wonder and awe they were once synonymous with". I mean, sure, you show clips of these films, and the more "sketchy" nature of them is apparent, but other than that, you keep insisting on a premise for which you don't have any examples to back up. Anyway, I suppose these are more nitpick-y than main criticisms, but I think they're important nonetheless. Also, I apologize; this comment came off more negative than I was originally intending lol. Honestly I really did love this video, and everything else was great. I just think if you take these things into consideration for the future you'll have even better, more coherent video essays! Keep up the good work! :)
Sorry my point didn't come across the way I had hoped! I appreciate the constructive criticism. I want to continue to improve my work, glad you enjoyed it :)
NOW it's all about Marvel movies, Star Wars and occasional generic cgi movies with generic songs in them. But they're making billions so they must be good -_- Disney doesn't have the balls to even make a movie with their original characters anymore let alone in 2D. They've turned their back on Mickey, Goofy and Donald.
I feel like Disney is currently going through its Dark Age with the live action remakes and sequels. The current Disney movies fail to represent that brand in a positive light and simply paint it as unoriginal.
The problem is that Disney now, rely so much on the beautiful animation, that they do not see the importance of a great and captivating story anymore. And kids today are used to that, so they don't complain. But I miss the dramatic and mature flair of the movies up until the 2000s, where I think Disney were really creative with their material. Stuff like Treasure Planet & Atlantis showed much promise in what Disney was doing, but somehow they switched completely into something else. You can also see the difference in the music. Disney used to use these epic arrangements, which could've been something out of Phantom Of The Opera or The Secret Garden . But now it's more about creating hit songs for TH-cam....
It's funny that the films considered the "dark age" basically COMPRISED my childhood. The Rescuers, Robin Hood, and the Aristocats?? My holy Disney childhood trilogy.
Is there a particular reason xerography produces inferior animation to hand tracing the art? Either way you're getting a copy, so why is there a difference?
It just looks sketchier. If you did a side by side comparison of a Disney movie from the 50s and a Disney movie from the 70s, you can tell there's a difference
I don't feel there is really a comparison. You are talking about one type of animation in comparison to another. The same as today's animation does not look like the animation of the 50s. Does that make one better than the other? No, it's like comparing realism to impressionism. You can't, because it's apples to oranges, and is really a matter of preference, and nuance. It's better to say a style doesn't appeal to you than to say one is good, and one is not.
I think the "sketchiness" was because xerography was only capable of black lines at the time. Secret of NIMH used the same process but was the first that was the first feature to use colored lines according to google.
I feel like because animation is art, it's strange to say "sketchyness" is bad, there's no empirical reason for it to be bad you just don't like it. Especially since people love that movie, clearly most people weren't bothered.
CGI is actually great. Infact, most movies HAVE CGI but you just never notice it (An example is mad max). Once you see very rarely bad CGI, of course youll notice it and think CGI Is bad. But if CGI is bad, that means Pixar is bad. 3d Animation is CGI.
I don't mind CG but I do wish that there was still 2D movies. ...well there is Teen Titans Go to the movies... Half of the reason I watch anime is because most of it is 2D. Disney has been using computer effects since the 80's though.
You forgot to talk about the importance of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It was more than influential & its success proved that audiences still loved animation, even more adult, so long as the story was good.
I loved almost all of those films from the Bronze Age as a child. I honestly don't think the renaissance was due to the movies being better quality but just easier to sell.
The so-called dark age films were some of my favourites growing up. While I love most of their 90s material, I feel that there's a certain quirk and magic to films like The Rescuers that Disney has lost over the years. The Renaissance might have brought them back financially and critically, but it also led to the very glossy and somewhat sterile state of their films today. Maybe it's just me, but I'll take Black Cauldron over Frozen any day.
I would like to know your opinions of the Black Cauldron. IMO, the Prydain series is one of the greatest 'kids' stories before Harry Potter (kids is in quotes, as I still love reading HP and Prydain as an adult). But Disney took the story, drowned it in a burlap sack, beat it, burned it, and tossed it down the sewer. I never saw it in the Theatre, and was excited when I was finally able to rent it on VHS. I was so disappointed. There are some good things about it, but man, the story team really lost their bearings. Rock bottom indeed.
It's been a few years since I've seen the movie but I do remember that I liked the character design of the villain, his minions, and his castle and I also liked some of the animation. But other than that, the movie didn't really make an impact on me. With the recent surge of live action remakes of Disney animated classics, Disney should look no further than The Black Cauldron because this movie needs a second try.
Excellent video! Thank you so much 😊 ! I’m surprised you didn’t go further and mention the animation teams that made the revival possible, for me, my favorite Disney animator is Glen Keane, and he plays a pivotal role in the Disney Revival! I was hoping you would talk about him a bit, because I would have loved to hear your opinion on him and how he affected Disney! 😊 Great Content! Thank you for posting!
Most of mine are from the "Dark Ages", too. Also, first time I hear that period being called that. And I'm honestly not a big fan of the "Renaissance".
Haha I'm actually not! My point is that the Disney Dark Age should not be solely based on the absence of Walt Disney himself and that it is important to recognize that the quality of Disney's animation went down during those years and why.
My issue with CGI animation is that it really is lazy as far as TV shows that use it and alot of the shows just aren't interesting enough to make up for looking budgeted. There's some good CGI TV shows but they are mostly limited to Disney Junior or are the older ones like Reboot and also Code Lyoko. Movies done in CGI animation depends on the movie. I'm not too big on Pixar but I do like Up and I actually liked Disney's Big Hero 6 for some reason (I liked the cuddly robot I guess?) Also I can't say I really like DreamWorks outside of the first 2 Shrek movies and Shrek 4 and also How to Train Your Dragon. I did enjoy Happy Feet. And The Miraculous Ladybug and Cat Noir is pretty interesting (I haven't seen but 2 episodes of it). My problem comes more from the story line of the show or if it's funny enough for me to at least enjoy what I am watching. I like action, drama, and comedy mixed up together (which is why Teen Titan's Go is unwatchable for me).
That's because Disney WAS cutting corners with xerography and reusing old animation assets, such as copying old animation cell and scenes... So, still falls under the category of "people misusing the method rather than the method itself".
this video is ridiculous. "UGH CHEAPER LINES RUINED EVERYTHING AND INSTANTLY MADE THEM GO FROM ARTISTS TO MONEY GRABBERS" lol christ, what the hell. all it did was just that... make the lines look less polished. you still had the same mind blowing golden age animators who are possibly the most skilled animators of ALL TIME. Jungle Book and 101 Dalmatians still has some of the most impressive animation of all time by geniuses like Milt Kahl. the latter ABSOLUTELY beats the 'muh golden age' animators - I'm sure even Glen Keane wouldn't claim superiority over Kahl. the quality of the films did decline over time but it wasn't about 'buhhh where did the polished go'. letting that small element have such a huge impact on you is ridiculous.
Thank you so much to everyone who watched this video! :) If you felt like it wasn't enough, don't worry, I got you. Check out, “What Made the Disney Renaissance Era so Special? PART TWO" th-cam.com/video/aqnUDxxY1qg/w-d-xo.html
I don't know how I made it to this video, but I loved it and you earned a new subscriber. You deserve so many more than 7.9k
The real Disney dark age was in the 2000's.
The Robin Hood anthropomorphic cartoon movie was good in my opinion.
I have to disagree with your Bronze Age concept, as a few of the early-mid 60s movies Disney made were great. Keep in mind Mary Poppins was great & won awards, while 101 Dalmations was clearly not of lesser quality even though it was Xenographed. Also I would argue that "Oliver & Company" was the film that started Disney's Renaissance as it was actually able to surpass "An American Tale" by leaps & bounds even though it fell short of the 1st "Land Before Time".
Allow me to explain, through "Oliver & Company" Disney managed to recapture the cute animal animated film success the company had in the days of 101 Dalmations & before. They then recaptured the Disney Princess success with The Little Mermaid & were on a roll after that. If Oliver & Company hadn't been successful would "The Lion King" still have been as great as it is? There was far more than Xenography for what made the Bronze Age & "Oliver & Company" managed to start solving those other problems.
As for the comment about Disney's Robin Hood, keep in mind Disney has 1 of the worst Robin Hood adaptations. If you want to see a good adaptation look to Live Action, The 2018 Robin Hood Movie is quite possibly the best Robin Hood movie thus far.
@@TheEiasam Are you kidding? Emperors New Groove, Monsters Inc, Lilo and Stitch, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Up. Plus they did many good live action movies. Remember The Titans, Princes Diaries, Santa Clause 2, Holes, Lizzie McGuire, Pirates of the Caribbean, Freaky Friday, Miracle, Teenage Drama Queen, National Treasure, Chronicles of Narnia... Wayyy better than the crap we had in the 70s and 80s.
It's a little frustrating that, in one breath, you say that Disney HAD to start xeroxing their drawings in order to LITERALLY SAVE THE COMPANY BECAUSE IT'S TOO EXPENSIVE TO MAINTAIN OTHERWISE, and that this decision kept the entire studio from going under .... and then ... a few moments later, you say "disney changed man, now it's all about makin dem profits"
... can we accept that not EVERY cost-cutting decision made by a company is done with ill will and greed?
Plus the aesthetic of the hand drawn animator's lines has its own appeal. Not as polished, but definitely has more character to it.
Agreed. If someone stole food because they were starving would you call them greedy and selfish?
Yeah we should feel bad for poor Disney
@@RAAZR- no one said anything about feeling bad for Disney,,,
Strangely, most of my favourite Disney movies are those made in so called "Dark Era".
