Added 1 new A* page:Hoy the color. I don't know if it's related but I've found myself on a Disney binge on Netflix this week--it started last week with The Secret of NIMH, which I've always had a soft spot for despite its story not making a whole lot of sense (dark, giant, genius rats! multicolored electrical arcs! subterranean skullduggery!), which is not, of course, Disney, although Bluth came from Disney...anyway that got me going on Disney stuff, and Disney doesn't really have their A material on Netflix for the most part, and I'm finding some things I was okay with as a kid I can't sit through now (Rescuers and Aristocats, for instance--in fact I suspect most of that sketchy period from Walt tuning out / dying up until The Little Mermaid is going to be a bit rough--the pedestrian themes, the lackluster action, and oh goodness the awful pacing--and I'm really starting to wish they had Sleeping Beauty on there, because I've been paging through my old Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life book and man that Beauty stuff just had a gorgeous graphic quality that most of the other Disney stuff, even the good stuff, doesn't--not in that way, at least.
Beauty, which came out in 1959, was also the last feature they hand-inked; the production as a whole was long and lavish, twice as expensive as they previous films, and when it didn't make a ton of money right away, financial crisis loomed and the studio switched to a xerographic process of transferring the animators' pencil drawings directly to the animation cels, skipping the time-consuming hand-inking step--and allowing them to trim staff from 500 to 100 people, or something like that is what I think I read somewhere on Wikipedia. And it's ironic and a little worrying to me because *I'm* taking pencils straight to final art and skipping inking with A* these days, but gosh if the Disney films didn't lose a huge amount of their beauty and charm when the inking went away--and it didn't come back until digital inking came along with The Great Mouse Detective (which *is* on Netflix, but isn't that great) 27 years later, in 1986.
So that's been an interesting process to watch unfolding as I skip around through their stuff. The other interesting thing for me is catching up on movies they've done since, oh, I guess Pocahontas (1995) was the end of my steady Disney viewing, although I also caught Mulan three years later. And I suppose they haven't really done all that many hand-drawn animated movies since, but still, there are a few I can catch up with on Netflix, and although Atlantis and Treasure Planet, for instance, have their cringe-worthy aspects, they are--3D-rendered bits notwithstanding--superbly animated, and mostly pretty watchable. Although now I'm enjoying the collections of classic Disney shorts Netflix has, and I've also been hoarding Dumbo and Alice in Wonderland, so I can end my little tour on a high note (except that now I've found more Don Bluth stuff, and some of that might be a bit iffy... and also Titan A.E., which, eh, I'm curious about, at least from the point of view of it being the movie that sealed the fate, for a while, of Fox's animation studio).
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