Walt Disney Animation Studios, every mention
55 scenes · ← back to Walt Disney Animation Studios
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 35Ben Gilbert 20
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Walt Disney Animation Studios comes up
Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire · Acquired
- ▶ 5:31 David Rosenthal So, Disney animation, once the shining pillar of the American can-do spirit and the core of Disney's beautiful flywheel business model, has become a rotting carcass.
- ▶ 8:57 David Rosenthal Rather, the group that I am talking about is a new hope for the core of Disney animation, the center of the flywheel.
- ▶ 9:13 David Rosenthal Disney animation is floundering.
- ▶ 9:15 David Rosenthal All of the following people are being taught the craft of Disney animation in a small basement room just a half hour's drive north of the Disney Burbank lot in another institution that Walt Disney himself had created, set up, and endowed…
- ▶ 10:32 David Rosenthal I mean, so there's people I mentioned, John Lasseter, Brad Bird, Tim Burton, John Musker, Brenda Chapman, all of them were hired directly by Disney and Disney Animation right out of school, and then Disney fired all of them.
- ▶ 24:54 Ben Gilbert Disney Animation had only released three movies from 1971 to 1984, and they had a film called The Black Cauldron in development for nearly a decade.
- ▶ 28:10 Ben Gilbert There's people sort of saying, hey, look, Disney animation can make good things that are commercially successful.
- ▶ 29:29 Ben Gilbert They come into Disney Animation, and the first film that they work on together is The Little Mermaid.
- ▶ 31:12 Ben Gilbert Animation grew its headcount from that low, when it was Left for Dead, of a 150 people to 550 people.
- ▶ 31:57 David Rosenthal Which, you know, look, trust in Disney animation had eroded, right?
- ▶ 32:47 David Rosenthal Disney Animation is back.
- ▶ 38:07 David Rosenthal To the Disney business model, all based on these characters and stories and this, this timeless IP that Disney animation is once again creating.
- ▶ 1:00:08 Ben Gilbert So, kind of from here, what comes out of Disney animation is...
- ▶ 1:21:32 David Rosenthal The real problem is Disney animation.
- ▶ 1:25:01 David Rosenthal Profit from the whole consumer products division had already been slowly ticking down as no new good IP was coming out of Disney animation to sell dolls and costumes.
- ▶ 1:33:13 David Rosenthal Disney animation had continued to go downhill.
- ▶ 1:33:59 David Rosenthal He's so upset about Disney animation.
- ▶ 1:34:01 David Rosenthal I mean, technically, he's the one in charge of Disney animation, so like, who's he upset at here?
- ▶ 1:43:16 David Rosenthal Number one, we need to devote most of our time and capital to the creation of high quality branded content, AKA we need to revive Disney animation and along with it, the Disney flywheel spot on, especially now because.
- ▶ 1:46:19 Ben Gilbert There's that whole first chapter that sort of ends with Frank Wells passing, Katzenberg leaving, the end of the great Disney animation era.
- ▶ 1:51:03 David Rosenthal So during his CEO audition process, Bob Iger had completely lost faith that Disney animation can be fixed from within.
- ▶ 1:51:15 David Rosenthal And secretly he concludes that the only viable path to restore Disney animation to its proper glory is to replace the entire leadership team.
- ▶ 1:52:08 David Rosenthal Pixar needs to take over Disney Animation, and that's why he called Steve Jobs the evening that he knew he was gonna become CEO.
- ▶ 1:52:23 Ben Gilbert We could have done it sort of in line earlier with Disney Animation, but we wanted to carve it out, give it its own special section, and, um, you know, really
- ▶ 1:52:44 David Rosenthal Pixar is the spiritual successor of Walt Disney's vision for Disney animation.
- ▶ 1:53:20 Ben Gilbert He does get a job at Disney Animation, but it's unfortunately during those dark times in the early eighties, John gets obsessed with the budding field of computer animation, even though no one else in the department is, although actually…
- ▶ 2:01:53 Ben Gilbert There's a guy who worked at Hallowed Disney Animation.
- ▶ 2:15:32 David Rosenthal It's something different than what we do here at Disney Animation.
- ▶ 2:15:49 Ben Gilbert Pixar knows they want to make a film that is different than your typical Disney animation.
