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| Clash of
the Monsters |
4 Feb 2002
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DreamWorks and Disney have been fighting a ding dong battle for
supremacy in toon town. In the latest round, it's the monsters
turn to square off.
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Double act: The stars of Monsters
Inc have got what it takes.
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By
Brian Pendreigh
Once upon a time there was a cute, little mouse, who had big ears
and a pair of red shorts with bright, shiny buttons. But those
were innocent times. Now the land is in the grip of fantastic
monsters, engaged in fearsome battle. The prize is the right to
entertain the children of the world... And billions of dollars...
And a shiny, new trophy, a bit like a golden snitch, except it
goes by the name of Oscar.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' decision to introduce
an Oscar for best animated feature, this year of all years, adds
spice to the intensifying battle for the soul of animation and
the fortune in box-office grosses, videos and merchandising that
goes with it.
On one side we have that big, ugly ogre who dared poke fun at
Disney, who cleaned up at the box office and seemed destined to
run off with the new Academy Award. The monster's name is of course
Jeffrey Katzenberg. He was one of the Disney's most senior executives,
but it ended in tears before bedtime. He went off to found DreamWorks
with Steven Spielberg and engaged the House of Mouse in battle,
both in the law courts and on the screen, in the wickedly funny
Shrek.
Katzenberg and Shrek may still win the new Oscar, but it no longer
looks the certainty it did. The opposing forces have responded
with a special offer - two monsters for the price of one. The
monster champion is a gallumphing blue beastie and his sidekick
a wee, fat creature that looks like a Granny Smith, with one big
eye. These monsters are called Disney and Pixar.
"We are very, very excited about the new Oscar category, because
we are lovers of the animation," says John Lasseter, executive
producer of Monsters,
Inc., the latest offering from Disney and the pioneering Pixar
computer animation company. It is the partnership that brought
us the Toy Story films and A Bug's Life. The latest offering,
the story of monsters who are terrified of children, was another
box-office record-breaker in America and is certain to join Shrek
on the Oscar ballot paper.
Lasseter has been called the new Disney. He conceived and directed
Toy Story, the first computer-animated feature film, and he faced
the same scepticism Disney encountered when he announced he was
going to make a feature-length cartoon in 1934. Sceptics dubbed
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs "Disney's folly", but it was
a huge hit and the company dominated the market for the rest of
the century.
At the start of a new millennium however the big monster is looking
increasingly dependent on its little sidekick for the really big
cinema hits. And sidekicks have a nasty habit of wanting to break
free and do some kicking in their own right.
Lasseter is Pixar's executive vice-president of
creative - not creative affairs, just creative, the noun, although
it was colleague Pete Docter who came up with the idea for a film
in which monsters visit the human world at night to collect the
children's screams that provide energy in their world. The monsters
believe children are toxic and there is panic when an inquisitive
and fearless toddler follows one back to Monstropolis.
Lasseter was very concerned that it should not be too scary. Originally
the film began with a scene in which a monster roars at a child,
and then it turns out it was a practice and the child was not
real. But it was recut, so the child wakes up and screams first,
frightening the monster. "I have five sons," says Lasseter. "Some
of them wake up in the night with nightmares and so on, and I
just said, "I don't want to get into that.'"
Lasseter is one of the nice guys, a burly individual
with wire-rimmed glasses, cropped hair, a loose, multi-coloured
shirt with monsters on it, and the sort of boundless, boyish enthusiasm
that disarms interviewers. He trained with Disney, and unlike
Katzenberg, is still very much a part of Uncle Walt's big happy
family. He maintains 2001 was a "banner year" for animation and
begins his assessment of its films with Dinosaur, the Disney film
in which computer-generated dinosaurs were combined with real
landscapes, even though it came out the previous year and is ineligible
for the Oscar.
Next up is Final
Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the sci-fi adventure inspired
by a computer game. Its characters were so life-like that executives
were reportedly fooled by early footage into believing they were
real. Its makers, Square Co, envisaged a money-spinning franchise
to rival Batman, but the film flopped at the box office and Square
Co announced it would stick to games in future.
