ToonEGuy

www.change.org/p/the-walt-disney-company-stop-wreck-it-ralph-2-from-being-released-to-theaters

Closed with over 260 signatures

As someone who's loved traditional 2D animation all my life, especially that of Disney, this stamp just disgusts me to no end.

This insulting disregard for the art form by one (who I know only really posted it to piss me off some more) is exactly the kind of reason why I always get at odds with so many people over the subject of 2D animation's future. The way that people like him can't so much as treat 2D animation as a legitimate art anymore, and put it under such discriminative terms as being "old", "outdated", or "the past". Pretty much following and believing all the same agendas that the studios like Disney are still pushing on us today by replacing 2D animated features with 3D animated features, because they want to believe that anything 2D will be automatically bad. He can claim all he wants that he still likes and respects 2D animation, but when you've gotten to the point that you're calling it "the past", then you aren't giving 2D animation the respect it deserves. 2D animation IS a valid art form, and it has every right to BE an art form!

Even worse is when a person like myself who genuinely loves the art form with a deep passion, and still believes in it as an art form, has to be unfairly labeled a "nostalgiatard" who "won't let go of the past". Why should I be told to let go of 2D when it's the art form that I love, when I see far more appeal in it than 3D animation, and when it inspires to bring out the artist in me most of all? A lot of the animated films that I still watch today are the 2D animated ones that were made in the 80's, 90's, early 2000's, and every decade beforehand. And unfortunately I have to turn to those past decades for the kind of animation I enjoy because that's where most of it is at the moment, so don't you dare put me down as "living in the past" for it, when it's the studios that are wanting to make 2D animation the past.

Speaking of studios, a lot of the love that I grew up having for 2D animation was in fact given to me by Disney in the first place, because they taught me to believe in the art like they once did. That is why I am so ashamed of how much they've let their own selves lose faith in their art to the point of wanting to kill it off. There is a reason why I love The Princess and the Frog. It was a movie made to prove the merits of 2D animation. To say that such animation deserves to still exist today, and to show that they (supposedly) were going to be committed to keeping the art form alive. And Disney of all studios should be committed to that the most, cause they had a huge hand in pioneering that art form since the days of Walt. So are you really going to have the gall to tell me that what I assume to have been all that sincere effort and passion from Disney to keep 2D animation alive was absolutely for nothing? Are you going to say that veteran artists like Andreas Deja, Don Bluth, and James Lopez, who have each been doing their own part to help revive 2D animation with their own projects, are just wasting their time as well? Are you going to tell that he's wrong for posting THIS?:



And while I have my reason for admiring Princess and the Frog from Disney, I also have my reason for utterly despising Frozen, and for despising Disney for their movies since then. Frozen was to be the next big movie in line for keeping 2D animation alive, but because Princess and the Frog didn't live up to their unreasonably high expectations when it was released, they decided to label it a "failure" and a "mistake" despite being a beautifully animated and genuinely good movie (which actually did quite well and wouldn't really constitute as being a failure), and once again go back to pushing the belief onto themselves and their audiences that anything 2D will be bad. Thus seeing them cheat 2D by forcing Frozen to be released as a computer animated movie was not only the biggest insult to the art form, practically saying that 2D isn't good enough for any animated film anymore and is not worth saving, but also insulting to all the people like myself who still care about the art form and were happy to see Disney bringing it back again, only to have them cheat us after only two films. Clearly Disney is not ashamed of their decision, as they've been sparing no expense in glorifying it in everyone's faces with an endless amount of merchandise, and by milking their agenda for all its worth. And yet some people, in a sad attempt to justify the movie for Disney, will just make an excuse that the movie "had" to be 3D because all that ice and snow "had" to look real. Yeah, that's why they did it all right...

I've seen this sort of thing many times online, where people think that they need to kiss up to the studios and defend all this 3D animation from them because it's the only real thing that they're pushing onto us nowadays for theatrical entertainment, at the great expense of them stifling 2D animation as an art of filmmaking. They can't see how these studios have turned 3D into one big corporate agenda of what they think can be the only standard for animated films, and the only thing they expect of us is to just keep blindly following their agenda like sheep (partly because they assume that 3D is all people want to see, when I'm sure the more casual moviegoers have never cared either way). When people like myself make this valid argument in 2D's defense, these other kind of people feel that they need to defend 3D more, making everything more about 3D than what 3D is doing to 2D. These stamps are just a few examples:

 

