The Decline of Traditional Animation
Despite the box office success of Disney's Lilo & Stitch, the failure of their much-hyped Treasure Planet seemed to ensure that there would be major cutbacks at Disney's animation studio. In 2004, Disney released what it announced to be its last traditionally-animated film, Home on the Range. The film received mixed reviews and was not successful at the box office.
That same year, the live-action film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was released. It was notable for being filmed entirely in front of a bluescreen, with the background being completely computer generated; only the actors and some props were real. Robert Zemeckis' film The Polar Express, starring Tom Hanks in five roles, was completely CGI animation, but used performance capture technology to animate the characters. Zemeckis followed The Polar Express with two other motion capture films: Beowulf and Disney's A Christmas Carol.
However, the release of The Princess and the Frog and The Secret of Kells in 2009, both nominated for an Academy Award, marked a renewed interest in traditional animation. In the same year, Coraline and Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox (also Academy Award nominated) renewed interest in stop motion animation.
Read more about this topic: American Animation
Famous quotes containing the words decline and/or traditional:
“Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall,
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“We should have an army so organized and so officered as to be capable in time of emergency, in cooperation with the National Militia, and under the provision of a proper national volunteer law, rapidly to expand into a force sufficient to resist all probable invasion from abroad and to furnish a respectable expeditionary force if necessary in the maintenance of our traditional American policy which bears the name of President Monroe.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)