I was snarking about Pixar being located "in the middle of the ghetto" and the Hat Building's hat being an antenna that attracts bad ideas.

In all seriousness, I know that, comparing circa 2003 Disney Animation culture to 2003 Pixar culture, there's a world of difference that explains the discrepancy between the two studios' output. Pixar was founded and run by a lot of right-brained creative people who made films more or less to entertain themselves and their own families. There (allegedly) is none of the extreme amounts of focus testing done on Disney Animation films.

Meanwhile, Disney in 2003 was stuffed with "creative executives": MBAs more interested in franchises, marketability, and "corporate synergy" than making good films. Add to that the splitting of the best artists who worked on their modern "classics" across multiple projects, and massive overhead requiring films to be pushed into production prematurely, and the excessive amounts of focus testing. As a result, a lot of Disney animated films from the late 1990s/early 2000s look and feel as calculated as anything ever made in Hollywood. And they're not very good films at all.

But that was in 2003.

In 2010, Ed Catmull and John Lasseter - those "right brained artists" I'd mentioned from Pixar - have been in charge of both studios for the last four years. They've had the time and ability to make Disney Animation more Pixar-like, and let the artists do more of what they want, haven't they? Or is corporate still requiring them to play by different rules? Or does Lasseter play favorites, and is letting Disney Animation slowly kill itself off?

It has nothing to do with the Disney corporation also being involved in parks, TV, etc. - like most large corporations, all of those divisions operate almost independently of each other. We're talking solely about the two animation studios.