If anything these messages should be flipped around since the only real honest thing we could be doing is defending 2D more than 3D, cause 3D is being made the agenda today while 2D is being neglected and mistreated. I've tried to defend 2D for the past few years by bringing my complaints directly to Disney in any way possible, but I had to give up on it cause it just wasn't working. Meanwhile, there are people who are just going to say that Disney will "never" go back to 2D animation, which they don't even have any right to claim when they never even try to stand up at all for the art form that they supposedly still value, and put more of their time, money, and effort into going to see every new computer animated movie that comes out. They'd rather contribute to the agenda than call the studios out on that agenda. They also just like to blissfully shrug it all off by saying that "times change", never thinking outside the box to think that these turn of events are the result of studios not really knowing what they're doing and making short-sided assumptions on what people want. That was the real reason why Disney fell away from their 2D animation in the first place. They saw that their animated features in the early 2000's weren't performing as well compared to Pixar or DreamWorks and assumed that it was because they were in 2D animation. Not taking into account that they may have had poor marketing, bad release dates, or simply just had weaker storytelling compared to any of their films in the 90's. Or that Lilo & Stitch came out the exact same year as Treasure Planet and was way more successful, given a lot more marketing, and I'd say had a much better story.

Nope, the blame was for something as shallow as being in 2D animation, leading to them being so reckless as to lay off their thousands of hand-drawn artists, shut down their various hand-drawn studios, and sell off all their equipment for producing 2D animated films. Their entire legacy and heritage tossed away and abandoned to attempt to emulate the apparent "success" of DreamWorks with Chicken Little in 2005. Disney was never justified in their films becoming 3D. It was all a mistake.

To end it all off, I'm going to try and debunk a couple of the other popularly used myths once and for all...

1. "2D animation is more expensive."

LIE! This Wikipedia article shows quite the opposite:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_…

All of the listed movies are computer animated. None of them are traditionally animated. Let's prove the point even further, shall we?

Budget:

Beauty and the Beast: $25 million

Aladdin: $28 million

The Lion King: $45 million

The Princess and the Frog: $105 million

Tangled: $260 million, and listed as the #1 most expensive animated film!

Clearly their films are actually costing more to make in 3D than any of their 2D ones really did, especially compared to their classics back in the 90's. And I'm sure a lot of it has to do with the whole obsession of just how realistic everything should have to be made to look in CGI, such as the hair, fabric, water, ice, snow, etc. I heard that they literally had to spend months just to develop some newfangled program for rendering all the fur on the characters in Zootopia, when it obviously would have saved them all the trouble to just draw the characters. There's no getting around it: 3D animation is more expensive!

And 2D animation is also not a "technology", as some people ignorantly call it. The only real technology to Disney's 2D animated films of the 90's was the use of the computerized CAPS system to color their films digitally, and of course, the integration of CGI elements. 2D animation is ultimately an art, and it is the art of drawing.

2. "People don't want to see 2D animation anymore."

There has never been any real proof of this, and only the assumption and agenda of the studios. Look at me: I've been against Disney going into 3D based on that very assumption from Day 1. I clearly am not one of these so-called people. Do you really think that the recent projects on Indiegogo for bringing back 2D animation, like Dragon's Lair: The Movie from Don Bluth, or Hullabaloo from James Lopez, would have gotten the overwhelming amount of success and funding that they did (even going over their intended goal) if people didn't still want 2D animated films? Do you think that anime would still be as popular today if people didn't want 2D animation? Or how about the critical acclaim of 2014's Song of the Sea?

Here is a really old forum discussion I dug up from 2003 that I think should be very important to analyze, as this was at the exact point in time when DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg (former chairman of Disney) publicly declared 2D animation as a "dead art form" based purely on the underperformance of the Sinbad movie, essentially having a hand in spreading that poisonous and misguided mindset to other animation studios in Hollywood like a disease. But if you really look at a lot of the old comments in this discussion, a lot of people were skeptical even back then.

forums.cgsociety.org/showthrea…

I've given about every argument I can possibly give in hopes of settling this matter for good. I love traditional 2D animation. I believe in it as being a valid form of animation in its own right, and I will continue to stand up for it as one no matter what. And you know what else? I will hate today's 3D animation as much as I want too and not have to support it anymore, because not only has it become extremely overrated, but I can clearly see that it's become a big corporate agenda from the studios that's wanting to kill off a valuable form of art in our culture. And I am through putting up with being constantly insulted, ridiculed, and antagonized by certain people for my love of 2D over 3D and what I believe to be the truth about it these days. Whether people agree with my views or not, I WILL be respected for having them, even if those people want to like 3D animation and defend the studios for what they're doing. And I will not be told by anyone to "let go of the past" for loving 2D animation and sticking up for it, because 2D animation is NOT "the past"! It is the studios' agenda to make 2D animation the past, and it is our own choice if we let them do it or not.

2Disney4Ever, my new 2D centered Disney group, has just been launched today. If you love Disney's traditional work as I do, then feel free to share all your art here:



Just remember: No CGI movies, please.