What snippet does the opening credits to every Walt Disney Animation use?”
Then, as big companies often do, Disney changed its mind. Actually, Disney bought Pixar and Pixar chief John Lasseter, assigned to run all of Disney animation, decided to bring back hand-drawn animation to the studio that perfected it. And the directors who spearheaded the great Disney animation revival with “The Little Mermaid” (1989) came back to try to do it all over again. “They had decided things were going one way, permanently, and then the Pixar deal came through, John Lasseter took over and everything changed,” says Ron Clements, co-director of “The Little Mermaid,” “Aladdin” and “Hercules.” Clements and co-director John Musker pitched Disney on a new “princess” movie, a variation on a classic tale they would call “The Princess and the Frog.” It would be a musical set in old New Orleans. The princess would be a first for Disney. She would be African-American. And the animation? Hand-drawn. Randy Newman, Pixar’s house composer and a songwriter with New Orleans roots, would do th
It’s been years since Disney made an animated film that Walt himself could have rolled up his sleeves and pitched in on. The traditional, hand-drawn “classic” animation fell out of favor with audiences enamored of the computer-generated animation of Pixar and Dreamworks. Until the idea for “The Princess and the Frog” came along. “All of the artists always believed in this (hand-drawn) art form,” says Mark Henn, who animated Pocahontas, Princess Jasmine (“Aladdin”), Belle (“Beauty and the Beast”) and Mulan. “But nobody sat us down and said ‘Let’s take a vote about continuing or not.’ It was decided (by corporate).” Disney dropped hand-drawn animation altogether, closing the last of its animation studios in 2004. “So what do you do?” Henn asks. “You keep working, try to learn new skills, do what you have to do to take care of your family.” “And some of us got rusty,” jokes animator Michael Surrey, who counts Timon from “The Lion King” among his credits. Hand-drawn animation was kept aliv
