J On The Spectrum - Disney's 100th Anniversary - The Old Guard Retires (GUEST: Jerry Rees)
Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period.
Jerry Rees (our guest star), gives us insights into the making of The Fox and the Hound and some of the transition that was going on at Disney once the Reagan years kicked into high gear.
The Fox and the Hound from 1981 was the point where the Nine Old Men decided that they were finally gonna hang up their pencils and paintbrushes and pass the torch on to the young animators that they've trained to make animated features, so this was their last go round. It has probably the best character dynamic of any animated film to date, by the early 1980s. Here we have a fox and a hound dog who end up becoming friends not knowing that they're supposed to hate each other, then something happens between them that makes them hate each other, until one suddenly shows compassion for his former friend and then saves him, leading the other friend to stand up for his former friend even if they're supposed to hate each other. The closest kind of character dynamic I can think of in animated features that comes this close is between Moses and Ramses in The Prince of Egypt from 1998.
Transition was going on at Disney during the beginning of the 80s. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston would retire and have an office dedicated to writing a book dedicated to the craft of animation. Eric Larson would retire and instead be an animation consultant from this point. During production on The Fox and the Hound, Ron Miller, who was now the head of Disney, attempted to put Don Bluth in charge of the animation department, but even Don saw that the upper management was so risk adverse in making animated films, so on his birthday in 1979, he left the studio and took many of the animators, including John Pomeroy, with him so he can start his own studio. Their first production was Banjo the Woodpile Cat, and their second production was The Secret Of NIMH, the only animated feature I can think of where the lead character is a single mother. It pushed back the release of this film to 1981.
Ironically, the studio that could not afford sweeping epic shots or creating drama in animated features by 1981, was on the same lot working on a live action film starring Jeff Bridges that would showcase a completely new kind of special effect: CGI. Our guest Jerry Rees worked on the CGI in Tron with Bill Kroyer, becoming one of the first features to ever use this cutting edge tool. Also, something would happen that would indirectly benefit animation as a whole, and it's spelled with 3 words. M-T-V. I want my MTV! Debuting the same year The Fox and the Hound was released, MTV, while it did not invent music videos, brought the medium to a mainstream not seen before, a kind of TV being craved by the youth known as Gen X, which spoke to them. As a result, animation artists now had a completely new medium to create animation with, beyond the constraints of family entertainment. This resulted in A-Ha's Take On Me video which used rotoscoped sketchy animation, and Dire Straits' Money For Nothing video, which also used early CGI.
Yet even as Disney continued to drag on, the young animators, by now including Glen Keane who had progressed to being a supervisor, John Lasseter (who would later end up at a Northern California startup that would be important later in our story), and surprisingly, Tim Burton (yes, the same one who directs gothic style quirky films with Johnny Depp), were waiting for something, anything to happen because they were just as passionate about the art of animation as were the Nine Old Men that came before them. Tim Burton, noticing this lack of quality, stopped being an animator at Disney and progressed to directing live action films, starting with Pee Wee's Big Adventure in 1985. It would take a big failure from the studio to suddenly motivate the management to finally work on turning things around and make great animated films again.
Next week, the film that almost killed Disney animation.
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