I still like a lot of the movies from the Dark Age too! I just wanted to shed light on this era for those that didn't know about it
Why? Does it really matter? It's a very subjective thing. Your generation may call it the dark era, but to many people who grew up during that time they are the BEST Disney movies, because they are ours. Stop pitting one era against another, and just love it, like it, don't like it based on your own personal preference. I'm not a fan of Frozen, or Tangled. It doesn't make them less. It just makes them not to my liking!
The Jaunty Professor my previous post was meant for you.
Same.
Me too, especially The Aristocats and Oliver and Company
A big part of your argument is that Disney's dark ages began because they chose to use xerography, which compromised the quality of the animation. But while you make that claim, you don't actually point out any ways that xerography compromised quality. 101 Dalmatians is a fantastic movie, not because it made a lot of money but because it has a wonderful and entertaining story, fantastic characters (not to mention one of Disney's best villains), and absolutely gorgeous animation. I'm just not sure I buy your argument that xerography played much of a role.
The only reason is that some people aren't fond of the style since it makes it look scratchy and lack the attractive, smooth, and distinct animation of films released before. One of my family members says that's the reason they didn't like the films of that era, but while I found it noticable, I don't really mind it.
Thank you for that explination! That's really interesting. I learned something new today. :)
Maggie Orr Your welcome. I actually love the films that used Xerox, especially 101 Dalmatians, Winnie the Pooh, and The Aristocats.
Aside from what Kenya pointed out, another big reason people criticize the Xerox Era of Disney is because that's when you started to see what a lot of people refer to as "recycled animation" -- AKA, those comparisons you see all the time between certain scenes in Disney films where the animation looks very similar (the dancing animations in Robin Hood and Aristocats, the interaction between Mowgli and the Wolves in the Jungle Book vs. Wart and Sir Kay's dogs in Sword in the Stone). Xerography allowed them to basically recycle previously used animation and make slight alterations to the character designs, which resulted in those "copy-cat" scenes and that scratchy, rushed look.
I'm guessing the creator of the video didn't go too far into it because you can find those comparison videos all over TH-cam, but would have been good to at least touch on briefly.
Don't get me wrong, I loved quite a few movies from the Xerox and Dark Ages (Robin Hood, Aristocats, Sword in the Stone, and The Great Mouse Detective especially), but I can see why Don Bluth (one of my favorite animators of all time) was disappointed with the process.
Another one of my family members actually considers Sword in the Stone to be his favorite. Also, thanks for acknowledging this. He probably should have touched upon this, considering that was something common in the era. Additionally, the films were reusing animation from the Golden Age, such as Snow White's clapping animation.
I’ve met Don, he’s still alive and puts on plays in Arizona. He’s a brilliant man with clear vision, unbelievable talent and a serious work ethic. We’re blessed to have him.
He is absolutely marvelous, I’m hoping to study under him in Don Bluth university, he chooses 21 students to teach everything needed to know about traditional animation :)
The guy is brilliant.
I think Disney needs to put cgi down and go back to basics and classics. Thats the way to go. Im tired of cgi.
Unfortunately you are not the only one going to watch the movies so I guess they will still cater to the masses most of the time
Esinam Adzo im sure the masses feel the same way i do
You won't be seeing a 2D animated feature from Disney for quite a few years, if ever. The problem with what you're suggesting is that Disney already tried it, and it didn't work. As soon as Chicken Little hit theatres, Disney fans were screaming for 2D. They demanded that Disney make films like the ones made during the Renaissance period. Disney listened and made such a film, it was called The Princess and the Frog. The problem? No one saw it. The Princess and the Frog grossed 271 million at the box office, including international sales. Out of the 10 films made during the Renaissance, only two films grossed less than The Princess and the Frog.
Disney gave the audience what they asked for and they simply didn't show up and put money down for it. You can chalk up to external matters like marketing or the release of Avatar, but the fact is that Disney isn't going to throw money into a bank that has failed them before.
I agree. It was fun in the beginning when it was a novelty, but I'd rather see drawings. Maybe if they created something really beautiful with cgi but usually it looks just like something could have been drawn.
I think you mean bad cgi. Like most cgi movies today is pretty bad + gci and drawings should be used for different movies. Some movies with cgi today should have been made with drawings imo
Honestly, stuff like Chicken Little was far worse than anyhing released during this so-called "dark age". So yeah, "bronze age" sounds like a more appropriate name.
Lyendith Chicken Little was epic
Alex Davenport it was good, definitely not better than The Fox and the Hound, or Black Cauldron, or Robin Hood.
Lyendith fuck you, chicken little was a fun movie lol
Don't hate, that was the year for the cheetah girls!
Chicken Little was sad in a way. It tried to make picking on people look funny and played up that popular kids being entitled to be treated like God's and unpopular kids getting treated like shit is the way it should be. I actually couldn't finish watching the movie because it just rubbed me the wrong way. It was just plain mean spirited.
xerography bad, bankrupting your company for the art good
No. Bob Iger bad. Xerography good technology, saved Disney.
I feel like we're in another dark age. Maybe not financially or fan base wise, but I feel like Disney is playing it way too safe and predictable and not pushing any boundaries except in cgi technology and buying power.
This. So true. All the past 5-6 CGI movies feel so damn same-y in terms of designs and plot development.
They ALL recycle the same damn last minute "plot twist" villain bs, they all have "self-aware" lines mocking old Disney tropes, they all try to be subversive for the sake of being different, ending up feeling the same trite crap.
And yes, what happened to all the advancements in animation ??? Disney was always pushing for those in the '90s with CAPS, CGI elements blending in or Deep Canvas.
What the hell happened to the promise of alternating hand-drawn animation and CGI going hand in hand ?
What happened to the Meander animation tool ?
They're creatively bankrupt, and they're playing way too safe in terms of everything.
@@TheDen-ec9xe Harry Potter killed that promise, so did Twilight
haven't seen a disney movie in five or so years and oddly enough i don't feel like i'm missing out
@@Urvy1A To be honest, that's Disney's fault for picking July as release date, for a freaking Winnie The Pooh movie of all things. Disney has picked terrible release dates before that ended up detrimental. The same happened with Treasure Planet.
@@tylerc4318 And well you did, buddy. You really didn't miss much.
I just know that I love "Aristocats" and "101 Dalmatians"
Me too. Not to mention, they were made for CHILDREN. Hearing this man-baby scream "I HATE THEM" was enough for me to end the video.
"Aristocats" is entertaining but the storytelling's not that great. "Dalmatians" storytelling, animation, and design is PERFECT.
@@ZeranZeran Actually, they weren't made for children; they were made for everyone.
No, they were made for children, ask the creators. But Adults can and should enjoy them too.
@@MyFriendlyCrow what was wrong with the aristocats storytelling
Idk why you ended the video at 1988. You could have gone into how just how they were able to re-capture the magic, what these new renaissance movies were doing right. This video should just be called “Disney’s Dark Age Explained” or something.
Yeaah i thought the ending was anti climatic too, didn't realized ir was the ending until i saw the red bar
Still a great video tho
Totally agree.
Very misleading title!
Agree to a step ... I mean it shouldn't be called like that because still to understand the Renaissance you have to understand the dark age. The rest is history
oreomonogatari right, that's what I was waiting for.
"xerography compromised the quality of the animation"
"elaborate on that"
"no"
Kjersten Walton bingo
I think it's clear. It's such an obvious thing that everyone already knows. Besides, he DID explain it. "Copy the drawings directly onto cells". And then he clearly shows how ugly it looks. Then follows it up with "Disney animators stormed out".
I don't know how much more fucking obvious he can make it for you.
It's your fault if you can't add 2 and 2 to get 4.
My question exactly: Not only with xerography but each time he indicated an improvement or issue. The Jaunty Professor knows this is the greatest comment ever but he's not going to give the how or why of it!
Basically it is all his opinion. Disney had a few flops and all of a sudden "this 30 year period was awful." Yea comparing any animated film to Pinocchio, it's gonna look like crap. Even those films from the 90s you loved so much.
It was probably more so the philosophical change than anything, "we can churn out this cheaper product and gain the same amount of profit", this drives out the animation veterans such as Bluth and the history reveals the people left behind were not up to snuff causing the "dark age".
Oh, you left out a lot of stuff. For starters: It wasn't just Disney which stopped making those big expensive movies, the 1960s and especially the 1970s are pretty much an animation wasteland. It simply was too expensive. What changed was that computer technology allowed them to really stretch their artistic muscles. It was first used in The Black Cauldron in a very limited capacity, and then for the clock tower scene in The Great Mouse detective. By the time Rescuers Down Under happened, they had the CAPSystem down. So technology was a huge factor in the Disney Renaissance (and the rise of animation in general).
Another important factor was "Who framed Roger Rabbit"....due to a number of factors (including Bluth stealing away so much talent), the animation for this was done out house (and apparently in a gruelling speed). Disney went and poached animators from there, but on top of this, when Disney started to raise again with the little mermaid and DB was still struggling to keep his productions financially afloat, all this combined with the trouble during the production of the Troll in central park, well, a lot of animators went back to Disney in order to work on Beauty and the Beast. Basically after having lost so many talent, Disney eventually managed to find fresh blood as well as luring some lost talent back to the studios.
Speaking of talents, let not forget Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. They came to the studio with their concept of an animated musical - yes, Disney had music in their movies beforehand, but they tended to be more filler than something to bring the story forward - and on this concept the whole Disney Renaissance was built. It is no accident that most of those movies because Broadway musicals.
