Return to Hand Drawn Animation

It sounds like 'the Hat' is still with hand drawn animation, just won’t be as soon as expected and not Snow Queen for now.

The leads at Disney were reportedly hoping Princess & Froggy to clear $300,000,000 internationally at the box office, not an unrealistic goal. At already over $250,000,000 it probably won’t be too far off (which would be competitive with Disney and Sony’s CGI releases over the past several years).

They’ve also noted the strong toy sales, which is great news. In fact, because The Princess and the Frog toys were such hot sell-out items, Mattel is now far more confident than Disney about future princess releases, encouraging merchants and investors that title changes (Tangled/Rapunzel) will do nothing to deter continued success.

Also, from what I’ve gathered, Snow Queen before its second shelving had the female vixen lead with a past of freezing her male suitors. An ‘average guy’ falls into her clutches and has to, allegorically, thaw her heart- a role reversal of the Beauty and the Beast theme. This no doubt would have been solid gold at the box office, as far as male attendance is concerned (of course, as long as the animation and everything were top-notch).

And speaking of Beauty and the Beast, an entirely new technology has been developed for the upcoming 3D release, that will give rounded dimensions to the art, rather than looking like flat multi-layers (as with the old ViewMaster picture discs). This will be the first traditionally-animated film to receive a fully-3D makeover. The film was selected because of computer technology originally used for the backgrounds, that would make it easier to convert into total-3D for this fresh, experimental stage in traditional-to-3D animation. The film's release has been pushed back to increase blu-ray sales beforehand.

Hand drawn animation is already immeasurably more expressive than computer/CGI. If this 3D release proves aesthetically sound, CGI may lose its only real edge over hand drawn, the total-3D aspect.

I got this,...