- ▶ 2:31:06 Ben Gilbert Remember, this is the same time that Disney Animation is releasing Treasure Planet and Atlantis The Lost Empire.
- ▶ 2:34:12 David Rosenthal So this brings us back to Bob Iger's phone call to Steve and his conviction that Pixar needed to come in and be part of Disney and not just be owned by Disney, but take over Disney animation.
- ▶ 2:35:54 David Rosenthal John and Ed will still run it, and they'll also commute down to LA two days a week, and take over and run Disney Animation.
- ▶ 2:36:02 Ben Gilbert And interestingly, Iger also said, hey, Lasseter and, and Catmull, you can also tell us you think Disney Animation is unrescuable, or that you think that you'd kill both things by splitting your time, and you can just tell us you want to…
- ▶ 2:36:26 Ben Gilbert Like, Disney animation is so important to where we all came from in the world, and they fly down, and they meet with people, and they see,
- ▶ 2:40:42 David Rosenthal Like it didn't work at Disney animation in Burbank to make it this utopian paradise because it had to be a business too.
- ▶ 2:41:52 David Rosenthal And this leads to the revival of Disney animation.
- ▶ 2:43:20 Ben Gilbert And to validate the Disney animation thing, I mean, I really wondered about this.
- ▶ 2:43:23 Ben Gilbert How did Disney animation turn into that hit factory?
- ▶ 2:43:35 Ben Gilbert To prep for this episode, who of course plays Anna in Frozen, and she very much confirmed the way that Disney animation works today is similar to that Pixar blueprint from the early nineties.
- ▶ 2:44:23 Ben Gilbert I mean, the, the first thing is it clearly saved Disney Animation, which if you believe the thesis that that's the center of everything good and durable at the company, then great.
- ▶ 2:45:58 Ben Gilbert Disney Plus are either Pixar or Disney Animation.
- ▶ 2:46:08 Ben Gilbert And those Disney animation movies are all the top ones that they're actually watching, kids these days, are the post 2005 Catmull and Lasseter era films.
- ▶ 2:54:42 David Rosenthal The core film characters and stories are back to all-time heights, not only at Disney Animation, but now Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Marvel, too.
- ▶ 3:11:48 David Rosenthal He directs all the creative studios within Disney, Disney Animation, Disney Live Action, Pixar, Lucasfilm, Marvel, to start producing content and gearing up specifically for the new first-party Disney streaming service coming in, on top of…
- ▶ 3:20:19 David Rosenthal Pixar and Disney animation are soaring.
- ▶ 3:21:13 David Rosenthal So, at Pixar and Disney Animation, they're in the midst of a major leadership transition.
- ▶ 4:30:42 David Rosenthal To Kristen Bell, the voice of Anna in Frozen, who helped us think about Disney animation and Pixar.
The Walt Disney Company: The most successful enterprise for monetizing human nostalgia (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:04:43 David Rosenthal And irreparably, his relationship with Disney Animation.
- ▶ 4:05:35 David Rosenthal So this is the era when George Lucas makes Star Wars and Steven Spielberg makes Indiana Jones and E.T. and these guys become the new American storytellers, not Disney and not Disney animation.
- ▶ 4:05:53 David Rosenthal Disney animation during this decade goes from a staff of roughly 500 at the time of Walt's death
- ▶ 4:06:28 David Rosenthal Yeah, it's a PG rated Disney animation movie.
- ▶ 4:13:29 David Rosenthal Core Disney and Disney Animation and Pixar have been so disciplined over the years about metering out their content and the core delivery of that content on an infrequent enough basis that it doesn't dilute it.
Nvidia Part III: The Dawn of the AI Era (2022-2023) (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:51:43 David Rosenthal So Moana came out in this kind of generation with Tangled and some of the other stuff out of actual Disney animation after the Pixar acquisition that are just like,
Nike (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:53:31 Ben Gilbert So, there's a lot of nuance there, but I think that in the same way as that old Disney quote, so with Disney animation goes the company, sort of like, so with running goes Nike, that's a bellwether.
- ▶ 3:53:45 David Rosenthal I think if you were to say that the equivalent Disney animation for Nike