So, right technology, talented people and a fresh concept, all this applied to an old idea of Walt Disney, and the Disney Renaissance is born.
I left a lot of stuff out because, otherwise, the video would have been twice as long. In my research I did come across things like the CAPS technology, talent such as Menken and Ashman, and the studio's re-discovery of fairy tales and the incorporation of broadway style music. Because there was so much information out there, I decided to keep this video as just an understanding of Disney's Dark Age. I hope to make a part 2 someday and dive into the rest of this fascinating information! Thanks for the comment
Who Framed Roger Rabbit was absolutely a pivotal project not only for Disney but for the Animation Renaissance as a whole. Things like the Spielberg-produced cartoons and Ted Turner's acquisition of the libraries he'd use to start Cartoon Network feel like direct reactions to what happened in 1988.
swanpride honestly a wasteland for mainstream, but lots of independent european, tsech and Russian animators had their debuts during those.
I am aware, but even with those it was still a wasteland in terms of movies (shorts and TV is a different matter altogether and most of the Russian "movies" are only 40 to 50 minutes long). Granted, there is a small chunk of Czech animation I still haven't seen due to is not being available, most of it being stop motion.
I should know, I did an article series looking for the best animated movies of the 20th century, and I had a really hard time even finding movies to analyse for the 1960s....the 1970s were a little bit better, because yes, that was when Europe and Japan started to rise to the challenge, but the really good stuff turned up towards the end of the 1970s/beginning of the 1980s.
And the fact that it was Frank Wells, the president, who kept an uneasy peace between CEO Michael Eisner and Chairman Jeffry Katzenberg. A likely reason why the Disney Renissance peaked in 1994, the year of Wells' death.
I very rarely comment on TH-cam vids but you’ve made some statements I simply can’t let stand. I was born in '65, was raised on Disney in the “Dark Ages” (which also included the 7-year releases of the classics, tho) I have been a student of Disney my whole life, went to CalArts in the mid 80s and studied Animation with the handful of Disney artists who worked with Walt who were still alive. Hal Ambro was my mentor. Yes, you’re right. This was at the bottomed-out point... mentioning “Black Cauldron” was jokingly forbidden, lol, “Great Mouse Detective” was in production and as students, we watched the story reels. (At the warehouse space on Flower Street.) Subsequently, I have worked mostly in the world of live musical theatre and have studied with the best of the craft (including many of the Renaissance writers, story men and composers. I’ve been mentored by Stephen Schwartz for the past decade.) That is my history which allows me a little bit of authority to make the following observations: Though Disney was in a slump, Don Bluth films were/are NOT great films by any measure; they are mediocre at best, particularly in the area of storytelling. On a personal note, the trippy color design makes them virtually unwatchable to me as a trained animation artist… a style he experimented with in “The Aristocats” but completely overused in his own films. (sidenote: the color design of “101 Dalmatians” is some of the best in the history of animated film. The storytelling in the film is lean and superb. You're correct that Walt didn't like the Xerox aesthetic ... but you should know that many in the animation game, including the Nine Old Men loved the Xerography -- and still do-- because it captures the rawness of the artist’s original drawings, including light sketch lines which give the final animation a vitality that was lost in the overly-slick ink and paint process. You're definitely selling 101 Dalmatians extremely short. As a llfe=-long student of the craft and the history, it remains my favorite of all Disney 2D animated films. i’m not alone. This is why it is never considered part of the slump period.)
Having lived through the period and judging it in real time as I learned my craft in subsequent years, one of the MAIN factors that was lacking until the Renaissance was in the quality of the music. I don’t feel “An American Tail” holds up any better than the other films of the era, however, the inclusion of “Somewhere Out There” elevated the film. Disney didn’t have a song that effective until “Little Mermaid.” Another huge factor was the advent of computer-aided, then computer-generated animation. Remember “Mary Poppins,” Disney’s biggest hit until the Renaissance, was in ’64 - was structured like a musical AND was using experimental special effects in animation which had been building to that point. This was the magic formula. It took 20+ years for the technology to develop and for artists to figure out how to use computer-aided animation to best effect. The film “Tron,” (’82) The Big Ben chase in “Great Mouse Detective” (‘86) and the spectacular moving backgrounds in “Rescuers Down Under” (’90) were huge strides forward, but the storytelling was still lacking, usually suffering from overly long sequences that had little to do with the overall thrust of the story…and no truly great songwriting.
It is true that judging art is completely subjective and depends on personal taste, but please understand that the “Dark Age” was NOT about the quality of the animation. The animators, including the celebrated Nine Old Men and others were at their prime in this period, continuing to produce amazing draftsmanship and character-acting-via -pencil until their retirements (in the 70’s mostly.) Some of their finest work was done in these years. (I point to Marc Davis’ Cruella De Vil, in ‘61 and Milt Kahl’s Madame Medusa in ‘71 which are their respective masterpieces, as recognized by all students and practitioners of hand-drawn animation.) The quality of the animation didn’t drop off until the 80’s as the new blood took over, with only a small handful of supremely talented new artists leading the way surrounded by scores of newbies. Some of the work in “Little Mermaid,” “Aladdin” & “Beauty in the Beast” is FAR, FAR inferior to any single, random frame of “101 Dalmatians” you can pull up. js.
It was the storytelling that fell off when Walt’s focus shifted to Mary Poppins and Disneyland, not the quality of the art. (and, sorry, Don Bluth’s storytelling wasn’t much better) In truth, Spielberg was the Walt Disney of that era in terms of storytelling & George Lucas in terms of innovative thinking. This was pretty clear to everyone in the business back then. In his day Walt was considered one of the best story men in Hollywood. When he bowed out during “Sleeping Beauty,” it wouldn’t be long before the lack of a single, great story man started to affect the department’s output. It was storytelling -- dramaturgy -- nothing to do with the quality of the actual animation. (and Xerography simply coincided with Walt’s waning interest in the art form.)
What brought about the Renaissance in my opinion? It was that formula stumbled on in “Mary Poppins.” When the use of Musical Theatre storytelling conventions, Broadway-quality scores and computer-aided visuals for backgrounds finally hit their stride together in “The Little Mermaid” -- that’s what truly changed things. (and the shift to screenwriters instead of numerous scene directors) I believe the REAL catalysts for the Disney Renaissance were Alan Menken and Howard Ashman.
This is already too long, but I have to also add that Walt NEVER made decisions based on finances. (His brother did.) Walt simply got tired and bored with animation. Plain and simple. The REAL money-hungry people in the org came during the Dark Age… Eisner and Katzenberg. Roy Disney jr. should also be credited with getting Eisner’s power-hungry, money-hungry, non-art-minded ass out of there and SAVING the animation department in 2005 when Eisner had reduced it to straight-to-video rubble and run off most of the truly talented animators left. This was the same time as great talent was emerging (and sometimes migrating from Disney) at Pixar…. but all that’s another story. lol The Animation Dept never fully recovered but Roy is a hero to animators everywhere, Eisner?…no thank you.
Sorry for the long diatribe. I simply wanted to set the record straight on a few things from an insider’s perspective. Thanks for taking time to shine light on this history though. Onward and Upward!
RooflessLA
Great history!
And I agree that the 101 Dalmatians bashing is dumb!
This is an amazing essay. Thank you so much for sharing it!! I felt like I was in a lecture hall, learning so much about the history of Disney.
Excellent retort! I agree that it was lower quality storytelling that nearly did in Disney, not animation. You can get away with some pretty poor animation if the storytelling is good. Just look at South Park!
Brilliant reply. Thanks for sharing! Ed Catmull has further details on the second dark age in his excellent book "Creativity Inc". Basically he points to the fact that the people waiting to step into the shoes of the master animators/storytellers as they retired were incorrectly promoted. They didn't have the talent or the chops, but they had just been there long enough that they'd EARNED their new positions. It makes sense in a way, and I wonder if that's what resulted in The Black Cauldron, etc.
Thanks for the great read!
This presentation is a good example of the dangers of the internet: poorly researched, lacking in knowledge of the industry, no underdtanding of the impact of the opening of the global marketplace etc. It is merely a set of incorrect statements placed in a very particular order to create a "new understanding" of a well known series of events that most people experienced...just not the creator of this drivel.
Here's a thought....read some books and learn something before attempting to be an "authority" on a topic. Those commenting have been trying to correct you for 10 months.
My dad was a Disney artist and he would agree that, near the end of his life, Walt cared more about the parks than the animation. Thanks for posting!
90's renaissance > 2010's renaissance
Unraveler where does Bolt belong?
What's a Bolt?
It's 2008, it goes in The Experimental era. It's alright but it feels different from Disney 90's and 2010's movies.
2010's isn't even a Renaissance... it's like a post-modern BLAH for the shitty generation of kids today.
In my opinion since 2010 the movie's had the better stories but the animations where meh not a fan of it but the animation still looks awesome
These voice cracks at every low point of a sentence are killing me rn.
I was trying to put my finger on what was so grating to my ears, and you nailed it. Thanks.
I don’t hear it lol
I wanna watch this video, I really do, but his damn voice...
It’s cringeworthy. I took to the comments for solidarity.
I surrendered, muted the audio, and put on the close caption.
The films from the "Dark Age" rule. Art changes, even at a macroscopic level like Disney, 100 Dalmatians, The Jungle Book, Robin Hood, The Rescuers etc are amazing.
I even like the box office flop 'The Sword & The Stone'.
Robin Hood = one of my all time faves
Robin Hood wasn't that great. And it reuses few scenes from the Jungle Book and smth more
The Great Mouse Detective is one of my favorite movies of all time! It's an incredibly underrated film.
