I was supposed to add it in here too, but forgot. Thanks for bringing me over.

My thing, though, about the "'Princess and the Frog' is stuck in the past" criticism...true though it may be, approximately 80% of the people who complain to me about the state of Disney animated films tell me they wished Disney was still doing things "just like they were in the early 1990s"...which, I suppose, to really do, you'd have to raise Howard Ashman from the dead.

The company's previous attempts at trying something new seem to have been unsuccessful and/or have been ignored by the public. Case in point: no one ever seems to talk about "Chicken Little", "meet the Robinsons", or "Bolt"...I suppose primarily because they have zero appeal to anyone over the age of 8, but also - possibly - because they're, well, un-Disneylike.

I think their key thing they need to figure out is what makes a Disney film a Disney film?

-It's not fairy tales: Walt himself only made three fairy tale films. -It's not musicals: A lot of the Disney films have songs, but in a non-Broadway type of style.
-It's also not cross-marketing and "corporate synergy".

It seems to me that what made Disney Disney when Disney WAS Disney (about 1932 to about 1962) was a sincere approach to innovation in filmmaking and storytelling, an unpretentious style of storytelling and filmmaking presentation that didn't speak down to children or up to adults, and the ability to make films so many people could relate to by the staff putting a lot of themselves and their personalities into the films.

Disney didn't focus-test his films. He didn't do sneak peeks or previews, and no outside Hollywood folks ever really were allowed inside the creative processes until Alfred Werker directed "The Reluctant Dragon" in 1941 (which, it is claimed, is how Disney-style storyboarding became a part of live-action film production). They just made the best movies they could make, and not all of them were hits at the time. Fantasia, Pinocchio, Bambi, Alice in Wonderland, and Sleeping Beauty were all flops of some significant magnitude. Each of those films flopped, I think, because they were released at the wrong time (Bambi), weren't what audiences at the time were ready for (Fantasia, Alice), or simply just cost too much (Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty)

Pixar is run and operated a lot like the old Disney studio, except they seem to have learned from the old Disney studio's mistakes and not repeated them.

Now why can't the very studio they're emulating do now what they did then? Do they need their own "Walt" who doesn't fly via commuter plane back & forth from the Bay Area every week?