Progress City, U.S.A.

First, if you haven’t seen it already, go watch the new trailer for Rapunzel.

For years I’ve worried that executives and marketing slobs were ruining Disney animation. Now I’m starting to worry that they already have.

Has the vast studio bureaucracy – ranks upon ranks of Vice Presidents and marketing mavens – really salted the fields of creativity so that nothing will ever grow there again? I talk a big game but typically am willing to cut Disney a ton of slack, yet in this trailer there are things that really make me want to retch. That some of the cornball nonsense in this trailer can be presented with a straight face in the year 2010 nearly makes me give up hope altogether. I have no connection to Disney besides my fandom, but I would be embarrassed for my friends to see this trailer in the theater.

In my practice of finding at least one or two good things to say, I’ll say this: I really like Rapunzel’s design. It’s Glen Keane-y but has converted well to CGI. Her animation in this trailer, and some of the model sheets I’ve seen, at least indicate that she’ll be appealing to watch. The hair looks good too; in fact, the look of the film doesn’t seem hampered at all by its computer-generated origins.

However, the tone of the piece, the insanely derivative male lead, the “wacky” animal sidekick, that horrendous horse design, and the awful comedy beats just… discourage me. There are about a dozen cliches in pose, animation, and design in this that I’d like to see banished from Disney forever. And “the smoulder”? Really? Marketing can make a lousy trailer, but the animators at Disney really need to purge themselves of some of these affectations they’ve developed over the years. Some of these stock expressions have become very obvious institutional tics.

I’ll just close my eyes and cross my fingers and hope that this is mostly to blame on Disney’s amazingly inept film marketing department. After all, this is a trailer for a film once called Rapunzel that gives no indication that it’s about… Rapunzel. That’s right, go back and check – her name is not mentioned once in the entire trailer. Then again, she has… what, two lines?

I’m sure it will be worth it, though. Not mentioning that she’s Rapunzel means that now it’s certain that teen-aged boys will go see this at least a dozen times apiece. Because that’s how the world works, in the minds of Disney executives.

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.

I know that I stumbled upon this possibility last December, but I didn’t think they’d be absurd enough to do it. It’s late-era Eisner all over again. Sure, the title doesn’t matter if the film has the goods on screen, but I had hoped the era of Disney running away from its own shadow was over. This is shenanigans. Shenanigans, I tell you!

The problem isn’t even the name, as silly as Tangled is. It’s what the name represents – confusion, fear, lack of confidence and creative cowardice.

What’s doubly ironic about their attempts to take the focus off of Rapunzel and emphasize the male lead is that almost the entirety of Lasseter’s presentation about this film last September was about how Rapunzel would be such a kick-ass heroine with her hair-wielding ninja skillz. So I guess we’ll have to adjust to a completely new set of buzzwords. Rapunzel who?

Dear Disney animators: I’m so sorry that your hard work is being dorked around with by a bunch of lunatics. Know that there are a few of us naive simpletons out here who still think what you do is art, not product for the marketing gristmill. The film looks lovely.

Dear Disney executives: It’s hard to sell people on your product when you don’t understand, respect, or enjoy the thing you’re trying to sell. Or, as the kids say, UR DOING IT WRONG.

What. the. eff. is. going. on. at. Disney?