Hell yes it is.
Great Mouse Detective and Oliver and Company are the two most underrated Disney films, imo.
Let's not forget the Black Cauldron.
This Charming LoveHound I was thoroughly disappointed in the Black Cauldron but to be fair I’m always disappointed if I read the book first and I loved loved loved that book series.
Great mouse detective is probably my favorite disney movie, the climax is so good
I feel that a lot of the time, people mistake the actual drawing for the animation. Animation is the process, the flow of the character movement, the repeated drawings of characters in a sequence.
The drawings in the 'Dark Age' were sketchy and you can see the pencil lines.
I personally like this (can you tell?), but I can understand why some don't. Its looks messy.
But it is not the animation itself that is messy. Disney are pioneers of animation. They learnt how to animate humans realistically, which is so damn hard. Even the best drawers had steep learning curve when it came to drawing the human form.
So while its all well and good saying that xerography sucks, what they seem to be referring to is the 'sketchy' quality of the drawings which starting with Dalmatians and ended with Mermaid. The animation is still incredible. Sorry for long comment!
I just watched The Great Mouse Detective last night! I like the "Dark Age" Disney movies, especially TGMD, Robin Hood, The Aristocats, and The Rescuers. Are they great movies? Not if they are compared to Snow White, Fantasia or Alice. But why compare them? Why not just like, or dislike them on their own merits?
I love the "raw" animation too! It feels more real, somehow.
Walt Disney literally donated enough money to save what is now known as "The California School of Arts" and had an entire student body trained to work on his movies. All learning how to do things like animating humans, and all new art styles that had never been attempted before. Learning about the Disney of the 50s-60s is so amazing to me, as someone that was born in the 90s, I am so envious. I have a lot of Old Disney mock art, sketches, etc for their parks. Walt and Roy had an amazing vision.
THIS
I actually like the style of xerography. Some quality was lost, sure, but it had an really unquie style to make up for it.
Halfway through watching, paused for comment.Disagree: xerography looks better. I love seeing the animators’ original drawings. For me, the dark ages start when the STORIES got bad.
Yeah I guess it comes down to what you prefer, but good point about the stories. Hope you still finished the video!
literally every animator's opinion, i saw him dissing on it, and I just ha such nerd rage uuughghghghhh, and not to mention, Walt hated it, but to see Milt kahl's and the other 9 old men's direct work, not a clean up artist, preserved on screen was more than we deserved. That's the struggle just like animators thought the tale of princess kagua was stunning, and moviegoers thought it was ugly.
101 Dalmatians is one of the greatest movies ever. How can you say that it is part of the dark ages? Storytelling is more important than animation.
I completely agree that 101 Dalmatians is a fantastic movie and one of Disney's best and this is partly because of its unique art style. I want to bring attention to what someone else mentioned in the comments that with every new era in Disney animation, there's a "proto-period" that preceded it. A period, though a part of the era before, still contributed to the visible transition of the next era. A great example of this is The Great Mouse Detective, though a part of the Bronze Age, it clearly shows promise for what was to come in the future. Same could be said for 101 Dalmatians. The animators used xerography to the best of their creative intentions but the tool would ultimately be used to create compromised cost-cutting productions.
You don't get that across very well at all in this video.
+James Harold It really isn't too much of his opinion. After 101 Dalmations, the Disney Dark age actually did intensify. But tbh, the real beginning to the dark ages was after the failure of Sleeping Beauty. Disney neglected animation, live-action movies were being shifted to as the primary output, animation in the company was getting lower and lower budgets, animation was being recycled from movie to movie, etc.
As someone who was born in 1970, I find that lots of younger Disney fans really don't understand what it was like to grow up during this extended low point for the Disney company. I see opinions on line that seem to indicate that the company's animation output would be nothing without the Renaissance films, but I can tell you that even though they were mostly a well-loved museum piece by the time I was in my teens, the constant re-release of their classics onto the big screen each year helped to continue to make them very relevant to kids. My family owned a Disney Songbook that was published in 1972 and it was already a treasure trove of wonderful songs even before the amazing Menken and Ashman compositions helped launch the renaissance. I was in college by the time that happened, and it was an amazing thing, but I just want younger fans to realize that as great as the Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin and others are, that they are simply excellent films that deserve their spot on the shelf next to Snow White and Pinocchio and Bambi, etc. They should never be allowed to shove those movies that established what Disney is off of that shelf. Classic characters and songs should always hold firm as cornerstones of what Disney means.
Thanks for sharing your story! I agree, every Disney animated feature holds a special place in my heart and young children shouldn't forget about where it all began in movies such as Snow White, Bambi, etc
I totally hear you, I was born in ‘78. I work at a movie theater with a lot of teens and twenty-somethings. One day we were all talking about Disney animated movies and they just couldn’t believe that I never got around to seeing a great deal of the Renaissance classics. Of course I saw the big ones (Lion King, Aladdin, the Little Mermaid) but somehow missed several others (Hercules, Mulan, Pocahontas, and Tarzan).
Pinocchio, Bambi and snow white belong to the Golden era though, also the silver era deliveref probably the most iconic movie during Walt 's life .the dark era is after the jungle book and before the little mermaid
The Black Cauldron is one of my favorite movies of all time
RebelBelle exactly. Each to their own.
The Black Cauldron is a wonderful movie.
Xerography didn't degrade Disney animation, it just changed the appearance of the line work. It's not as pretty, but as long as the stories are strong it can work. And color xerography and computer manipulation has brought back a lot of what was lost, plus added new possibilities.
What killed Disney for me was the loss of stories. There's now one story: Girl meets roguish and handsome wisecracking crook, they have adventures. Hero and or hero's sidekick is in mortal peril, villain stands triumphant, and a last effort defeats him. Hero kisses girl. The end.
Cue repeat with different names and settings.
The Black Cauldron was the worst of these. The main characters spend the entire movie bickering, then the end of the movie gets too close so out of nowhere the writers have them kiss and live happily ever after.
What did Disney learn from that failure? "Not enough songs. That's it. Let's have forest animals do big, splashy Busby Berkeley numbers in the middle of the jungle."
I don't even know if I'd call the line work not as pretty. If you look at Snow White closely, for example, the lines are so inconsistent. It creates an unsettling flickering effect.
pixels are worse.
Claude i loved the coarseness of the linework from xerography. In fact, for me i actually appreciate the unrefined human quality and rawness of the drawings! It was super economical and added a clear distinct line weight and energy that u don't see in refined contrived cells. Looking back at films like Aladdin and Lion King... The quality was overly polished. Disney Dark Ages all day! And Big Hero 6 is my fave modern disney animated film!
I mean, classic Disney stories weren't much more complex though. I could summarize Snowhite with "girl is born from royalty but gets run out by a jealous witch who demands her death, but the man she hired to kill such girl gets cold feet and lies about actually killing her while she goes living with dwarves. Witch realizes this and goes to kill the girl herself but fails, the end." The Sleeping Beauty might even be simpler: fairy curses little girl to fall in an eternal slumber unless True Love's KissTM wakes her (and like that's such a stupid line of action too, why not just kill her, why add an explicit loophole to the spell if you want her dead as punishment for not being invited to a party?), plan fails when True Love's KissTM happen, everyone lives happily ever after.
If you want to summarize Frozen, as many problems I have with that story, it would get a bit more complicated, because there's layers to Elsa's trouble and there's layers that need to be undone to fully understand what's going on, and that's while ignoring the whole trolls subplot.
But you don't see me dismissing any of the "simpler" plots. Because you know, a good plot doesn't need to be convoluted and complicated, that notion is actually what I hate about modern storytelling. Lost destroyed storytelling in this sense, because no story needs to be that complicated and forcibly cryptic to that level, just like true tragedy doesn't need to be forwarded by endless deaths (looking at Game Of Thrones and The Walking Dead here). A good story is a story that stands on its own two feet WITHOUT needing tons of crutches and plot devices to be kept up. Less is more in this context as well.
Basically, fuck this idea that good stories are necessarily complicated and brainy. As a story, Big Hero 6 holds up pretty well. So does Wreck-it Ralph, so do Wall-e, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Ratatouille, Inside Out, or Atlantis which is a CRIMINALLY underrated movie. They're just stories that work, and they're animated well, and they have good music and artistic ideas.
I liked the grittiness
I strongly disagree with your chronology but more importantly with your assesment. The downfall of Disney on those years was not due to technique, nor a resullt of xerography, but due to the competition of tv and more importantly because its limited thematic variety. "Animal tales" were derided as the stuff of saturday morning cartoons, and Amblin didn't fire better either. Also, you left out a lot of stuff, like the importance of who framed Roger Rabbit, and the exodus of a lot of talent when Katzenberg got in.
Yeah, I feel like people need to realise that unlike an actual documentary, any buffoon with a microphone and decent editing skills can make one of these. Too often random videos or opinion pieces on TH-cam are taken as gospel because they think that because someone had enough spare time and dedication to make an entire video about a topic then clearly they must know what they are talking about. Unfortunately that is just not the case all of the time and we get stuff like this, a video that says it's talking about the cause of an era in Disney's history but is actually a well disguised excuse to say that Disney's old style was great and xerography is an inherently lesser form of creation. There are certainly nuggets of good information here but it's clouded with this bold statement and lack of a lot of crucial information that you have listed above which would be necessary to include in the video leading people to believe it was the quality of the movies themselves that caused the downfall and not other factors.
