Progress City, U.S.A.

Good news, everyone! The truly excellent new Pixar short Day & Night has just been released on iTunes. If you haven’t seen Toy Story 3 yet, or even if you have, it’s well worth checking out. In fact, at the moment I think it might be my favorite Pixar short ever – I enjoyed it far more than Toy Story 3 itself, as a matter of fact. It’s certainly different, and draws on some unique styles and techniques to do something refreshing and new. It also has some nice midcentury traditional animation influences, so that’s fun. Anyway, that’s my spiel – head over to iTunes to check it out yourself.

Well it hits today – I’m assuming no one here has been spending time in the stone age and is well aware of what I’m talking about. So here are some pretty pictures…

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First, Rapunzel became Tangled, when Disney’s marketing department panicked and imposed a title change on Disney Animation Studios. Then, more recently, The Bear and the Bow was re-announced as Brave because… well, who knows, actually. Now it looks like the still-officially-unannounced-once-canceled-but-now-alive-with-a-different-director-project-that-won’t-die Joe Jump is going to be called Reboot Ralph. Because, ya know, the kids love to reboot. According to Deadline Hollywood, the story of an 8-bit videogame character in a quad-core world will debut on March 22, 2013.

Meanwhile, while all these semantic shenanigans were afoot, we’ve lost King of the Elves and The Snow Queen. This week, the internet got all aflutter with the shocking news that Pixar had pulled the plug on Gary Rydstrom’s newt. To which I say, well, yeah.

So with all this bloodletting, what do we have? Lined up on the Disney side of the fence there’s Rapunzel, Winnie-the-Pooh in 2011, and Reboot Ralph in 2013. Pixar is now sequeltown (next door to Pigs With Pigs Junction) with Toy Story 3 (2010), Cars 2 (2011), Monsters Inc. 2 (2012) and Brave (2012). Brad Bird is AWOL and headed to Paramount to film Mission: Impossible IV (potential subtitle: “The First Good One”), Andrew Stanton’s John Carter of Mars isn’t out until 2012, and Pete Docter is doing… something. But he won’t say what.

Then there’s all the mid-level talent creeping out the doors; with only two releases per year, directorial power has remained in the hands of a select few and there’s nowhere for rising stars to go but to other studios. Will the sequels take over, or is there still room for new ideas?

So after the much-ballyhooed slate of a few years ago has been picked apart, and the much-ballyhooed return of traditional animation has been pretty much relegated to W.T. Pooh, and the much-ballyhooed shorts program is nowhere to be seen, one has to ask… what’s up?

One last thing – I don’t typically do this but I’m feeling particularly saucy tonight. From February:

Who wants to bet that newt’s summer 2012 release spot goes to another Pixar rehash, Monsters, Inc. 2?

OK, so I got the season wrong (Monsters 2 be a fall release, not a summer release), but next time, Disney, prove me really wrong.

UPDATE: It looks like the Reboot Ralph announcement was official. No word on if Rich Moore is still slated to direct.

Well, I didn’t intend for this week to become the animation apocalypse, but something seems to really be poking the hornets’ nest in Burbank and Emeryville. Snow Queen is back on the shelf, newt is dead, Rapunzel has been ridiculously rebranded as Tangled, and King of the Elves is either in turnaround or abandoned depending on who you talk to.

Then there are the more insidious whispers. Whispers that the Walt Disney Animation Studios will be severely downsized, going to a model similar to the one that has occasionally been pushed on Imagineering – that of a small, centralized core of managers and key creatives still working at Disney, with the production work farmed out to contractors. When Michael Eisner arrived at Disney in 1984, Jeff Katzenberg and Frank Wells originally wanted to go to this television model; if TV animation could be completed so cheaply in Korea or China, why couldn’t this be used for expensive theatrical animation too? Thankfully, Roy Disney and others were able to appeal to Eisner’s desire for prestige and keep animation at the Disney Studios, but who knows what the future holds.

But wait, there’s more – lots of rumbles of internecine squabbling at Pixar, possible troubles with Cars 2, the studio’s noticeable new reliance on sequels, and then today I hear the following words for the first time:

Toy Story 4.

Whenever I’m at some Disney event handing out my silly little business cards to people in Imagineering or Animation, I often tell them, “Feel free to read and yell at me when I get it wrong.” I don’t expect them to be ringing me up and giving me the top-secret scoop on their new projects; I’m hoping, instead, that they’ll set me straight when I’ve really messed up. Because despite what some might think, I do not relish disseminating bad news. I’ve had no happier day in reporting on animation than when Disney and Pixar released their very ambitious production slate in 2008. And while I’ve been talking about these recent rumors and events, no one hopes more than I that I’m completely wrong.

Just keep your eyes open and your ears to the ground, in the off chance that I’m unfortunately not wrong about this. Hopefully the suits are just in panic mode right now, and things will level off like they usually do. We’ve been on the cusp of disaster before only to be pulled out of the fire, so this could just the cycle of executive indecision at work. I’ll bet that if Rapunzel is a hit, the suits will be shoving each other out of the way to see who can take the most credit for it.

Well, the bodies sure are stacking up.

First, King of the Elves gets whacked. The computer-animated fantasy based on a short story by Philip K. Dick would have been released in 2012.

Then, in all the marketing-driven panic following Princess and the Frog’s lukewarm box office, Disney shelves the long-anticipated and traditionally animated The Snow Queen. Who’s up next on the hit list?

It looks like it’s newt.

Actually, I’ve been worried about this one for a long time. I’d heard a few things hinting at this, but nothing definitive enough that I’d be comfortable writing about it. Then, today in a comment thread on the Animation Guild Blog, Disney vet Floyd Norman stated that the film is dead.

newt was first announced in April of 2008 as part of Disney and Pixar’s ambitious new animation slate. It was to be directed by long-time sound engineer and guru Gary Rydstrom, from a script by Rydstrom and Leslie Caveny. Michael Giacchino was slated to write the score.

According to the press at the time, the film would have followed Newt and Brooke, the last remaining male and female blue-footed newts on the planet. Forced together by science to save their species, the only problem was that they can’t stand each other. According to the press release, “Newt and Brooke embark on a perilous, unpredictable adventure and discover that finding a mate never goes as planned, even when you only have one choice. Love, it turns out, is not a science.”

So, that’s out. But hey, at least we get Winnie-the-Pooh and Cars 2. Who wants to bet that newt’s summer 2012 release spot goes to another Pixar rehash, Monsters, Inc. 2?

UPDATE: I’ve had a couple of people tell me that King of the Elves has not actually been completely abandoned, but that it’s still in turnaround for retooling. I know this had been the fact at one point, but other informed sources have said that it’s no longer actively being worked on. If anyone can clarify this, drop me a line. In stranger news, I’ve had two sources independently hint to me that Cars 2 is actually having production problems, and I’ve seen that rumor posted anonymously today on the Animation Guild’s blog. Whispering campaign or fact, I don’t know, but it’s something to keep an eye out for.