Only then does Lasseter get round to name-checking Shrek, sandwiching
it between Final Fantasy and Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, from Nickelodeon,
the cable channel that had a big cinema success with the Rugrats.
This time it is exploiting its parent company Viacom's multimedia
outlets by launching Jimmy virtually simultanesouly in a movie,
TV series, comics and all the usual merchandising.
All these films have one thing in common - they were created inside
a computer. At least Lasseter has the decency not to mention Atlantis:
The Lost Empire, the Disney cartoon that looked flat and old-fashioned
beside the new generation and which sank beneath a wave of audience
indifference on both sides of the Atlantic.
Disney's cartoon features, from Snow
White to The Jungle Book, were the original event movies,
appearing every few years and reappearing at regular intervals
to delight new generations. They lost their way after Disney's
death in 1966. It did not seem to matter much, because of the
diversification within his empire, though Disney might have been
spinning in his fridge at the sight of Daryl Hannah's bare bottom
in Splash!
Uncle Walt was posthumously accused of colonial imperialism,
taking the world's stories and remaking them in his own sexist,
racist, capitalist image. Other film-makers were praised by exponents
of the auteur theory for the way in which films reflected their
makers. Disney was an FBI "special agent" in his spare time after
all, so the conservative "messages" in his films should have come
as no great surprise.
The old cartoons found a huge new market on video
and the real reason the new ones did less well was that the studio
ran out of inspiration. Snow White was bland, but the dwarfs had
been wonderful grotesques. The Fifties gave us Peter Pan and Lady
and the Tramp; the Eighties gave us Basil the Great Mouse Detective
and Oliver and Company. Now the cartoons were simply bland.
Michael Eisner, the clean-cut, young all-American,
was brought in from Paramount as chairman and chief executive
of the Walt Disney parent company. Katzenberg was appointed chairman
of Walt Disney Studios and by the end of the decade the intense,
balding studio boss, who looked more like a banker than a film-maker,
had turned the ailing operation's fortunes around.
Beauty and the Beast looked like a marriage of Disney and Shakespeare
and was nominated for the best picture Oscar. Aladdin brilliantly
tapped into the anarchic humour of Robin Williams - taking the
children to a Disney cartoon was no longer a chore, it was a delight.
The Lion King really was a marriage of Disney and Shakespeare,
and became the highest-grossing animated film of all time.
Then Katzenberg fell out with Eisner, and went off
to DreamWorks. There was speculation at the time that he was motivated
by revenge. Meanwhile Disney teamed up with Pixar, a company developed
out of the computer division at Lucasfilm. Lasseter joined Lucasfilm
in 1984, the business was acquired by Apple Computer founder Steve
Jobs in 1986 and Pixar won its first short-film Oscar in 1989.
Toy Story followed six years later. It is a classic,
not because it is computer-animated, but because it is a great
movie - Buzz and Woody were the new Butch and Sundance. Adults
who appreciated Williams's genie genius in Aladdin relished
the quips about "laser envy" and the little alien toys, in the
arcade game, who await their turn to be chosen by a deity called
"the claw".
Audiences flocked to see Toy Story because it was funny
and clever, and because it had Disney behind it, not just giving
their seal of approval, but using all the marketing expertise
they had built up over the decades to turn it into a must-see
event.
Pixar exploited Disney's supremacy; DreamWorks would challenge
it. Others had periodically thrown down the gauntlet and inevitably
retired from the battlefield, bloodied and broken. But perhaps
now there was room for two rival animation companies, both with
computer-animated films, more precisely both with computer-animated
films about insects. Katzenberg pulled out all the stops to get
Antz into cinemas ahead
of Pixar's A Bug's
Life, but still lost out at the box office.
Computer animation revolutionised cinema. The
Phantom Menace combined real actors with animated characters
and blurred the boundaries of animated film. But it took the failure
of Final Fantasy and the success of Chicken
Run, a film that used plasticine models to pastiche The Great
Escape, to underline the fact that computer technology was neither
a guarantee nor a prerequisite of success.