Have a glass of water or something before you record, man.
mate, i had to stop watching after 3 minutes. you don't have a clue what you are talking about. the animation is the MOVEMENT. the quality of animation has been compromised in some disney films, when they used rotoscoping over film of actors (such as snow white) or recycling animation. the animation of 101 dalmations onwards is great, any animator would tell you so.
what you don't like is the less polished look. actually its more graphical. the whole style of 101 dalmations is a high point in animation for its flat graphical style. and animators really like the look of these less polished films.
The problem is that the xeroxed scratchy look is so horrible, it detracts from the technical art of how well the animation is otherwise.
@@gcooper642 I love it. I think it's cool to be able to see the animator's sketchy work.
Lists/cites xerography as the cause of the Dark Age. Shows The Black Couldron as the pinnacle of said Dark Age.
But the failure of The Black Couldron has absolutely nothing to do with the xerox method.
I'll not have you bad mouthing Sleeping Beauty, the Aristocats AND Robin Hood!!!!
I really appreciate this video but disagree that the dark ages films are lesser. They are darker in content, but the stories are sometimes richer because they are heavier, but kids and parents of young kids don't go to Disney for thought provoking and heavy. They want lighter and sweeter lessons.
Fox and hound might not be the best adaptation (though I haven't read the book) but it works as its own very well. If my memory serves right it was not only Disney films but other animations overall having kinda melancholic base-rhythm.
I was never to fond of the "Dark Ages" title. Too dramatic and overreaching. If I was to rename it I would call it the early modern animation era. That bridge between the stiffer, super clean early animation and the smoother and more relaxed modern style we see today. Furthermore "Dark Ages" implies an era of no advancement or some type of regression, when in reality this was an era for major development in animation. Notably the beginning of computer animation, but also a shift between using animation as a medium for children's story telling to a medium which could be used for adult story telling.
Yeah, some people like to regard it as the "Bronze Age" too. Good points
Kristie Puffen I like to just forget about the "ages" altogether because I like so many of the xerox films. Personally, I arrange it as classic-xerox-CAPS -CG, that way there's a much more clear distinction.
I like overly dramatic titles like "The Dark Ages". It brings a bit of, well, drama to what would otherwise be
considered kiddie fodder by many. And that's just depressing.
Still, to be fair, Fantasia is darker than anything produced in the "dark age", so you could argue that it started,
albeit periodically, a lot earlier than the 60's.
Hell, even the donkey scene in Pinocchio or Bambi's mother is darker than the later stuff.
Well the Dark Ages doesn't mean the tone of the movies during the 60s-80s, most would be classified as rather light-hearted fare. It simply means an era when Xerox eliminated the need for manually inking (which made the overall cost cheaper) and the era without Walt Disney at the helm.
If I was to say one HUGE shift as far as movies from this era vs the previous era was the emphasis on character development. Previous films we very visual oriented, this era became dialogue oriented. The "renaissance" films combined these two elements thanks to technological improvements.
You're not wrong, Kristie, but I don't think it's inaccurate to notice the influence the 70's had on Disney
films, just as that decade's visual and cultural aesthetic had a strong influence on most everything
produced at the time.
Plot lines were more serious and character-driven (as you said). And the Xerox method contributed
to making the visuals look rather stark and bleak, in my opinion. And combine all that, and you're a
long way from the happy, colorful singalongs of earlier times.
So while the term "Dark Age" doesn't officially refer to the look or feel of the films produced during this era,
to me, about half of the films do correlate with this darker perception I have of the decade's cultural themes
of introspection and psychological drama and horror.
Other people may think of disco and lots and lots of orange colors when they think of the 70's.
I think of Bergman, The Exorcist, cocaine and lots and lots of plane hijackings... :)
What's wrong with xerography? Those movies look fine.
Take a shot every time this guy voicecracks.. I bet you won't survive
he sounds critically dehydrated... i only made it halfway and couldn’t finish his video.
hope he learns from this so his future content can thrive cause he seems to present decent ideas.
My voice didn't crack 1/10th as much during puberty lul.
Rikard Karlsson hohohoho
If you ever get a chance to watch the special features in 101 Dalmatians, they have some good interviews with some animators on the movie. They talk about how Mr. Disney didn't like the new way to animate, preferring the affect of Sleeping Beauty. The style was too modern. The art director of 101 Dalmatians and Mr Disney had a rocky relationship afterwards, and it wasn't until close to Mr Disney's death, that Mr Disney gave the idea that he forgave the art director for the animation choice.
And using a xerox for all those dots on those dalmatians? Probably a lifesaver for the traditional animators. So from a corporate level, sure, it's a money thing. From an artist level, sure it gave a distinctly different style, but it was much better for production and continuity.
GDI, now i need to watch this, thanks for the heads up
Yup! :D
+MikaelaWorks Disney really did completely change his tune. I remember 2 stories from the 60s. One was during the development of the animated sequence in Mary Poppins. Late at night, he would go looking in trash cans and pulling out dis-guarded artwork that he believed was NOT like a traditional Dumbo style and pin them up on the designer's desk. The other story I heard was that he believed/wished that he was doing the Yellow Submarine feature.
Very cool! Thanks for sharing those stories!!!
I would take xerography over CG any day of the week.
Yeah I miss traditionally animated movies too...
just watch anime or watch European features nitwit
Blond Gabriel Ghibli isn't doing traditional either. There is no major studio still using traditional 2D animation. It's a dying art.
it'll come back..don't worry about it...It has to come back.
Blond Gabriel that's rather optimistic of you.
some of the "dark age" disney movie's were my favorite as a child and still is
Jesus I might actually start crying with these voice cracks. Every single sentence- man.
The Black Cauldron is awesome!
Charles Lumia The books, sure but the movie was a goddamn disaster. Although granted, the Horned King is one of Disney's scariest villains.
Never even knew about it until now
Naw, it's really pretty awful -- really the low point of Disney, if you believe that Disney is all about storytelling.
Lord, every time you end a sentence, your voice cracks
How can anyone with a straight face say, that the animation quality in 101 Dalmatians is worse than the one in Cinderella, Peter Pan or Lady and the Tramp? The Xerox-movies are different, but very beautiful as well, especially 101 Dalmatians where they picked a style that works perfectly with the movie setting and the Xerox characteristics. In my opinion it's visually way more stunning than the flat, boring, lifeless and bland Silver Age films (excluding Sleeping Beauty). If you want to have a look at real bad Disney animation, maybe take a closer look next time you watch "Beauty and the Beast". At times it looks like a Saturday morning cartoon. But hey, it's a renaissance film, so it has to be top notch.
^ true
Agree, I love the style of 101 Dalmatians and would not class it as a part of the dark age... I almost agree with everything you said with the exception of Beauty and the Beast, I think the animation is gorgeous.
I admit the part with Beauty and the Beast was exaggerated, though there is some truth to it. The towns people are really sloppy animated and designed and there is one shot of the castle (I believe it's from when Belle finds it first and is looking up to it) in which they totally fucked up the perspective. You can definitely tell from some parts they really had to rush it to get it done in time for the release date.
Anyway, I still like the movie very much, even though I appreciate it way more for its great music, characters, dynamic camera angles and the staging of the musical numbers than for the animation itself.
loopyvirgo Honestly, out of all the films that used the process, I think 101 Dalmatians used it the best.
Agreed. I'd still consider the death of Disney and post-Jungle-Book films to be the start of the dark age. I think the prof has a bee in his bonnet about xerography, but I also think the effect he sees is is compounded by the shift to a more graphic rather than realist style, started with Sleeping Beauty. I'm not really sure that _not_ scribing a single flat line around the drawings of the likes of Milt Kahl, Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston etc. etc. killed them dead. Growing up watching Disney's xerographed films, especially The Jungle Book, I don't mind the look. I thought the ocassional hairy line [halfway to a 'boiling line'] gave it a little life and interest.
There were a number of problems that contributed to the dark age, IMO. If xerography was one, it was a little one.
You just said that Disney were about to shutdown the stadio because of money loss over sleeping beauty and the cost of making them. Then they find a cheap alternative that left them stay open and apparently they only care about money?
yeah, that part of the video really ground my gears
He really doesn’t know what he’s talking about at all.
Look at that insane background at 2:14. Nothing they make even today comes close to that.
so basically this is just a video you made to say how much you hate xerography. As if we care.
I care. I finally have a kindred spirit 🤗
Dude... I love 101 dalmatians :(
Me too. The animation is good enough as far as I can tell. This guy is a real snob.
@@GingerGilligan I actually love the animation in this movie, it looks new and interesting and it reminds me of the animation in Sleeping Beauty
+James Harold No opinion is a shit opinion. Except Calobi Production's opinion.
Although I was born in 1997 and didn't grow up in disney renaissance era, I still remember watching them growing up in the early 2000s. So sad disney doesn't make their movies the way they used to make em. It's now frozen that's becoming more popular. It's really overrated
You're not too much younger than me actually! Watching classic Disney movies is a childhood must :)
So there are actually kids born in the '90s who think Disney's golden age animation is better? I'm so moved ...
ChromeXY I grew up in the early 2000s which was the post Renaissance Era, but I still got to grow up with some of the films from the Renaissance era
Wow, I didn't realize Disney's history was so interesting! You speak clearly, with concise points. Nice job
Thanks Emily! I work hard to make sure it sounds and flows the way I want it to, thanks for noticing!
I recommend reading Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination Book by Neal Gabler. In 1919, Walt Disney was working for Grey advertising and met Ub Iwwerks. Their friendship helped Walt Disney Studios succeed. Disney had the vision and Ub Iwerks with brilliant talent as a cartoon artist in the studio.
