From 1988 to 2000, while CGI was still taking off its training wheels, traditional hand-drawn 2D animation experienced a renaissance of interest in a way not seen since the 1940s.

It is difficult to describe a historic period just lived. Time and distance are required to put what has occurred into perspective. The animators who were flipping paper, drawing Ariel or Stimpy, knew there was suddenly a lot of fun projects to work on, but they probably didn’t think they were living in a new Golden Age. And except for a few grizzled vets, many thought it would last forever. From 1988 to 2000, while CGI was still taking off its training wheels, traditional hand-drawn 2D animation experienced a renaissance of interest in a way not seen since the 1940s. This created, in Tinseltown, a boomtown atmosphere of fast careers and fast profits. But it was a renaissance that carried within it the seeds of its own demise.

From the closing of the big movie studio shorts divisions in the 1960s to the end of the 1980s, animation was the bastard stepchild of the mainstream film business. A 1976 Report to the National Assoc. of Advertisers declared that animation, as an advertising vehicle, was, “too time-consuming and labor-intensive to be profitable.” The last shorts seen in movie theaters were gone by the 1970s. Mel Blanc did his last Bugs Bunny short in 1969. The major studios dabbled a little with feature cartoons but not consistently. Ralph Bakshi’s films and the occasional Disney feature were the exceptions.

Animation had disappeared from nighttime television except for the occasional seasonal special. Hanna-Barbera’s two attempts at primetime series, Where’s Huddles? and Wait Till Your Father Gets Home, didn’t find an audience. No one had thought of Japanese anime since the days of Astroboy and 8 Man. Only the vigorous efforts of Motion Picture Academy Board of Governors like June Foray and Herb Klynn prevented the animation category from being dropped from the Oscars.

Nope, in America, animation was good only as a babysitter on Saturday mornings. Young animators inspired by Tex Avery and the Nine Old Men, who burned to do quality animation, were told to forget it. Animation like Bambi and the Looney Tunes were done with Depression Era budgets, “… you’ll never see anything like that ever again.”

The 2D Renaissance might have begun when Don Bluth quit Disney in 1979, or with the birth of MTV, among other new networks. Courtesy of Don Bluth's Toon Talk.

There are several places one may point to as the beginning of the 2D Renaissance. Don Bluth and his young crew quitting Disney in 1979 could be seen as the first spark. Or the founding of the Fox Network or MTV, with a mandate to create programming free of the kind of censorship that kept Lucy and Ricky in separate beds. Maybe it also had to do with the baby boomer generation becoming middle age consumers, nostalgic for the cartoon entertainment of their youth. The breakup of the post-war Communist states enabled a new generation of eastern European artists to move into the mainstream film community with their new ideas. And the creation of new cable networks like Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network created new opportunities for animation.

By the 1980s, The Walt Disney Studio still held a precious niche in the public’s mind. Its cartoons were special events, but there were long periods between films and little or no TV programs. While the wild ideas of Ralph Bakshi’s Heavy Traffic, Dunning’s Yellow Submarine and the blockbuster changes brought about by Star Wars changed Hollywood film, the Walt Disney Co. acted like the Kingdom of the Sleeping Beauty. The creator had been dead for 18 years, yet Disney workers still addressed production problems with, “What would Walt do?” Into the 1980s, most Disney animators still used hand-cranked pencil sharpeners. In the rest of town every animator had a cassette player to listen to soundtrack tapes, animators at Disney still relied on “acetates” — thick, record-like 78mm platters that played on a record player, much as they had done when their ancestors were animating The Three Little Pigs in 1933.

The studio reluctantly started a training program for new animators in the early 1970s, only when it became obvious that their old crew were not immortal. In 1984, among movie studios, Walt Disney Studios was sixth in overall box office and relied upon theme park revenues to keep its books balanced.

After a celebrated power struggle, Roy O. Disney’s son, Roy E. Disney, the producer of True-Life Adventures, wrested control of the company from Walt’s son-in-law, Ron Miller. Roy had developed a healthy stock portfolio under his banner company, Shamrock Inc., headquartered on the site of the old UPA studios. Roy and his colleague, Frank Wells, brought over to Disney high-powered studio executives Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg from Paramount, where the two had been instrumental in helping Barry Diller turn around the fortunes of that sagging behemoth. Now Eisner and Katzenberg were given full powers to improve the fortunes of the Magic Kingdom.