Chicken Run was made by Nick Park's Aardman studio
in Bristol. It had aligned itself with DreamWorks, the way smaller
countries lined up behind the big powers in the two world wars.
The fight for the animation market has all the trappings of a
world war. Chicken Run gave DreamWorks its biggest animation hit
so far. Before Shrek that is.
As Shrek shattered box-office records on its way to becoming the
most successful computer-animated film ever, Katzenberg insisted
he was not challenging Disney, helpfully pointing out that his
film was "playful", even "subversive", in other words "very un-Disney".
Certainly, the red-headed heroine, Princess Fiona, was nothing
like traditional, bland Disney heroines: her singing causes little
birds to explode, and she then proceeds to cook their eggs.
There were also all those digs at Disney characters,
or rather characters Disney had borrowed from other sources, and
which therefore fell outwith corporate copyright. At the end of
Shrek, Snow White and Cinderella are seen fighting over Fiona's
bouquet. Revenge must have tasted sweet for Katzenberg. He had
had to wait seven years to savour it. Most wars do not last that
long, not even world wars.
What has made this conflict so intriguing of course
is that it is being fought on the field of children's entertainment,
with animated characters instead of armies. How different the
world would be if statesmen resolved their differences by creating
stories about ogres and monsters, princes and red-haired princesses
called Fiona, and then allowed the public to decide the winner.
Shrek came at a bad time for Disney. Its cartoons were beginning
to look just a little tired. Each one grossed less than its predecessor
and they had lost that aura of a special event. Pearl
Harbor could certainly boast that status, but it fell short
of Eisner's huge expecations. Something had to give and Eisner
announced Peter Schneider was resigning from Katzenberg's old
position of studio boss to take up the challenge of forming his
own theatre company. It was not an obvious career move, a bit
like Henry Ford going off to open a filling station.
Eisner's Disney is one of the biggest media and
entertainment groups in the world, with television stations, theme
parks, hotels, cruise ships and a vast library of old movies,
some of which it has successfully transferred to theatre and ice
rink. It has hundreds of stores, selling toys, clothes and other
items designed specifically to exploit its movie characters. But
the whole operation depends on a supply of hit movies. September
11 hardly helped business prospects and there have been major
job cuts, including several hundred animators.
Once again, Pixar came to the rescue with Monsters,
Inc. James P Sullivan and Mike Wazowski are, as their names suggest,
a couple of regular guys, who just happen to look strange, by
human standards, what with the fur and the teeth and the single
eye and all that. They were fresh and new, reflecting the medium.
Monsters, Inc. was fun. It was funny. It was a hit.
Disney and Pixar signed a five-film deal after Toy Story, but
Disney has a habit of falling out with people and there have been
arguments over whether the deal covers Toy
Story 2, which was intended to go straight to video. Pixar
argued for a cinema release and the film outgrossed the original.
Now Disney plans to release the Peter Pan sequel Return to Neverland
in cinemas. Traditional animation, it opens in the UK on 22 March,
when it will be up against two rival animated features, Jimmy
Neutron and Ice Age, showing just how crowded the marketplace
has become.
Disney will have another traditional animation film
out just seven months later and can look forward to further films
from Pixar. But for how long? Commentators are suggesting the
time may be coming for Pixar to leave the House of Mouse and set
out on its own. "Disney are the best at marketing, at distributing
and publicising films," says Lasseter. "Especially in the UK,"
he adds, with a laugh. "It's a relationship. When we are done
with the next three films, I think then we will take a look at
it and see what is best for our company."
No empire lasts forever. It is 100 years since Walt Disney took
his first teetering steps towards fame and fortune. The company
he founded has been celebrating with special screenings of all
the old favourites. Disney will always have the past. The future
is less certain. But it looks like it might be a fun ride getting
there.
Monsters, Inc.
opens in the UK on 8 February 2002.
The 2002 Oscar nominations
are announced on 12 February.
Katz on Shrek - Interview with Jeffrey
Katzenberg
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