TIME, THE ARTS/CINEMA NOVEMBER 17, 1997 VOL. 150 NO. 21 -------------------------------------------------- THERE'S TUMULT IN TOON TOWN FOR 60 YEARS, THE ANIMATED FEATURE WAS A DISNEY MONOPOLY. NOW RIVAL STUDIOS ARE MUSCLING IN, LED BY FOX WITH A WINSOME ANASTASIA BY RICHARD CORLISS ------------------------------------------------------------ It is a rite-of-passage saga fit for a cartoon classic. Plucky kids dream of breathless adventures in a rainbow kingdom. They will be animators, spin magical musical tales for children of all ages and make pots of money in video and burger tie-ins. But standing guard before the cartoon castle is the evil Cruella Di Sney. "The animated-feature franchise is mine, all mine!" she thunders. "Nobody does it better, and nobody better try." Will the daring insurgents storm the castle and free the people from the tyrant's cloying clutches? Or will they discover that, gee, the people really like Di Sney's style and don't care to be rescued? We'll find out next week, when Anastasia, the winsome, often winning debut film from Fox Animation Studios, arrives on screens nationwide. Directed by Disney renegades Don Bluth and Gary Goldman (An American Tail, The Land Before Time, All Dogs Go to Heaven), this fanciful story about the lost princess of the Romanovs has all the elements for a cartoon hit: a girl-becomes-a-woman plot; a chipper, Alan Menkenish score by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty (Once on This Island, Ragtime); and a cute, chatty bat. Close your ears to the Fox fanfare in the opening moments, and you can mistake it for a Disney film. Which is exactly what Fox hopes parents will do. There's no mistaking Hollywood's sudden urge to outfox the mouse. Anastasia is the first in a salvo of all-animated features from three deep-pocketed Disney rivals: Fox, Warner Bros. and DreamWorks SKG. The next few years will see the biggest splurge of cartoon features ever. But after the exclamation point come the question marks. Are there ways to make popular animated films that don't slavishly follow the rules Walt and the boys made up in the 1930s? Are studios jumping on the toon trolley just as the form has shown signs of losing its commercial luster? "I'm a little uncertain," says Chuck Jones, who joined Warner's in 1935 and today, at 85, is the greatest living animation director. "There are so many films in the works now that the market may soon be oversaturated." Anastasia, which cost about $53 million, is getting a blast of promotion equal to that given any Disney cartoon--and 35% more marketing support than Fox lavished on last year's smash Independence Day. With such a price tag, a studio boss gets to hope out loud. "I'd like it to be, at a minimum, the most successful non-Disney animated film," says Fox filmed-entertainment chief Bill Mechanic, probably alluding to the $90 million earned at the box office by Warner's 1996 Space Jam. "But I really hope it will compete with the best Disney pictures." Best as in biggest: The Lion King's $313 million. So do other studio heads, who can be stirred to animation animus when they shiver in the shadow of the cartoon colossus. "We're rooting for Anastasia," says Bob Daly, Warner Bros. and Warner Music Group chairman and co-CEO. "It would be great for the entire industry if a non-Disney animated film became a real hit." It would also exact a little revenge on Disney, which is countering Anastasia with a 17-day rerelease of its 1989 hit The Little Mermaid as well as the kid-oriented Robin Williams comedy Flubber. "Disney is throwing the kitchen sink against Anastasia," says Daly. "They're doing everything to kill it. And I guess if you were in their shoes you'd do the same thing." One of the men in those shoes, Disney motion-pictures-group chairman Richard Cook, deems it business as usual. Disney has tried--and succeeded in--undercutting most of its rivals' big animated films. "Are we going to make it easy for them?" he asks. "No. Are we going to compete? You bet! And what will be, will be." Daly also sees a proprietary arrogance in Disney's chairman. "Michael Eisner never tried to warn us off, but obviously he tried to make our life miserable," Daly says. "He thinks animation is Disney's birthright and that nobody has the right to be in animation but them." Birthright? Well, yes. For 60 years, since its release of the cinema's first cartoon feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disney has been the brand name for animation. Its chief rivals in the '40s and '50s, Warner Bros. and MGM, which were besting Disney in the quality and appeal of their animated shorts, never produced a feature-length cartoon. Only in the mid-'80s, when