The Decline of Traditional Animation
Despite the box office success of Disney's Lilo & Stitch, the failure of their much-hyped Treasure Planet seemed to ensure that there would be major cutbacks at Disney's animation studio. In 2004, Disney released what it announced to be its last traditionally-animated film, Home on the Range. The film received mixed reviews and was not successful at the box office.
That same year, the live-action film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was released. It was notable for being filmed entirely in front of a bluescreen, with the background being completely computer generated; only the actors and some props were real. Robert Zemeckis' film The Polar Express, starring Tom Hanks in five roles, was completely CGI animation, but used performance capture technology to animate the characters. Zemeckis followed The Polar Express with two other motion capture films: Beowulf and Disney's A Christmas Carol.
However, the release of The Princess and the Frog and The Secret of Kells in 2009, both nominated for an Academy Award, marked a renewed interest in traditional animation. In the same year, Coraline and Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox (also Academy Award nominated) renewed interest in stop motion animation.
Read more about this topic: American Animation
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—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“I conceive that the leading characteristic of the nineteenth century has been the rapid growth of the scientific spirit, the consequent application of scientific methods of investigation to all the problems with which the human mind is occupied, and the correlative rejection of traditional beliefs which have proved their incompetence to bear such investigation.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)