Sad and very disappointing news to pass along today Disney Animation fans … according to the company itself, The Walt Disney Company will no longer produce animated/musical films based on classic fairy tales. Tangled, Disney‘s modern take on Rapunzel, hits theaters next week and altho the film will not be presented in traditional 2D animation, it will feature a classic fairy tale story (like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) set to a musical soundtrack (like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin) … and, sadly, it will be the last Disney animated feature to do so … at least for the “foreseeable future”:

Once upon a time, there was a studio in Burbank that spun classic fairy tales into silver-screen gold. But now the curtain is falling on “princess movies,” which have been a part of Disney Animation’s heritage since the 1937 debut of its first feature film, “Snow White.” The studio’s Wednesday release of “Tangled,” a contemporary retelling of the Rapunzel story, will be the last fairy tale produced by Disney’s animation group for the foreseeable future. “Films and genres do run a course,” said Pixar Animation Studios chief Ed Catmull, who along with director John Lasseter oversees Disney Animation. “They may come back later because someone has a fresh take on it … but we don’t have any other musicals or fairy tales lined up.” Indeed, Catmull and Lasseter killed two other fairy tale movies that had been in development, “The Snow Queen” and “Jack and the Beanstalk.” To appreciate what a sea change this is for the company, consider that a fairy tale castle is a landmark at Disney theme parks around the world and is embedded in the Walt Disney Pictures logo. Fairy tale characters from Disney’s movies populate the parks, drive sales of merchandise and serve as the inspiration for Broadway musicals … Over the decades, Disney has benefited from the ticket sales and licensing revenue generated by such princess-driven properties as “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “Aladdin.” The studio’s most recent offering, however, was a clear disappointment. Although critically acclaimed, last year’s “The Princess and the Frog” was the most poorly performing of Disney’s recent fairy tales. In the age of mega-franchises when movies need to appeal to a broad audience to justify a sizable investment, Disney discovered too late that “Princess and the Frog” appealed to too narrow an audience: little girls. This prompted the studio to change the name of its Rapunzel movie to the gender-neutral “Tangled” and shift the lens of its marketing to the film’s swashbuckling male costar, Flynn Rider …

The article excerpt continues, after the jump …

So why has the clock struck midnight for Disney’s fairy tales? Among girls, princesses and the romanticized ideal they represent — revolving around finding the man of your dreams — have a limited shelf life. With the advent of “tween” TV, the tiara-wearing ideal of femininity has been supplanted by new adolescent role models such as the Disney Channel’s Selena Gomez and Nickelodeon’s Miranda Cosgrove. “By the time they’re 5 or 6, they’re not interested in being princesses,” said Dafna Lemish, chairwoman of the radio and TV department at Southern Illinois University and an expert in the role of media in children’s lives. “They’re interested in being hot, in being cool. Clearly, they see this is what society values” … “You’ve got to go with the times,” MGA Chief Executive Isaac Larian said. “You can’t keep selling what the mothers and the fathers played with before. You’ve got to see life through their lens” … Bonnie Arnold, an animation veteran who most recently produced DreamWorks Animation’s “How to Train Your Dragon,” said animated films must vie in the cineplex with effects-laden action films that a generation ago might have been considered more mature fare. “You see elementary school kids standing in line to see ‘Iron Man’ or ‘Transformers,’ ” Arnold said. “To be honest, that’s who we’re all competing with on some level.” In an effort to give the Rapunzel story a more contemporary feel, Catmull and Lasseter pushed the reset button in 2008 and brought in a new directing duo who had both worked on Disney’s animated movie “Bolt.” The Rapunzel film underwent a “total restart,” Catmull said: All the prior work was scrapped and the movie was reconceived as a musical with five songs by Disney’s veteran, multiple-Oscar-winning composer Alan Menken. The only surviving elements, Catmull said, were “the hair, the tower and Rapunzel.”

The company feels that the use of fairy tales, a tradition upon which Disney Animation feature films was founded on back in 1936 with Snow White, has “run its course” and that they must focus on new stories to win “wider appeal”. I personally think this is bullshizz. While I LOVE new, original stories like Toy Story, Up!, Monster’s Inc., etc. I really feel that the heart and soul of Disney animation (and animated films in general) comes from the retelling of classic fairy tales. Fairy tales resonate within all of us … they are ancient tales that spark archetypes in our collective psyches and give us all a familiar point of reference to respond to. I don’t understand why there needs to be a complete cut off of that spark. The new animated films are fantastic, yes, but I’m really bummed that classic tales will be thrown by the wayside in order to appeal to a wider audience. Why can’t they alternate new and old stories? Why can’t they, at the very least, put out a classic fairy tale every other year … every 5th year, something? IMHO, the new stories told by Disney/Pixar have a decidedly Western feel to them (like Cars) … while classic fairy tales (like Aladdin, for example) have a much wider appeal. I dunno … this news just really rubs me the wrong way. What do y’all think … are you bothered at all by this news? Do you think telling fairy tales has “run its course” or do you, like me, believe that there is still merit and entertainment to be had in modern retellings of classic fairy tales?

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