Thursday, July 12, 2012

Around the Diz Toon Studio

Wandering through the Disney Toon facility on Sonora Street in Glendale is always enjoyable (although it's usually seems as quiet as a church library. Maybe it's the high ceilings, sound-absorbing cubicles and carpet.) ...

The next Tinkerbell feature gets released this October, and the following year the first Planes feature rolls into Disney's distribution channels. Staffers tell me that the picture will get theatrical releases in some foreign markets.

The studio is in the process of developing shorts for both franchises which will (presumably) go on the little silver disks. The thing that I didn't know but was happy to find out? Planes has a small animation crew inside Sonora that is animating key scenes for the first movie.

(There was a Disney Toon crew on Sharon Morril's version of Tinkerbell as well. It too was animating key scenes, also doing repair work on animation that came back from India. This group was housed on the main lot in Burbank. Sadly, the animators were laid off when the picture -- 60% animated and in color -- was viewed by Lasseter and Iger and deep-sixed.)

A couple of people asked me how much animation work is happening around town; I told them quite a lot. It's always nice to be riding an industry updraft. Hopefully it continues for awhile.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do you know whether they will continue making Tinker Bell features after the fifth one scheduled for 2014? Or will they move on to other projects?

Steve Hulett said...

I'm informed that Diz Toon will keep making them as long as they keep making nice money.

Richard Ross cut back the number of Tinkerbells on the slate eighteen months ago. Richard is now gone, and I believe the total amount of Tink features that the studio plans to make has expanded again.

Chris Sobieniak said...

Like I want to see another umpteenth Tinker Bell movie. I missed it when she was mute and merely opened up the show every Sunday night!

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