`Treasure Planet' crash endangers Disney animation

Andy Goldberg, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Los Angeles

For kids around the world, and many of their parents too, Disney has long been synonymous with lavish animation, fantasy tales, and engrossing characters.

But the spectacular box office failure of the legendary studio's latest offering, "Treasure Planet", is prompting many industry watchers to question whether the end is night for the most famous animation studio in history.

The movie, which cost US$180 million to make and market, earned just $16.6 million on its opening weekend and has earned only dimly since.

The failure was so pronounced that it forced the entertainment conglomerate to restate its annual revenue forecast as the film fell catastrophically short of studio predictions.

The debacle could not have come at a worse time for Disney, which has been disappointing investors with poor earnings and is currently the subject of an official financial probe.

"Perhaps the famed Disney animation division - which dominated the family film market for more than half a century, spurred the studio's resurgence in the 1990s and gave Hollywood its most enduring brand - is running out of gas?" speculated The New York Times.

In many ways the problem illustrates how technology and changing tastes are forever altering the face of entertainment.

Disney's classic methods of producing animated movies rely on the hugely expensive practice of employing talented artists to hand draw thousands and thousands of individual cells.

Computer-generated images may lack some of the artistic class, but they are far cheaper to produce and the difference is hardly noticeable to audiences, especially those made up of toddlers.

This generation of youngsters also has very different media consumption habits than those of their predecessors, who made movies like "The Lion King", "The Little Mermaid" and "Aladdin" such huge hits.

Today's kids are inundated with cartoons on television. For them, the unveiling of a new Disney cartoon is no longer the must see event it was a decade ago.

Tastes have changed in other ways too. Teenage kids now have to be dragged screaming into an animated adventure movie like "Treasure Planet". Their tastes are far better served by movies like Eminen's provocative but ultimately inspiring "8 Mile".

Nevertheless, the last year has seen three hugely popular animated films. "Shrek", "Ice Age" and "Monsters Inc." all set the box office alight as families clamored to see the photo- realistic characters created by state of the art computer animation technologies, mixed with clever and witty multilayered dialogue.

Even the moderately successful Disney movie "Lilo & Stitch" utilized computerized techniques and included a rascally monster that appealed to kids' sense of mischief.

The lost fortune of Treasure Planet is also symbolic of deep troubles within the Disney organization, according to a report recently in the Los Angeles Times.

The movie was the long term pet project of a team that had collaborated on previous Disney hits under the supervision of the legendary animation executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, who has since left to form his own studio at Dreamworks.

Katezenberg thought the idea of updating Robert Louis Stevenson's classic to a modern space adventure was plain stupid, but filmmakers Ron Clements and John Musker managed to get the project into production following his departure.

The movie and script were dogged with problems however. "Emotionless" and "brooding" were two of the adjectives used by Disney executives to criticize the project.

It didn't help either that the movie was promoted by a flaccid marketing campaign which failed to generate excitement on a weekend when young moviegoers also had the choice of seeing "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" and "The Santa Clause 2".

In some ways Disney had anticipated the lessons of "Treasure Planet" long before its actual failure. The studio had previously announced that the movie would be the last made using costly hand drawn animation.

During the last two years it has cut the staff in its animation studio by half to 1,200.

On its own that will hardly be enough to save the world's most famous animation studio. Disney will have to find a liberal sprinkling of the magic that made it famous in the first place.