The new animators weren’t mentioned. In the early eighties, all of the original animators were retiring or had already retired, and new animators were coming in. The new animators were anxious to please and tried very hard very eagerly, but their eagerness and innocence and lack of experience was a huge factor in the creation of The Black Cauldron.
0:42 Oh god.. As soon as I saw that Classic logo, I had childhood flashbacks in a flash lol The good old VHS format !
Great video! The renaissance gets a lot of shine, but that period leading up to it is just as important in understanding the renaissance. This video deserves more views
Thank you sir! Exactly why I wanted to shed light on it
I think it's a little unfair to say that Xerography was as bad as you say it was.
When you're involved in a commercial art, you have to accept that experimenting with new technology isn't always going to yield perfect results, especially when you don't have someone with a big, creative vision directing how you're going to use it best. Sure, the "Dark Age" quality wasn't as good as it's forebears and certainly not as good as the Renaissance, but it's still great animation and art design, albeit their storytelling would take a while to recover, but that's why we need better writers in the first place. Dalmatians encapsulates that by trying to figure out how to use Xerography and a few other technologies (I think rotoscoping was used for the overlapping/repeating movement of the puppies) and if it meant finding a cheaper way in order to still be making film the next day, I think that's fine. For a time. I think the animators were perhaps impatient (although Bluth leaving was good and got animation out of a small monopoly), but also the execs didn't give the animators enough leeway to see how they could push the technology and make great films instead of mediocre ones. Flaws on both sides, really.
Now, one could argue that Pixar's films (particularly the older ones) were very experimental e.g. Monsters, Inc. for hair, creature movement and textures, Finding Nemo for its water effects and atmosphere, or even A Bug's Life for naturalistic things like tree bark and grass. All experimental, all good films, in my opinion. But the difference between Pixar and Disney back in '61 was youth and vision. Pixar had the freedom to push their new tech further AND make great stories built around that. Disney execs had neither youth nor vision, so all they could do was keep the company ticking over to keep investors happy.
In conclusion, I see your point, but just think it's unfair to see the melodramatically named "Dark Age " as the worst thing in the world.
James Harold
You think so, James Harold?
Infatti dagli anni 70 sono cominciati ad entrare nuovi animatori che hanno portato mano a mano una ventata di freschezza e preso in mano l' eredità degli artisti storici. XD All' epoca Reitherman e co. temevano che dopo di loro il reparto animazione avrebbe chiuso. Meno male che sono corsi ai ripari. XD
James Harold who u referring to, boy???
It's a shame tDon Bluth couldn't survive his own dark age. Thumbalina? Pebble and the Penguin? yeesh.
The 90s were not good for Don Bluth
Every animated company if you think about it goes through their Dark Ages and come out better for it although there are some that you just wonder how are they still in business look at all the Disney knock off movies and you'll see what I mean.
Hey what’s wrong with thumbelina? I liked it as a kid. The story was okay, and the music and the side characters were very memorable.
Hopefully this is Pixar's dark age with all the sequels, because to be fair... it's been pretty alright aside from some Cars sequels.
True. Bluth didn't stand a chance throughout the 90s. His only comeback was Anastasia in 1997 and then disappeared from the studio in 2000 after Titan A.E.
I could sit here and argue that some of the movies during this "dark age" are some of the most underrated Disney movies that have been created.
oh definitely. my favorite was always Aristocats.
New drinking game: take a shot everytime ur voice cracks lol
I miss Don Bluth. I know he's still around, it's just that we haven't had a Don Bluth film since Titan A.E. back in 2000. The world needs more Don Bluth animation.
Great Video! Howard Ashman was also a big force (creatively) behind the early part of the Disney Renaissance
Oh cool! Yeah I hope to make a Part 2 someday that explains more of what happened during the renaissance
The Jaunty Professor If you ever want to collaborate let us know. I think we can make your videos get a little more mainstream.
AMagicProduction do you like zootopia
Everyone always forgets about Howard! I'm glad a fellow Disney fan knows his name an what he did!
Rebecca Carhart of course. I often wonder how many other future classics we would have had if he hadn’t passed away :(
I think the issue with the Dark Ages starting with Xerography in '61 is that it ignores the consistency in storytelling that continued with Walt's personal involvement up to the Jungle Book. Sure he was busy with other projects but he was still widely influential in the production of the post-'61 features. Xerography/technology wasn't the issue, it was the storytelling. Walt Disney's pipeline, which was purely storyboard driven, wasn't exactly a traditional studio pipeline and didn't work if you didn't have a strong story editor to oversee things, which Walt was. When he died, the studio kept doing it his way, which resulted in the widely known dark ages films. It wasn't until Katzenberg/Eisner stepped in and forced proper screenwriters to collaborate with the animators and provide structure that the renaissance really began to take shape.
Yeah, I overlooked the important role storytelling played when defining these eras. Thanks for the constructive criticism!
I think you're right. Not only that but Xerography was used by Bluth, so I doubt that was the reason for the drop in quality.
+stitchcastle i think there is some truth to this. As I understand it after Disney died the studio began making decisions by committee based on what they thought Disney would do. They became too safe, and there are a number of examples of bad choices as much for the live action as for the animation.
Smith! is a good example. The film had a timely theme, and it's the adult relationship between Smith, and his wife was handled in a very adult way. But apparently, a board director (who has never been named) took one look at a scene where the white man (Smith) ends up in a fight wrongly accused of being racist and ordered the film go out with minimal promotion.
This was also the period where they began cutting scenes from films like Treasure Island. Even films make by Disney were not safe!
Some of the best Disney films were made during the so-called "Dark/Bronze Age" but I agree that the quality of the animation was (sometimes) poor. As far as story is concerned, though; The Great Mouse Detective, The Jungle Book, The Aristocats, Robin Hood, Oliver and Company, 101 Dalmatians, The Fox and the Hound, and Rescuers are some of my favorites. (I personally thought that both The Black Cauldron and Sword and the Stone were beautiful, but boring story-wise.)
Also, I think the Xenography style was perfect for "The Many Adventures of Winnie The Pooh" and "Robin Hood" which both intentionally have a illustrative "folk art" vibe, and would not have made as much sense if the were created using the traditional Disney animation style.
Adriana McGee I love sword and the stone
FINALLY ! a video recognizing what Eisner did to save disney and push it into a new era. He took a ton of risks in his time at disney, and while not all of them paid off, disney wouldn't have survived if he hadn't. He greenlighted so many movies that built the foundation of what disney is today. If only Iger could stop ruining everything. -___-
You forgot the fact of the global situation. Globalization became a thing and make Disney films reach world-wide making so a lot of money. The first Disney film showcase at a theater in my country was the Little Mermaid, which became a great success. Don't get me wrong, Disney is great and makes greats movies, and there was and improvement, but I believe it was the fact that Disney films started shipping worldwide that made de comeback of the company.
I somewhat agree however I would actually say the worse era at 1942 to 1949 between the Golden Age ( ending Bambi) and the Silver age , the Wartime era. during that time many of the animations weren't even really movies and due to government control during World War II the quality of them were pretty terrible and this led to Disney almost going bankrupt until Cinderella happened. I would consider this more of a Bronze Age due to the it brought new cheaper animation technique that kept some quality in a time when most animated media we're getting price dropped due to the creation of television pre 3D techniques. Also I don't want to say Winnie the Pooh from the Dark Ages
We just going to ignore Emperor’s New Groove, the greatest Disney movie of all time?
IMO Emperor's New Groove is its own category and i wouldn't call it the greatest. I love that film and i still make references to it whenever i have a Disney-related conversation but it doesn't add up to the Renaissance because it feels like it was a one-time thing made for laughs that the production nailed in effort and let go. i haven't seen much marketing for that film and the Renaissance had a Disney magic aesthetic.
If you can find it (and I admit that it's really hard) check out a documentary called THE SWEATBOX, which is about the making of the film and it's near disaster.
Patrick Hogan the renaissance, if I’m correct, was all of the 90s Disney animated movies, and The Little Mermaid. Emperor’s New Groove, while fantastic, was released the year after the renaissance ended.
The Disney renaissance ended with the Lion King. That was Peak. The decline began with Pocahantas.
that movie was going too bee called kingom of the sun then change some things
Why does his voice crack whenever he says anything. lmao
The ACTUAL "Dark Ages" of Disney were at the time of the "Golden Age" of PIXAR... While Pixar was nailing it, Disney was releasing crap like "HOME ON THE RANGE" and "CHICKEN LITTLE"
It is so easy to be a purist in anything, all you have to do is to ignore reality.
Would you really have preferred that Disney had gone under than continued to create less that magnificent animated movies. If you had had your way there would have been no renaissance.
While I am personally not a big fan of the Xerography-process, there is in fact a case to be made for it from an artistic standpoint, which is why I am objecting to your claim that the "Dark Age" (a rather sensationalistic term, in my opinion). Many of the animators were really happy with the xerography process, because for the first time, you could see their real drawings come to life. They were not cleaned up and processed by other artists, but you got to see directly what Davis, Johnston, Kimball etc were drawing directly on the screen. So you could in fact see their drawings and the power behind them, the weight, the movement, all the little details. It was Disney himself who was very disappointed by the process and did not like the result, because it destroyed the illusion he was aiming for: The creation of a painting coming to life.
So, in many ways, it is a matter of taste. Do you want to see the illlusion of a painting that comes to life in front of you or do you prefer the real force of the drawings the artist has come up with without someone tempering with it?
