Toy Story 3 having problems
Film January 31st, 2005 |It’s nice to wake up on a Monday morning to some good news.
Word broke a while ago that Disney was working on moving ahead with creating a third sequel to the popular Disney/Pixar CGI Toy Story films. However, due to the currently strained relationship between the two companies, Disney would be doing this third film entirely on their own and without Pixar’s involvement, as they hold all the rights to the property under the terms of the current agreement between the two studios.
Few, if any, of the people I know thought this was anything remotely close to a good idea, given Disney’s current inability to produce anything of quality and tendency to pump out cheap direct-to-video sequels to their classic films in lieu of any real creativity. The only animated films that have come out of the Disney empire for the past few years that have really been worth seeing have been the Pixar collaborations, and Disney trying to continue a Pixar success sounded like nothing but trouble.
Apparently, though, my friends and I weren’t the only ones to feel that way, as Disney is having problems finding anyone willing to sign on to the Toy Story 3 project.
> No one wants to direct ‘Toy Story 3.’ > > That’s the word in Hollywood’s animation world, where the third installment of the incredibly successful Pixar series has no director, writer or, possibly, stars. > > My sources in the animation biz tell me that Disney, which will make ‘Toy Story 3’ without Pixar, cannot find a director to guide the project. > > […] > > Disney has the right to make sequels to all the Pixar movies it distributed, including ‘Toy Story,’ ‘The Incredibles,’ ‘Finding Nemo,’ etc. But there’s a hitch — since Pixar developed all the animation materials to create the movies, it also gets to keep them. > > In other words: Disney is now trying to hire another team of animators to recreate Buzz Lightyear, Woody and all the other ‘Toy Story’ characters so that they look the same. It will have to start from scratch to reproduce Pixar’s creative work. > > The next step, of course, is to find a writer and director for the project. With Lasseter gone, my source says, “Every single animator of note has turned down the director’s job. They don’t want to cross Pixar. They’ve become the only deal in town.”
Good news, indeed!
(via Luxo)
“Heresy” by Rush from the album Roll the Bones (1991, 5:25).
[See also: Disney vs. Pixar | Finding Nemo | Disney turning Bloom County 3-D | Is Pixar a ‘boys only’ club? | More on Pixar (Or, Why I Suck at Soundbites) ]
Andrew
RD
Fyr
mike
Tim Who?
January 31st, 2005 at 11:46 am
That IS kickass news. The only non-Pixar Disney movie that I’ve enjoyed in as long as I can remember is The Emperor’s New Groove.
January 31st, 2005 at 12:34 pm
Oh, yeah — Emperor’s New Groove seems to be the exception that proves the rule as far as current Disney films go. Absolutely hilarious flick, and by far the best thing I’ve seen Disney do on their own in ages.
It actually felt a lot more like classic Warner Brothers to me in some ways — while the animation style was definitely Disney, the sheer random absurdity of the script was far more similar to old WB ‘toons than anything else I can remember from Disney.
Lilo and Stictch was cute too, and had some enjoyable moments, but that’s the only other Disney ‘toon I can think of that’s come out recently that I find at all watchable (of course, quite a few of the more recent ones I haven’t watched at all, so there’s a slim chance that they might be better than I’m giving them credit for…but I’m not holding my breath).
But then, with both ENG and LaS, we’re dealing with original properties, not the shoddy marketing-driven sequels that seem to define Disney’s current strategies, either.