I've just watched the trailer. While I agree they seem to show more facial features as opposed to the Lion King remake, I'm still not a fan of realistic animals talking like humans. I wish they had gone with traditional animation or Pixar style instead.
Curious to hear what you think when it comes out.
From what I've heard
The Guardian article from March of 2013, this was when the Disney chief executive Bob Iger "revealed that none of the studio's animation companies was working on 2D, hand-drawn material for the big screen."
Then about a month later,
Disney gutted their hand-drawn animation division, leading to many veteran animators being laid off unfortunately.
This article from Vulture is a good insight of what happened to Disney animated movies. This quote near the beginning of the article summarizes what may have been the case with the ceasing of animated films at Disney, but you can read the rest of the article for more in-depth elaboration of that.
“Pixar was doing really well and Disney films weren’t, and there was a general push in that direction,” says Amid Amidi, publisher and editor-in-chief of Cartoon Brew. “Of course, why they didn’t do well is another question. It wasn’t because hand-drawn wasn’t good, it’s because there were bad decisions at upper levels — too many layers of middle management, too much second-guessing, the typical filmmaking by committee.” Pixar was, famously, a filmmaker-driven studio, where animators and artists often collaborated on creative decisions. By contrast, Disney was being run by managers, executives, and accountants. You could see the difference in the respective movies they made.
And also according to the article, when Disney bought Pixar in 2006, it led to a short resurgence of of new hand drawn animation movies. But that quickly fizzled away, with their last full hand-drawn animated film being
Winnie The Pooh in 2011.
So in essence, for anyone hoping that Disney will eventually return to traditional 2D animation... that's not gonna happen unfortunately. Their hand-drawn animation division is long gone, and I doubt they will revive it. And as for me personally, I was done with Disney when they decided making live-action movies was going to be their whole shtick going forward. And it's especially horrendous when they keep making live-action remakes of older successful animated movies as cheap nostalgia-bait and cash grab, while also making them worse than their traditionally animated counterpart.