Personally, I think the artistic decline should rather be measured by the wildly increased use of re-used animation or the increasing lack of depth in the screenplays rather than just the use of xerography.
I prefer to use "Bronze Age" (if one had to classify it at all) for the era after Walt up to "The Great Mouse Detective". If one had to use the term "Dark Age", I would only use it as a sub-classification for the movies from "The Reasuers" onward, when the studio was nearly falling apart and losing its grip.
And then Don Bluth made Thumbelina and A Troll in Central Park...
And his only comeback was in 1997 with Anastasia.
You saw A Troll in Central Park? I though it was never released....Bluth turned to crap really fast.
And Rock A Doodle Doo, seems like he temporarily lost it in the 90's.
I loved A Troll in Central Park as a kid. Haven't seen it since so I don't know if it holds up, but I remember thinking the final showdown being a thumb-wrestling match was a ton of fun
Maaan I was always amazed at how realistic the movements of the human characters in early Disney cartoons were, it just shows how much effort the animators back then put into their work,drawing the scenes frame by frame getting every single detail of the characters movement correct.
Hats off to walt and all the other animators back then who made animation really come to life with their hardwork.
Never mind the FACT, the so called 'dark ages' you refer to, produced the most ICONIC Disney films.
The Jungle Book, The Sword and the Stone, 101 Dalmatians, The Rescuers, and yes even The Great Mouse Detective (which actually kicked off the rebirth of the animation studio, before The Little Mermaid).
That's funny how Disney lost making "NIMH" because it was "too dark" for them. So much of the stuff Disney puts out is
a lot darker than "The Secret of NIMH"! XD
Ironic as it was a lot less dark than the Black Cauldron by far. I still rank Secret of NIMH as my favorite animated movie not made by Disney.
Troodon The Secret of NIMH is by far my favorite animated film, and has been since i was 4
If Disney didn't scrapped their Rats of NIMH adaptation, I wonder if they will make it more light-hearted and more family friendly than the original novel version? I'm very glad Don Bluth decided to adaptated it instead and kept the dark themes for his movie adaptation. Disney has adaptated a lot of stories that were originally too dark and changed them to more family friendly adaptations. There are also other non-Disney adaptations of the stories that Disney have adaptated that are a lot darker and more faithful to the original versions than the Disney versions. Of course, Disney have made some movies that were very dark like Hunchback of the Notre Dame and the Black Cauldron. Well, I remember that I have watched a non-Disney HoND animated adaptation where Quasimodo actually died (I think I heard that he died in the original novel too) at the end of the movie and I also remember not being very happy with the ending. I also have seen various other animated adaptations of The Little Mermaid that were very faithful to the original fairytale and in some of them that I have watched, the Little Mermaid died and dissolved into seafom at the the end just like in the original version of the fairytale. I have heard that Walt Disney originally planned to use the original sad ending for his animated adaptation before the other people decided to change it to a happy ending after Walt Disney's death, but I'm not sure if it was true.
i imagine that the black cauldron was disney's response to the favourable response to NIMH. "oh geez, kids like the dark stuff. pull out the concept art for the cauldron idea!"
so true
Animation in general had been in decline since the early 1950's. At that time, it didn't make sense economically to produce the quality animation that was prominent in the 1930's and 40's, largely due to increased production costs and the rise of television. Hence, producers cutting corners or the closure of many studios. The xerox photography did compromise quality animation in the short run, but brought it back as technology advanced in the long run.
I agree, the technology got much better going into the 1990's. Thanks for leaving an informative comment!
@Vimacone, since the 1950's? Sorry, but that's complete B.S, especially where there's proof that this isn't the case, when we got back to back Disney quality in the 90's like Beauty in the Beast, Pocahontas, Aladdin, Lion King
@Warjay, Simply look at the Warner Bros. cartoons produced in the late 50s and early 60s. The art and animation quality in them is well below that of the 40s and early 50s. The storytelling in them is awful, too. Mostly recycling gags (if not outright footage) from earlier cartoons. WB closed its animation studio in 1963, and not because of one bad year. Google "the 50 greatest cartoons" Except for "What's Opera Doc" (1957), there isn't another cartoon on the list between 1955 and 1969 (where "Bambi Meets Godzilla" makes the list)
Fritz Freling went on to create the studio that made the mediocre Pink Panther cartoons. The late 50s saw the rise of Hanna/Barbera (who had produced the Tom & Jerry cartoons for MGM) and their super cheap style of animation designed to fit into TV level budgets. Disney actually copied some of their techniques trying to reduce production costs. Watch Scooby Doo or Flintstones and then watch Robin Hood sometime and see if it doesn't look an awful lot like a Hanna/Barbera production. The 1950s saw Mister Magoo wining Academy Awards for best animated short. Rankin and Bass outsourced all their animation to Japanese studios because they couldn't get the quality they wanted for the budget they had in the states.
So, yeah, it wasn't just Disney animation going through a dark age, and that decline started before 1960.
But it wasn't just about art quality. There was a tiredness to the whole medium, a dearth of originality. Some of it was the rise of Television, some of it involved the aging animators still coasting on stuff they'd done 20 years ago, some of it involved the time-intensive (and therefore expensive) methods of producing cartoons, some of it involved the changing tastes of the new audiences in the '60s. Disney was capturing that audience with his TV shows (like Zorro and Davey Crockett) and live action movies (like Mary Poppins) by that creativity didn't really reach his animation department. The late 60s and early 70s was a low point in the movie industry as a whole.
@lilenborg, so you don't feel like the 90's and early 2000s were a great time for cartoons? There was far more variety in TV cartoons than there is now.
Oh yes. I'm old enough that I was there when Smurfs, Transformers, & He-man hit television. Heck, I remember when you could still catch Johnny Quest, Herculoids, Superfriends, and the pre-He-man Filmation versions of Star Trek, Batman (with Bat-mite), Flash Gordon, and Tarzan on Saturday morning. My first date with my wife was going to see Little Mermaid. That's what I meant when I said that the 60s and 70s were a "dark age" for animation generally, not just for Disney. In the '80s a number of things began to change; one was Star Wars creating a demand for sci-fi programs and animation was a much cheaper way to produce sci-fi than live action was.
For Disney, their revival had to do with new leadership and a general focus on quality, not just in the art and animation, but in the music, and scripts, too. Using the computer for inking, coloring, and special effects, also reduced the production time and costs. On television it had to do with FCC deregulation allowing alliances between animation companies and toy makers that made it profitable to put in the time and money to make cartoons since they would essentially serve as half-hour commercials for a toy line. "Moichendizing! That's where the real money of the movie is made!" - Yogurt
Actually, I consider the Golden Age of Disney to be from Snow White to Lady and the Tramp. Silver Age to be Sleeping Beauty to Aristocats. And Bronze Age to be from Robin Hood to The Black Cauldron.
I personally believe the Renaissance started with The Great Mouse Detective, but no one seems to care.
Falchion Of Eternity I've always liked Mouse Detective as well but it never really took off and achieved lasting appeal like the 89 to 94 era films.
That's because nobody does care
Just one thing - I lived in Britain for many years & never heard about the Black Cauldron being a failure - it is a Welsh legend and, as I remember, the Disney version was wildly popular in all parts of the UK - my family loved it & one of my teenaged nephews saw it 6 times with his friends!
The Mermaid-Aladdin-LionKing combo
Put them back on top forever
Everyone always loves to point to The Black Cauldron box office performance as an indicator of its worth as a movie, but it's honestly unfair to do so. The fact is it premiered at one of the most inopportune times in movie history. It went squarely against Back to The Future which premiered two weeks before.Then it had to contend with National Lampoon's European Vacation, and Pee Wee's Big Adventure just a couple days later. If you look at all the movies that came out in July 1985 the gross box office for every movie, but the ones mentioned were not the great. With the exception of Mad Max and Silverado, but those are far from family flicks. I remember seeing European Vacation while being PG-13 at the age of 7 and I was by far not the only kid there watching it. After watching EV we went right back in and watched Pee Wee.
jason c It was also considered too scary to even be SHOWN in many theaters.
That makes even more unfair when you consider it what it actually grossed.
summersophia29 oh baloney. I live in Utah, and no one thought it was too scary to be shown. Maybe too scary for little kids, but not too scary for kids 9 and up.
jason c maybe in utah, but it was pulled very quickly from southern theaters. I still have my promo Burger King watch somewhere.
It was the first PG 13 Disney movie and they made the cauldron born scene scarier than normal for a Disney film to attract teenagers. But alas, Care Bears beat their asses!! Lol.
When I saw The Black Cauldron, I thought it was just dull and empty. The pacing was terrible (I remember thinking, about 20 minutes in, "jeez, when is the movie going to actually start?") and it just... it's hard to find the words for it, but it just felt like it was missing some vital spark that actually made it come alive. It's like they sewed all the pieces together, but didn't zap it with the lightning bolt to make it stand up and start lurching about on its own. I've never seen another movie where the only reaction I had to it was "Well, I guess that happened." It didn't even make me mad, that's how bland an experience it was.
I prefer The Great Mouse Detective. But then again I'm a Sherlock Holmes junkie.
For the looks of it, this channel is just starting up (and this is my first video here). Keep with the quality of this video and you'll have a huge channel one day. I'm suscribing.
Wow thank you so much for those kind words. My life dream is for this to become successful and I appreciate the encouragement :)
i liked the black cauldron. imagine a live action of that. would be bad ass!
You're on point with this. One other thing to consider is the "limited animation" that destroyed most animation from the 1950s until the Disney Renaissance (and currently hurts post-Renaissance 2D American animation).
