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The Challenges of the Big Screen Cartoon
(continued from page 1)
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| Recess: School's Out is currently a big hit
at the U.S. box office. © Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights
reserved. |
Ansolabehere continues, "We didn't want [Recess: School's Out] to be a 3-part TV episode. It doesn't have to be the greatest adventure ever, but it's got to be bigger. Our shows are about the small things in life that aren't dealt with these days. If you're in film, it has to be high concept and big, but you have to make something good within the parameters." Germain and Ansolabehere are continuing their beliefs in creating Disney's Lloyd in Space for ABC. It is refreshing to know that they are maintaining the Disney tradition by making good shows, by just doing what they believe in.
Against the Very Nature?
Renewed popularity in The Jetsons and Tom & Jerry in the early '90s led to the production of their respective feature-length films. Both are examples of how not to transfer half-hour icons into ninety-minute farces. However, are the adapters to blame or the general nature of these particular cartoons? Both are historically funny cartoons because the humor of their characters is sustainable within a twenty-minute storyline. But sometimes, when characters are removed from their natural habitat, there is no way they can function optimally. Nevertheless, as pitiful as Tom and Jerry: The Movie was, there is no way Film Roman could have produced ninety minutes of a cat chasing a mouse because there is no way to sustain that humor while staying innately true to the original core of the show.
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| DuckTales: The Movie follows Scrooge McDuck
as he takes his nephews to Egypt on a 74-minute chase to find a
pyramid that contains a magic lamp. © Disney Enterprises, Inc.
All rights reserved. |
Catching the Wave
While finding the delicate balance between the show's original emotional center and the demands of the theater is tough, writer/producer Alan Burnett summarizes his foray into big screen toonage very succinctly: "Making movies takes a lot longer." As a writer for Disney's DuckTales: The Movie and Warner Bros.' Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, much pressure was put on him to produce a great story in a limited amount of time because the movies had to be released no later than a year and a half from the conception date. Studios tend to rush the production of big screen cartoons in order to capitalize on a show's popularity before it wanes. "In the case of Batman: MOTP I had my group of story editors, Paul Dini, Martin Pascoe and Michael Reaves, and what I did was write a very detailed treatment so that I could split it up amongst the four of us and get the script out faster...which is unusual."
When producing DuckTales: The Movie, the Disney crew was given such a limited time to create the film that it was not possible to incorporate any songs. "So we had to make a lot more plot than we would have liked. It turned out kind of frenetic. I think it worked better on TV because of the commercials. They broke up the plot so it wasn't one long chase, which is really what the movie was."
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| Tom and Jerry: The Movie has the popular
cartoon cat and mouse assisting an orphan in her trials with a
corrupt guardian. © Warner Bros. |
In fact, Disney was in such a rush to release a DuckTales movie that the original plan was to take one of the multi-part episodes (i.e., the origins of Bubba Duck or Gizmo Duck) and release it theatrically. "[Disney staff] were going through the episodes seeing what could be a movie," Burnett explains. "When they tried blowing some of them up on a bigger screen the quality of the animation was too poor." This resulted in DuckTales: The Movie as we know it. The big and small screens are very different and those studios that try to create a half-hearted mishmash often fail. So while it is advantageous for studios to rush cartoon features, the result can often lead to sub-par stories and animation.
It Isn't All Gravy
Batman: MOTP experienced an extremely short theatrical run in late 1993. The movie was released less than sixteen months after Batman: The Animated Series premiered on Fox Kids in 1992. Burnett explains how Warner Bros. had little hope for Batman: MOTP in theatres, for example, in Los Angeles, it was only screened as a matinee, which is extremely atypical in such a large market: "I think part of the problem was the animation. What we were getting back from overseas was not up to par with what we wanted. The movie originally began as a home video, and one of the executives saw some computer animation that was being applied to the movie and decided that it should go into the theatres. It turns out the computer animation was a small part of the animation we were doing. Fortunately, the animation at the climax was good which helped a great deal."
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