the studio taken over by Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg had yet to hint at a renaissance, did Disney lose its animation pre-eminence. An American Tail, produced in 1986 by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, took in $47 million at the North American box office, equal to the grosses of both the previous Disney effort, The Black Cauldron, and its follower, The Great Mouse Detective. Under Katzenberg, Disney animation flourished with a new visual and musical verve. Nearly every film, from Oliver & Company (1988) to The Lion King (1994), outgrossed its predecessor by 40% to 50%. The Lion King, which Daly calls "the Star Wars of animation," earned about the same in domestic theaters as Forrest Gump did the same year. But that's chump change for animation. Toss in the video market, the merchandise and CD sales, and The Lion King has so far generated an estimated $1 billion--in profits. Video is animation's private bank. Of the all-time leaders in video sales, the top three (The Lion King, Snow White, Aladdin) and 13 of the top 20 are Disney cartoons. "Disney's animated machine remains the most lucrative business in the filmed-entertainment mix," noted a Smith Barney report, Filmed Entertainment: It's a Small World, issued in July, "and virtually no live-action film can replicate the profit potential of this venue." The figures that movie moguls dream of have dollar signs in front, and Disney's were enough to goad any showman into finding his inner children's market. It was time for Disney rivals to wake up and smell the cash flow. Is animation a market that will always expand? Or was the Simba spectacular the apogee of a trend? Or a glorious fluke? Disney's last three fully animated films to hit theaters--Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Hercules, all released after Katzenberg's rancorous departure from Disney and his start-up of DreamWorks--have earned together just a bit more than The Lion King. You needn't cry for Eisner. Hunchback, his personal favorite as a passionate work of cartoon artistry, added $500 million more to Disney's bottom line. But you are free to wonder whether studios without the mouse-ears logo can count on customers that even Disney is losing. DreamWorks is too committed to wonder, too busy to worry. Next November the company will release The Prince of Egypt, the Moses musical that DreamWorks insiders have drolly tagged The Zion King. To build early support for his chancy project, which has no merchandising tie-ins, Katzenberg has shown clips to religious leaders, from eminent rabbis to rabid Evangelicals like Jerry Falwell and Donald Wildmon. The real test, though, is to make The Prince of Egypt not like Sunday school but powerful and fun. "If you're a disbeliever," says a crew member, "you can see it as a fairy tale." DreamWorks then moves from the mountain to the anthill for a computerized comedy, Antz, with the voices of many Hollywood familiars (Woody, Meryl, Sharon, Sly). Warner, which saw the part-animated Michael Jordan jape Space Jam earn $350 million in world theatrical release and merchandising, is preparing a fully animated feature, The Quest for Camelot, an Arthurian romance about a girl's search for Excalibur. The film, with songs by hitmakers David Foster and Carole Bayer Sager (at home she is Mrs. Robert Daly), has had a troubled history: it lost its director and two lead animators, and its release was bumped from this holiday season to next May. The Warner team's next project: Iron Giant, from Ted Hughes' novel about a boy's friendship with a mysterious metal machine. Since 1990, Warner Bros. and Spielberg's Amblin have collaborated on the small-screen Tiny Toon Adventures. Ah, TV, where the real money is, and where Paramount went for its 1996 hit, Beavis and Butt-head Do America, which grossed (heh heh, he said "grossed") a robust $63 million. (Next up for Paramount: a Rugrats feature.) "A movie can't compare financially with a successful series like The Simpsons on TV," says Fox's Mechanic. Says Peter Chernin, president of Fox's parent News Corp.: "We should have done a Simpsons movie five years ago." Simpsons creator Matt Groening and his colleagues toyed with expanding a 1993 episode, Kamp Krusty, before deciding no. "But," notes Chernin, "we also wanted to start a traditional cel animation division and thought Anastasia was a compelling property to begin with." Based on a true-life fable that was the source for Fox's 1956 film with Ingrid Bergman and Yul Brynner, the new Anastasia leaps from factoid to fantasy and turns pre-Leninist Russia into a fairy-tale realm. "We lived in an enchanted world," says the Czar's mother Marie (voiced by Angela Lansbury) of a land that festered with hot heads and empty bellies. The film then pins the whole Revolution on the monk Rasputin (Christopher Lloyd). Furious at being ejected from the Czar's court, he vows revenge, unleashes the forces of revolt, dies and returns, madder than ever, to chase down Anya. "We invented a lot of Rasputin's story," acknowledges Mechanic. "But parents and teachers who have seen the film feel this is a piece of history kids don't really know about, and it gets them interested in it." Right--so they can learn that it's all lies. Well, Quasimodo wasn't alive at the end of Victor Hugo's Hunchback, and Pocahontas wasn't all that much of a babe, and DNA tests proved that the woman widely believed to be Anastasia was not. But animated movies aren't built for lectures; they are supposed to move, and move people. Anastasia comes close to doing that with its coming-of-age tale of the orphan who could be a princess. Ten years after the Rasputinolution, Anya (Meg Ryan) is 18 and alone. She meets Dimitri (John Cusack), a onetime palace servant with a 10 million-ruble scheme: to take a suitable young woman to Paris, persuade Marie that the girl is Anastasia and pocket the reward money. The usual complications ensue--boy hates girl, boy loves girl, girl keeps tripping annoyingly over scarf, dead monk tries to kill girl--accompanied by lilting melodies. The extensive rotoscoping (using live-action scenes as the basis for the artists' sketches) lends a stiffness to some of the animation; kids may well complain, "Too many humans!" But there are lovely memory and nightmare scenes that help create a wistful, trystful, tristeful mood. These are lovers who, to win a heart, must renounce their dreams. If there are any lovelorn six-year-olds out there, this is the movie for them. There probably aren't, so what is Anastasia's target audience? "We wanted our story to appeal to adults," says Mechanic, "particularly women who are most likely to take their kids to the movies." To keep Bluth from wandering too far into his trademark whimsy, the Fox creative brass kept tight reins on script and character development. They also insisted that he and Goldman give up their old-fashioned Rostrum camera and use Silicon Graphics computers in the studio Fox built for them in Phoenix. Says Goldman: "They pulled Don and me into the 21st century, kicking and screaming." The storytelling technique, though, is pure 20th century--1937, to be exact, when a young woman, surrounded by funny dwarfs, faced up to an evil sorcerer, cheated death and found her royal destiny. Snow White was a family film, but so were most movies, and it was a musical when perhaps a third of all films had songs. Now there's only a niche family market and virtually no other films are musicals, but the format is unaltered. That was then, and this is then too. In the time of the niche market, it's both presumptuous and enthralling for animators to try making a movie that touches everyone. That is the glory and the limitation of the Disney-style cartoon. "I'd like animated features to venture into adult territory," says John Canemaker, a leading historian of the form. "Why not do an animated Sweeney Todd? Or head in a totally different direction? Very few animated features have tried something original and unique, often with mixed results: the 1954 version of Animal Farm, the Beatles' Yellow Submarine, the X-rated Fritz the Cat. But most studios will probably try emulating Disney's success." Even if Disney is able to crush the insurrection, the company has already paid--in the defection of some animators and in the hyped prices it paid to retain its top talent. About time too, since animation directors were the only industry auteurs denied the Hollywood grail of profit sharing. A few animators are millionaires now, and frantic studios are wooing youngsters right out of art school with investment-banker salaries. "It's sure a novelty to have rich animators," says Jones, with the rueful laugh of a '40s ballplayer discussing today's $7 million infielders. If the challenge to Disney is at all successful, it will at least mean a few more reliable multiplex babysitters a year for parents who fret about the lack of decent movies for their kids. It could mean more: a revitalizing of a beguiling film art that, for all the fine recent work from Disney, is in a state of genial stasis. But for that rainbow ending, animators will have to forget about beating Disney and start with an open mind, a sharp pencil and a blank sheet of paper. Is it too much to hope that someday the prince won't come or the princess won't go to Paris? --Reported by Jeffrey Ressner /Los Angeles