The nomination of the Disney/Pixar film “UP” for Best Picture at the 2010 Academy Awards returns Disney to its rightful position as the undisputed king of animated film, a throne it has occupied for most of of the last 100 years. Arguments about what constitutes an animated film aside (some claim this designation for Up’s co-nominated Avatar), this is only the second time an animated film has been nominated for the award (the first was another animated film). Disney: Beauty and the Beast). , from 1991, which ironically lost out to The Silence of the Lambs, which, one could argue, resembled Beauty and the Beast in more ways than one).

Although popular opinion has Avatar as the favorite to win Best Picture, the mere fact of Up’s nomination is a vindication of Disney’s purchase of the company in 2006 and a testament to the courage and commitment of the chairman and Pixar CEO Steve Jobs and creative genius John. Lassetter, now creative director of Pixar, and also of Disney Animation Studios.

Disney’s wisdom in recognizing not only the financial value of Pixar, but also the artistic value of its creative team, brings the company almost full circle back to the early days of animation, when founder Walt Disney realized quickly realized that he couldn’t achieve his creative and commercial ambitions on his own, and set about employing the best artists and writers available.

His first big collaboration was with his friend and former co-worker Ub Iwerks, with whom Disney had worked at the Pesmen-Rubin Commercial Art Studio in Kansas City. Although Iwerks was not the only animator Disney worked with, he was the most influential on the early films, most notably in his development of the now-iconic Mickey Mouse from an earlier Disney character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, whose rights he had lost. in a contract dispute. Using the new Iwerks character, Disney took the risky step of investing in new cinematic sound technology, introduced the previous year in The Jazz Singer.

Although 1928’s Steamboat Willie, starring Mickey Mouse in his third appearance, is often cited as the first cartoon with synchronized sound, it was in fact preceded in 1926 by Max and Dave Fleischer’s My Old Kentucky Home, and in 1928 by Dinner Time. , created by Paul Terry, later founder of Terrytoons. None of these successful predecessors made it to the box office, but Steamboat Willie was a sensation. With him, Disney went big and embarked on a hugely productive phase in which several Mickey Mouse cartoons (including his first two, Plane Crazy and The Gallopin’ Gaucho, redone with sound) were released each year, along with a number of other titles featuring a growing group of popular characters.

Disney had combined technical superiority with artistic excellence and business acumen, and this combination of attributes earned him and his company a place at the forefront of the animation industry, a position he cemented four years later when he signed a two-year contract with Technicolor for its exclusive use of its new color-processing technique for cartoons.

In the late 1930s, Walt Disney had ambitions to develop animation further. He made the risky but ultimately profitable leap into animated feature films with the hugely popular and successful Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1938, a film that launched several decades of box office dominance for Disney, with films as iconic as Bambi ( 1942). , Song of the South (1946) and Cinderella (1950) join modern classics like 1989’s The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast (1991) in the pantheon of great movies, animated and otherwise.

It’s no surprise, then, that the Disney Company recognized the potential of the new and innovative medium of computer animation when Pixar made its first feature film Toy Story in 1995. Disney and Pixar formed a distribution partnership for Toy Story and the subsequent Pixar production that , though not without occasional contract disputes and personality clashes, eventually led to Disney buying a majority stake in Pixar. True to the history of these two leaders in motion picture animation, the quality of Pixar’s work has steadily progressed, and with the appointment of John Lassiter (also a Disney animator) as Creative Director of both companies, there is no reason to hesitate. that this will continue. It may only be a matter of time until a Disney/Pixar film receives the recognition and respect this often underrated art form has deserved since the earliest days of animation.

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