Quote:
7. Pixar Takes Over As THE Animation Studio
It used to be that whenever the words “animated movie” were uttered, people would think of Disney. Specifically the 2D cartoons like The Lion King, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid and The Jungle Book. And generally speaking, these were looked at as movies for the kids. Even if adults could still watch them without complaints (and don’t get me wrong, they’re great movies, aimed at kids or not), they weren’t really looked at as legitimate movies for every age.
Then in 2001, things started to really get going for Pixar, starting in 2001 with Monster’s Inc. Then we had Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, WALL-E and finally their latest, Up, was released earlier this year.
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If you have to pin a date on a timeline, June 2003:
"Finding Nemo"
scared the living CRAP out of every studio in Hollywood....Every live-action studio. They just couldn't explain it.
Producers of Terminator 3, Tomb Raider 2, and the Ang Lee "Hulk" thought it was the End of Days, that adult audiences were going to see a Pixar movie,
repeatedly, while their own pyrotechnics were dying sad deaths at the box office.
(And if you were in the audience back then, you
knew why you were going back to see Nemo instead of Hulk.
)
Up to that point, animation was seen as a commodity, and Dreamworks was still trying to make the melodramatic Disney-knockoffs, until they had their hit with Shrek--
John Lasseter once said "CGI is a tool, not a genre"...Because back in '01-'03, studios and columnists did think it was a genre, and that
one studio was making money off of all of it: "From the hit studio that brought you Toy Story and Shrek!"
As a result, every studio thought a traditionally animated movie, and later a CGI, would make millions just for showing up--Which over the course of two summers turned out to be a rude awakening for Nickelodeon, "Spirit", "Sinbad", "Powerpuff Girls Movie" and even Disney's own "Treasure Planet".
One of the reasons we're celebrating the "return" of Princess & the Frog was that even Michael Eisner shut down his own traditional studios personally, rather than compete with a force of nature no one could explain and no one even dared try to.
(As for when studios learned that we stopped caring about other people's CGI, and that we actually knew how to tell Pixar's from everyone else's, you could pin July 2006:
The year studios were equally shocked to see audiences not go to see "The Ant Bully", and slowly realize, "...Okay, maybe they got a point there.
")