![]() and the highest box office gross of any animated feature to date! Finally, they had a much-needed financial success to offset all the dreadful live-action garbage they’ve been churning out. Regardless of my personal feelings on Reitherman’s auteurship, Robin Hood released to positive reviews. You directed the dragon sequence in Sleeping Beauty. I find it annoying as an audience member fifty years later I can only imagine what it was like to work with the man. The man who once animated the best action sequences in the Disney canon now refuses to take risks or try anything new. He also chose to leave all of the Merry Men except Little John on the cutting room floor to give the film a buddy comedy feel like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, because the man has no idea how to write anything else. Legend has it that he wept when he saw that Reitherman reduced all his quirky, inventive character designs to tired animal stereotypes. Remember when I said I don’t love all the decisions Reitherman makes as a director? Well, neither did Ken Anderson. Without Walt’s guidance, tensions and discord grew high. This isn’t his first Disney job, but it is the first time he was credited.īut it wasn’t all new beginnings around the studio. ![]() The biggest of these names is the legendary Don Bluth, who animated the rabbit family and would go on to have great success animating anthropomorphic animals. For the other eight, retirement beckoned, and that meant passing the torch to the young, talented animators just getting started in the industry. In fact, this was the final animated feature that they would all live to see released, before John Lounsberry’s death. Let Davy Crockett go.īy this point, the Nine Old Men were becoming the Nine Really Old Men. There are other elements of the final film that speak to the studio’s unhealthy obsession with Westerns, too, but I’ll talk about that a little later.ĭisney, I am begging you. ![]() However, multiple famous Western actors had already been cast for the original treatment, and they decided to stick with them. In one of the few decisions I applaud him for, director Wolfgang Reitherman wisely decided to stick with the traditional setting of English countryside. However, the execs balked at the idea because the last time Disney did anthropomorphic animals in the Deep South it was not a good time for anyone. The original plan for the film was to move the famous English legend to a Deep South setting. Combining those two ideas allowed Anderson’s team to retool the work that had already been done on Reynard into a much more moral and better-known thief, Robin Hood. Some of the most fun the team had ever had was coming up with character designs for Song of the South, so why not do anthropomorphic animals again? And, after the failure of the Aristocats’ original story, the execs wanted to go back to Disney’s fairy tale roots. They needed a new idea if Disney animation was to survive, but what? Story man Ken Anderson had the solution. But Aristocats was the last project in the pipeline following their creator’s death. For example, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan all came out more or less within a year of each other because their productions overlapped. Neither one panned out, and Reynard remained on the shelf until well after Walt’s death.ĭuring Walt’s lifetime, the animation department usually had multiple projects in the works at the same time. They came back to the Reynard stories as potential animated interludes for Treasure Island, where Long John Silver was to tell them to Jim Hawkins, and again as a potential villain for the Chanticleer project that was dropped for the Sword in the Stone. ![]() Not only that, but the stories were a little too high-brow and inaccessible for Disney’s normal, family-friendly fare. Walt considered the French folktale Reynard the Fox, but felt that a morally gray, thieving hero would be a bad role model for the kids in the audience. The story of Disney’s Robin Hood begins waaay back in the 1930’s as a potential follow-up to Snow White. All photos are from Animation Screencaps unless otherwise stated. The opinions expressed therein reflect those of the authors and are not to be viewed as factual documentation. The authors’ claim no ownership of this material. Any material, including images and/or video footage, are property of their respective companies, unless stated otherwise. Disclaimer: This blog is purely recreational and not for profit. ![]()
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