Pretty Little Pixar

As I'm sure you've heard, Disney has bought Pixar. Amid Amidi has a news round-up over at Cartoon Brew.

My gut reaction is that Disney may have bought into a declining market. Pixar is a great company, but the computer-animation boom shows signs of having peaked; remember the reports that DVD sales of Pixar's The Incredibles and DreamWorks' successful albeit pointless Shrek 2 were less than expected. Of course, Jobs, Catmull and Lasseter are smart guys who know how to keep up with changing public tastes, so there's every possibility that they'll be able to keep turning out hits -- but I just wanted to raise the possibility that we've already seen the highest heights of the vogue for computer-animated movies, much as the vogue for hand-drawn movies hit its peak with The Lion King in 1994.

Speaking of hand-drawn, I share the hope of Jerry Beck that we might see the return of hand-drawn animation to Disney, but I doubt the executives would stand for it ("Hand-drawn? Animation with pencils? What kind of Mickey Mouse operation is that?").