J On The Spectrum - Disney's 100th Anniversary - With It To The End

Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period.Show more

Walt Disney Animation was about to face quite a challenge ahead. The Jungle Book was put into production around 1965, with Ken Anderson's story treatment as the basis for the film. Based on Rudyard Kipling's book of the same name, the film took a consistent narrative compared to episodic interstitials that made up the book. Most of the crew haven't even read the book, one time Walt Disney asked the story crew, "How many of you read The Jungle Book?" none of them raised their hands. As consistent with many Disney adaptations, Disney took a rather dark source material and turned it into something more lighthearted.

Being on a schedule that now limited animated features to one every four years, Walt Disney focused much of his precious time on his big Florida project, which would become Disney World. Unfortunately, his health was deteriorating. During filming where he was explaining about Epcot, he had to have one of those health asthma things in between the takes. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston somehow managed to animate half the movie themselves. As for Richard and Robert Sherman, they wrote such classic songs for the movie that they ought to be commended for The Bare Necessities. With both of these groups of people, they visited Walt Disney to get some ideas for how they were going to take on The Jungle Book, but they noticed that Walt was not quite feeling himself. Would it have been too much to get as much additional input from such a great master as possible. It wouldn't have mattered anyway, because on December 15, 1966, Walter Elias Disney, family entertainment icon and American folk hero, died at age 65 of lung cancer. The papers were full of it. Rumors floated around that Walt was cryogenically frozen and placed under the pirate ship at Disneyland so he can later be thawed out at a point in the future. I never believed that. When you die once, you're brown bread, you ain't coming back.

Without Walt Disney, the production of The Jungle Book and the rest of Disney had such a huge hole in it. Walt believed in animation, but his brother Roy was still the business guy and thought Jungle Book wouldn't make it, so the animators really had their professions and craft on the line. 10 months after Walt Disney's death, The Jungle Book premiered in theaters, and on a $4 million budget, grossed $11.5 million in domestic and some more in other territories, making The Jungle Book a success. Disney as a company believed they could did carry on like normal, but going forward, nothing was gonna be "normal". This was the late 1960s. Hippies, the birth of metal, Woodstock, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, protests and riots regarding the Vietnam war, people all of a sudden now starting to care for planet Earth, as the first Earth Day was held on April 22, 1970. A year or so after Walt Disney died, the Hays Code was abolished, and films that Walt Disney would have burnt every copy of had he had his way came into cinemas and became big successes. Films like The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Bonnie and Clyde, Rosemary's Baby, Easy Rider, and Midnight Cowboy showcased a new edginess and cynicism not seen in cinema before. It was known as New Hollywood. If anything, Dennis Hopper getting annoyed by other drivers in Easy Rider and then flipping them off, that's pretty much the ultimate gesture of how the young people in America that did get the press felt about the old guard and establishment that Walt Disney belonged to.

From this point, Disney would enter a period known as the Dark Age of Animation, which would last until 1989. It was a period where the upper business management running the animation department did not want to take risks in cinematic animation. Even so, this period did produce some charming films, yet they didn't have the gravitas that they would have had Walt Disney been involved.

Since this club I'm part of has already looked at Aristocats, next week, Disney enters the Dark Ages properly with an adaptation of a classic tale that would prove to be a forerunner for the furry fandom.