The sweeping changes now underway at the Disney studios represent a radical departure from the conservative image fostered by Disney for so many years. Due for release in the middle of this year, Tron, with its spectacular effects and state-of-the-art techniques, is aimed at capturing the imagination of children and adults today as surely as those early Disney films did years ago.
A feature-length combination of animation and live action, Tron heralds a new age of computer-generated film and video graphics. There are new faces and a new creative spirit at Disney: they belong to 29-year-old Tom Wilhite and his assistants, a group of young animators who are about to reshape drastically the tradition of cute hand-animation that has been the Disney hallmark. Gone with Tron are the days of fairy dust, Jiminy Cricket and lisping ducks.
Computer animation from Disney might seem to go against the handcrafted sensibility of the studio, yet Disney's moral and political conservatism always disguised a creative liberalism bordering on the revolutionary. The early Disney animated films broke new ground in color, believability and story development, and set the standards for everyone else in those early days.
Disney himself had a basic instinct for American taste and for new tools that would help him provide entertainment the public would welcome. In the same spirit, Wilhite is banking $13.5 million on being able to combine the Disney tradition of the well-told story with live action and animated characters co-existing in a computer-generated landscape.
He is doing this in collaboration with a few old-school animators and a gaggle of whiz-kids recently out of Cal Arts (California Institute of Art, Valencia), the animation and film school set up by Disney. Since graduation these new-breed animators have been honing their skills at the Disney studio on the corner of Dopey Drive and Mickey Avenue; and now those skills are to be tested on Tron, a story conceived by Steven Lisberger, visualized and storyboarded by futuristic industrial designer Syd Mead, comic artist Jean “Moebius” Giraud and high-tech commercial artist Peter Lloyd. Whiz-kid animators, animation choreographers and technobrats include Jerry Reese, Bill Croyer, Rick Heinrichs and Tim Burton – to name a few among hundreds.
[…]
