Experienced Disney animator and storyboard artist Eric Goldberg has said that there are plans for 2D animated content like films and series to make a comeback for Walt Disney Studios. This comes as good news for fans of Disney’s 2D animation since Disney seemed to abandon the medium for the past decade.
Disney‘s last 2D animated film was Winnie the Pooh back in 2011, which was an hour-long film that sadly underperformed in sales. Their last feature-length film was The Princess and the Frog in 2009, and since then, 3D animation truly dominated their filmography.
In an IndieWire article, Goldberg talks about how Disney has opened up to the 2D medium once again in the past year.
“I’ve been campaigning for a long time to train up people in hand-drawn, and, as the CG films became more and more popular, that idea became less and less important to the studio,” says Goldberg. “But now we have an atmosphere and a group of people who recognize that’s part of the legacy here, and to actually have content that requires hand-drawn animation is absolutely great. Thank goodness we have people who can do both here, but to actually commit to training up a new generation is a wonderful thing and I think perfectly appropriate for [us].”
To give more context to what Goldberg is saying here, Disney Animation Studios launched its first training program for hand-drawn animation in more than 10 years. Led by the mentorship of Goldberg and other relevant Disney animators, six trainees were selected out of more than 2000 applicants for a 12-month program for animation. What comes out of all of this is Goldberg saying that there are plans for upcoming 2D projects that include series and feature-length films.
Goldberg is almost a legend in the Disney animation world, as he was the supervising animator for several characters in famous films like the Genie in Aladdin, Phil in Hercules, Louis the Alligator in Princess and the Frog, and Rabbit in Winnie the Pooh. He was a co-director on Pocahontas and also supervised animation sequences like Maui’s tattoo animation in Moana.
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