Great video! This is rife with interesting history and compelling facts and reasoning as to how the Dark/Bronze Age came to be and Disney's struggle to get out of it. However, I do have a few gripes with this video.
For one, you mention at 2:20: "Because the losses were so devastating, he had to consider shutting down the studio's animation division." And then you explain how they discovered xerography, which allowed them to continue making animated features. But then at 3:42 you say: "And deciding to do that showed me that Disney was no longer concerned in expanding the animation industry..... ....And were more concerned about making a profit."
Wait, what? You admitted that he had two choices, use xerography or be forced to not make animated films anymore. How is that in any way indicative that they were more concerned about "making a profit"?
Now, to be fair, later in the video you say that they used the xerography process for the next 28 years, which I would say you could make an argument for that being a compromise of their integrity in favor of higher profits, sure. However, with the way the video's structured as it is now, it doesn't come across that way. The sentence about Disney being more concerned about making a profit comes right off the heels of your "I don't care about 101 Dalmatians" spiel, so it gives the effect that you're saying it in reference to that film, which is patently false and undermines your point unintentionally.
Also, you're incredibly vague about why the process of xerography is even compromising the animation quality at all. You barely mention its weaknesses, and instead say super nebulous things like "The movies they made just lacked the wonder and awe they were once synonymous with". I mean, sure, you show clips of these films, and the more "sketchy" nature of them is apparent, but other than that, you keep insisting on a premise for which you don't have any examples to back up.
Anyway, I suppose these are more nitpick-y than main criticisms, but I think they're important nonetheless. Also, I apologize; this comment came off more negative than I was originally intending lol. Honestly I really did love this video, and everything else was great. I just think if you take these things into consideration for the future you'll have even better, more coherent video essays! Keep up the good work! :)
Sorry my point didn't come across the way I had hoped! I appreciate the constructive criticism. I want to continue to improve my work, glad you enjoyed it :)
NOW it's all about Marvel movies, Star Wars and occasional generic cgi movies with generic songs in them. But they're making billions so they must be good -_-
Disney doesn't have the balls to even make a movie with their original characters anymore let alone in 2D.
They've turned their back on Mickey, Goofy and Donald.
Yes, Disney most certainly has a vastly different business model than in the past. Makes you think what Walt Disney would think of all this!
And they are not even making good Star Wars movies. The Force Awakens was an atrocious insult to film making
I wouldn't say that. It was the same toy with brand new packaging.
I feel like Disney is currently going through its Dark Age with the live action remakes and sequels. The current Disney movies fail to represent that brand in a positive light and simply paint it as unoriginal.
The problem is that Disney now, rely so much on the beautiful animation, that they do not see the importance of a great and captivating story anymore. And kids today are used to that, so they don't complain. But I miss the dramatic and mature flair of the movies up until the 2000s, where I think Disney were really creative with their material. Stuff like Treasure Planet & Atlantis showed much promise in what Disney was doing, but somehow they switched completely into something else. You can also see the difference in the music. Disney used to use these epic arrangements, which could've been something out of Phantom Of The Opera or The Secret Garden . But now it's more about creating hit songs for TH-cam....
It's funny that the films considered the "dark age" basically COMPRISED my childhood.
The Rescuers, Robin Hood, and the Aristocats??
My holy Disney childhood trilogy.
Is there a particular reason xerography produces inferior animation to hand tracing the art? Either way you're getting a copy, so why is there a difference?
It just looks sketchier. If you did a side by side comparison of a Disney movie from the 50s and a Disney movie from the 70s, you can tell there's a difference
I don't feel there is really a comparison. You are talking about one type of animation in comparison to another. The same as today's animation does not look like the animation of the 50s. Does that make one better than the other? No, it's like comparing realism to impressionism. You can't, because it's apples to oranges, and is really a matter of preference, and nuance. It's better to say a style doesn't appeal to you than to say one is good, and one is not.
The Jaunty Professor
It would be interesting to see copies of the same original using both methods, then.
I think the "sketchiness" was because xerography was only capable of black lines at the time. Secret of NIMH used the same process but was the first that was the first feature to use colored lines according to google.
I feel like because animation is art, it's strange to say "sketchyness" is bad, there's no empirical reason for it to be bad you just don't like it. Especially since people love that movie, clearly most people weren't bothered.
CGI breaks my heart
CGI is actually great. Infact, most movies HAVE CGI but you just never notice it (An example is mad max). Once you see very rarely bad CGI, of course youll notice it and think CGI Is bad.
But if CGI is bad, that means Pixar is bad. 3d Animation is CGI.
here watch this: th-cam.com/video/yOrfhH77ynY/w-d-xo.html
I don't mind CG but I do wish that there was still 2D movies. ...well there is Teen Titans Go to the movies... Half of the reason I watch anime is because most of it is 2D. Disney has been using computer effects since the 80's though.
CGI never looks good and it ages like milk.
So "Mary Poppins" is part of the "Dark Age"....interesting.
Yes but the dark age largely refers to animation titles rather than live action
These Disney eras only seem to include animation.
You forgot to talk about the importance of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It was more than influential & its success proved that audiences still loved animation, even more adult, so long as the story was good.
I loved almost all of those films from the Bronze Age as a child. I honestly don't think the renaissance was due to the movies being better quality but just easier to sell.
The so-called dark age films were some of my favourites growing up. While I love most of their 90s material, I feel that there's a certain quirk and magic to films like The Rescuers that Disney has lost over the years. The Renaissance might have brought them back financially and critically, but it also led to the very glossy and somewhat sterile state of their films today. Maybe it's just me, but I'll take Black Cauldron over Frozen any day.
I would like to know your opinions of the Black Cauldron. IMO, the Prydain series is one of the greatest 'kids' stories before Harry Potter (kids is in quotes, as I still love reading HP and Prydain as an adult). But Disney took the story, drowned it in a burlap sack, beat it, burned it, and tossed it down the sewer. I never saw it in the Theatre, and was excited when I was finally able to rent it on VHS. I was so disappointed. There are some good things about it, but man, the story team really lost their bearings. Rock bottom indeed.
It's been a few years since I've seen the movie but I do remember that I liked the character design of the villain, his minions, and his castle and I also liked some of the animation. But other than that, the movie didn't really make an impact on me. With the recent surge of live action remakes of Disney animated classics, Disney should look no further than The Black Cauldron because this movie needs a second try.
I loved it. By far Disney's 'darkest cartoon.
Disney is developing a live-action Chronicles of Prydain film.
Someone needs to do a real adaptation of the Prydain saga. Probably as 5 separate movies.
pinball1968 I LOVED the Black Cauldron but they could have gone so much farther.
Xerography > Disney ceasing to exist
Excellent video! Thank you so much 😊 ! I’m surprised you didn’t go further and mention the animation teams that made the revival possible, for me, my favorite Disney animator is Glen Keane, and he plays a pivotal role in the Disney Revival! I was hoping you would talk about him a bit, because I would have loved to hear your opinion on him and how he affected Disney! 😊 Great Content! Thank you for posting!
Also state that this is a 2 part video essay, great job on the video, it was really entertaining
I would say we are in a dark age now. In the 90s a new Disney movie was like a huge event. Now they are just remaking those same movies.
Man, a lot of my favorites came from the “Dark Ages”.
Most of mine are from the "Dark Ages", too. Also, first time I hear that period being called that. And I'm honestly not a big fan of the "Renaissance".
You sound like the people who complain about the over use of CGI, aka wrong and placing blame on the methods instead of the people behind them.
Haha I'm actually not! My point is that the Disney Dark Age should not be solely based on the absence of Walt Disney himself and that it is important to recognize that the quality of Disney's animation went down during those years and why.
My issue with CGI animation is that it really is lazy as far as TV shows that use it and alot of the shows just aren't interesting enough to make up for looking budgeted. There's some good CGI TV shows but they are mostly limited to Disney Junior or are the older ones like Reboot and also Code Lyoko. Movies done in CGI animation depends on the movie. I'm not too big on Pixar but I do like Up and I actually liked Disney's Big Hero 6 for some reason (I liked the cuddly robot I guess?) Also I can't say I really like DreamWorks outside of the first 2 Shrek movies and Shrek 4 and also How to Train Your Dragon. I did enjoy Happy Feet. And The Miraculous Ladybug and Cat Noir is pretty interesting (I haven't seen but 2 episodes of it). My problem comes more from the story line of the show or if it's funny enough for me to at least enjoy what I am watching. I like action, drama, and comedy mixed up together (which is why Teen Titan's Go is unwatchable for me).
But you are because you blame the start of the dark age on xerography. That's a method.
That's because Disney WAS cutting corners with xerography and reusing old animation assets, such as copying old animation cell and scenes... So, still falls under the category of "people misusing the method rather than the method itself".
this video is ridiculous. "UGH CHEAPER LINES RUINED EVERYTHING AND INSTANTLY MADE THEM GO FROM ARTISTS TO MONEY GRABBERS" lol christ, what the hell. all it did was just that... make the lines look less polished. you still had the same mind blowing golden age animators who are possibly the most skilled animators of ALL TIME. Jungle Book and 101 Dalmatians still has some of the most impressive animation of all time by geniuses like Milt Kahl. the latter ABSOLUTELY beats the 'muh golden age' animators - I'm sure even Glen Keane wouldn't claim superiority over Kahl.
the quality of the films did decline over time but it wasn't about 'buhhh where did the polished go'. letting that small element have such a huge impact on you is ridiculous.
Incredible video! I think that was the first time I’ve ever subscribed after only watching 1 video! Bravo.