Acquired
02:27:04 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[02:27:04] S1: And so they try a bunch of stuff. On the animation side, they do packages where they take a bunch of shorts and they package them together as feature films. These are movies that you almost assuredly have never seen called, like, Make Mine Music or Fun and Fancy Free, not big successes. The other thing they try in animation is to go back to the original Alice's idea of combining animation and live action. The result of that is the movie song of the south. Yeah. Which historians look back on as racist and deeply problematic, and Disney has never released on home video or streaming. So, not a big success for the flywheel there either. And for the first time in animation, there's now actually real competition in the marketplace. So before the war, Warner Brothers had started Looney Tunes, you know, with, like, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig and then Elmer Fudd and, of course, Bugs Bunny. Ironically, it's a former Disney story department employee, Charles Thorson, that does the initial designs for Bugs Bunny. And then in 1940, you know, same year, it all started to fall apart for Disney. Joseph Barbera and William Hanna start working together. They produce Tom and Jerry for MGM. So the other major studios [02:28:28] S0: And The Flintstones. [02:28:29] S1: Yeah. The Flintstones, of course. Yeah. The other major studios are starting to creep in on the animation game. And so by this postwar period, these other studios had grown in popularity and were really starting to rival Disney. Meanwhile, Disney, they go the other way, and they get into live action.
02:28:29 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[02:28:29] S1: Yeah. The Flintstones, of course. Yeah. The other major studios are starting to creep in on the animation game. And so by this postwar period, these other studios had grown in popularity and were really starting to rival Disney. Meanwhile, Disney, they go the other way, and they get into live action. [02:28:47] S0: Yeah. They somehow had a bunch of cash tied up in Europe that they couldn't repatriate, so they needed to spend it in London. So they went and shot a live action film, Treasure Island, in London, which did well for them. Live action is far less expensive to create. You can do it fast, and they needed to do something with this cash. But, you know, you're not buying a lot of Treasure Island merch today. It's not durable like the [02:29:10] S1: the animated stuff. As we talked about earlier, live action doesn't feed the flywheel, at least for Disney, in quite the same way.
02:29:10 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[02:29:10] S1: the animated stuff. As we talked about earlier, live action doesn't feed the flywheel, at least for Disney, in quite the same way. [02:29:17] S0: Yep. They started doing nature documentaries. They did one called Seal Island shot in Alaska. They also started studying the emerging TV medium to see if they should do something here. But at this point in time decide, basically not. But we'll watch it and see. We're very interested. But Walt Hart really was in animation. He wanted to get back to making animated feature films that push the envelope. Roy, meanwhile, hates this idea since the studio is not on good financial footing. It has lots of debt. Walt ultimately has to give an ultimatum that if we don't get back to this, then we should just sell the company. Like, what are we even doing here? In 1950, Roy capitulates, and the company went and raised another $2,000,000 to finance their next film, which was Cinderella. [02:30:05] S1: The first bright spot in a long time. [02:30:09] S0: And their first full length feature film in eight years since Bambi in 1942. [02:30:14] S1: And the way they made Cinderella was quite different. Right? [02:30:18] S0: Yeah. So Walt pounds the table to make this thing, and then he kinda realizes the way they are gonna make it feels compromised to him. Mhmm. Because the budget just can't be what they were blowing before in those early forties to try to really push the envelope.
02:30:18 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[02:30:18] S0: Yeah. So Walt pounds the table to make this thing, and then he kinda realizes the way they are gonna make it feels compromised to him. Mhmm. Because the budget just can't be what they were blowing before in those early forties to try to really push the envelope. [02:30:34] S1: Yeah. There's a great quote from the animator Frank Thomas who worked on Cinderella. We planned Cinderella more carefully and shot it all in live action first so we could judge it. This was without costumes or a set. Just go on a soundstage and see whether that scene's going to work. Walt said, we can't afford to animate it and then change it. The animation has to be right the first time. Yeah. Not the mindset that they took into Snow White.
02:30:34 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[02:30:34] S1: Yeah. There's a great quote from the animator Frank Thomas who worked on Cinderella. We planned Cinderella more carefully and shot it all in live action first so we could judge it. This was without costumes or a set. Just go on a soundstage and see whether that scene's going to work. Walt said, we can't afford to animate it and then change it. The animation has to be right the first time. Yeah. Not the mindset that they took into Snow White. [02:30:58] S0: And this basically flips the, like, live action animation thing from a source of inspiration and study to a crutch. So they were filming every scene and then rotoscoping, effectively, like, tracing the live action footage out of the camera Right. To make it animated, which can lead to this much more rigid feeling animation. Also, once you film it, you are completely locked into that view. It's not like you can move the theoretical camera because you haven't really built the muscle to animate in that style for the film. Yep. So you're you're kinda stuck with this, like, how it looked in the camera is how we trace it on paper. It just had less of the, like, lavish detail that they put into Pinocchio and Bambi. All this ultimately leads to, like, Walt's hard is just not in it. He he kinda helps kick start the whole thing, but then is not engaged during the production of this film. It does end up being a critical and commercial huge success, though. [02:31:54] S1: Yes. I believe it makes basically the same amount of money as Snow White. I think it does $8,000,000 in film rentals in the first year.
02:31:54 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[02:31:54] S1: Yes. I believe it makes basically the same amount of money as Snow White. I think it does $8,000,000 in film rentals in the first year. [02:32:03] S0: Yep. On a cost of 2,200,000. Yep. So, really, this is the first big financial success for the company since before the war. It's the biggest success since Snow White. It got the company back on sound footing after a pretty gnarly [02:32:17] S1: time Gnarly decade there. Yeah. But yeah. So Cinderella is is a huge bright spot. It was a onetime financial boost to the studio that didn't solve all the company's problems, but it did get animation back on the right foot creatively. Even though Walt was no longer, you know, as deeply involved as he was in the Snow White era, it did turn things around enough that, like, at least they were making quality work again. And, like, obviously, those films still hold up today. [02:32:46] S0: Over the next few years, they then released Alice in Wonderland, which surprise ballooned over budget and did not pay back. That is in part because a lot of historians say it's a film that Walt felt like he should do because of his reverence for the source material [02:33:02] S1: Yep.