Ok, but it really was. It recycled a ton of animation from earlier films like The Jungle Book, and it didn't have many particularly challenging scenes to draw, with a somewhat simple cartoony art style without any humans characters. And this was made long after animation was considered to be a impossible challenge.
Heck, many of Disney's early films were much more impressive, like Pinocchio that had come out over 30 years prior.
I still really love this movie though, it's very charming
You’re right, but what’s funny is that it was still made by illustrators/animators with art directors and people who did all this shit by hand.
I’m in a similar field and it’s absolutely fuckin bananas how nobody in power gives a single fuck about the quality of work, artists’ pay, or making sure the end product is something quality (even with recycled artwork), ALL THE WHILE crying about the bottom line when they slash already-razor thin budgets.
i.e., “we cut the staff, recycled a ton of stock animation, frankenstein’d all this shit together, used AI to fill in the gaps…and it was a commercial failure! What the fuck did we do wrong?!?”
I don’t know at what point people push back and demand better — if we have to roll out guillotines or what — but until that happens, we’re never getting cool animated movies like this again
Maybe the solution is to just get everyone into their same fetishes. That way they'll start comissioning much grander projects for the public. That is how you save art!
In a sane world the industry would change their business model before dying, but that's not what's happening. Just look at the videogame industry, it's a bloodbath because of 10+ years of failed business models. Industry executives really be dumb fucks
Not the point. OP is lamenting about the current state of the industry, pointing out that what used to be called a quick cash grab went leagues above and beyond what is considered full effort today.
According to director Yoshiyuki Tomino, one of the reasons for the Gundam movie trilogy in the early 80s (incidentally this is when Gundam actually became a commercial success for the first time) was to raise enough money to make Ideon, the next project they were working on, and what the staff were actually passionate about (not that they weren't passionate about Gundam, but real artists want to make new things, not just milk what they've already done).
You could therefore argue that the Ideon movies were, from the start, money sinks rather than cash grabs, never expected to be successful enough to justify their own creation, and instead kind of leeching off Gundam's success to have much bigger budgets than they would otherwise have access to.
Guess you haven't seen Pinnochio. Or Snow White. Or Sleeping Beauty. Or 101 Dalmations. Or Beauty and the Beast. Or Lion King. Or 10+ other movies I don't feel like listing
Originally it was supposed to be about Reynard the Fox. Walt liked the idea, but wasn't too big on a main character who rapes a wolf, stands trial for murdering 14 other characters, along with attempted murder, chops off the hand of another character, gouges another character's eye out and pees on the children of the wolf he raped. Then there is blasphemy and if I recall correctly, sodomizing a priest (don't hold me to the last one, I just remember the priest's butt hole is explicitly brought up).
So they kicked the idea around for 40 years until someone had the bright idea of combining Reynard's characters with Robin Hood's story. The only character who is really off is Friar Tuck, who should be the fox's angry badger uncle, who gets the church and king to forgive the fox, after the fox beats himself in the head with a club. Instead he gets turned into some Goofy animorph.
Reynard was a take down of medieval France. The wolf stood for the legal establishment, the lion for the king, and the other animals stood in for different figures in the church and state, who you couldn't specifically call out. Adding to the absurdity, Reynard is always held to the standard you'd hold humans to, in spite of him being a literal fox.
So at the beginning of the story Reynard is charged with raping the wolf's wife. There is some trouble with getting him to actually show up to court, but when he does he argues that he was helping her get out of a break in the ice, so he was actually saving her life. In the story I kinda get the feeling that neither was true. He was probably having an affair with the she-wolf, since he just happens to end up back at her place later in the story and while hiding from the lawyer wolf, the fox ends up peeing on his wolf cubs (he was hiding up in in the rafters).
He ends up getting out of the case, but later on he gets tried for murdering 14 chickens, so the rooster demands that he be brought in and face justice (this happens while having a funeral for the chickens, but it's hard not to imagine the king lion gnawing on a chicken leg while all of this goes on). He ends up injuring different animals, like a cat and a bear, while they try to arrest him. Every time he tricks them into doing something that animal would naturally do, like getting the bear to attack a bee hive. In the end he somehow gets out of trouble, while outsmarting everyone. Then back into trouble, over and over again.
He's the little guy who constantly gets called out by the system for the crime of being who he is, a literal four legged fox, and in the end he always ends up fucking over the system.
The biggest problem is that the movie cheaped out on the ending. As in, there wasn't one. They made 85% of the movie, and then just said "Oh yeah after the dance party the king returned and set things right offscreen so the story is over. The End."
As a child I didn't care and actually remembered it well but then I watched it as an adult expecting a good disney movie and yeah...it's really not that good. Not bad, but they have made so much better ones. The recycled animations aren't even a huge problem, even though it's lazy.
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u/Filmologic 2d ago
Ok, but it really was. It recycled a ton of animation from earlier films like The Jungle Book, and it didn't have many particularly challenging scenes to draw, with a somewhat simple cartoony art style without any humans characters. And this was made long after animation was considered to be a impossible challenge.
Heck, many of Disney's early films were much more impressive, like Pinocchio that had come out over 30 years prior.
I still really love this movie though, it's very charming