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Modern animation in the United States

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At the start of the 1980s, Walt Disney Productions had been struggling since Walt Disney's death in 1966, and the 1979 departure of Don Bluth and eleven other associates from the animation department dealt Disney a major blow. Bluth formed a new studio, in direct competition with Disney.

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At the start of the 1980s, Walt Disney Productions had been struggling since Walt Disney's death in 1966, and the 1979 departure of Don Bluth and eleven other associates from the animation department dealt Disney a major blow. Bluth formed a new studio, in direct competition with Disney. Disney's "Nine Old Men", the animators responsible for Disney's most famous earlier works, and their associates began to hand their traditions down to a new generation of Disney animators. New faces such as Glen Keane, Ron Clements, John Musker, Andreas Deja, and others came to the studio in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a period that produced such features as The Rescuers, Pete's Dragon (a live-action/animation hybrid), and The Fox and the Hound, as well as the featurettes The Small One (Bluth's only Disney-directed credit) and Mickey's Christmas Carol (the first screen appearance of Mickey Mouse since 1953). At the same time, animator Steven Lisberger brought to the studio a concept about a computer programmer who is launched into a computerized world. The film would mix live action sequences with computer animation, which had not yet been used to such an extent. The studio was impressed with the idea; the result was an ambitious $17 million film ($ in today's dollars) entitled Tron. While Disney's stock dropped four percent after a screening for unenthusiastic investment analysts, and in spite of only moderate grosses at the box office, Tron received enthusiastic praise from film critic Roger Ebert, became a cult favorite and turned out—many years later—to have a greater influence on animation (at Disney and elsewhere) than expected. In 1984, Disney became the target of a corporate raid by Saul Steinberg, who intended to break up the company piece by piece. At the same time, Roy E. Disney, who had already resigned as President in 1977, relinquished his spot on the Board of Directors in order to use his clout to change the status quo and improve the company's declining fortune. Disney escaped Steinberg's attempt by paying him greenmail, but in its aftermath CEO Ron W. Miller resigned, to be replaced by Michael Eisner. Roy Disney, now back on the Board as its Vice-Chairman, convinced Eisner to let him supervise the animation department, whose future was in doubt after the disappointing box office performance of its big-budget PG-rated feature, The Black Cauldron. The studio's next release, The Great Mouse Detective, fared better in relation to its significantly smaller budget, but it was overshadowed by Don Bluth's An American Tail, another film featuring mice characters that competed directly with Mouse Detective in theaters. In 1988, the studio collaborated with Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis, producing Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a comedic detective caper that mixed live action and animation while paying homage to the Golden Age of Cartoons. Disney characters appeared with characters from Warner Bros., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Universal Pictures and other rival studios for the first time in animation history. The film was a huge box-office success, winning four Academy Awards, reviving interest in animation made for theaters, and popularizing the in-depth study of the history and techniques of animation. Several aging legends in the business, such as Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng, suddenly found themselves the center of attention, receiving acclaim and accolades after decades of being virtually ignored by audiences and industry professionals alike. Additionally, the release of many older Disney features and short cartoons on home video, and the 1983 launch of the Disney Channel, renewed interest in the studio. Disney followed up Who Framed Roger Rabbit and its commercially successful 1988 fully animated feature Oliver & Company with The Little Mermaid, an adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale with songs by Broadway composers Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. Mermaid was a huge critical and commercial success, won two Academy Awards for its song score, and became the first of a series of highly successful new Disney animated features. The studio invested heavily in new technology, creating the Computer Animation Production System to be used in tandem with traditional animation techniques. The first film to use this technology, The Rescuers Down Under, only grossed $27,931,461 ($ in today's dollars), not even equalling the take of the original 1977 film. However, the films that followed it, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, won rave reviews, received multiple Oscars, and topped the box office charts. Beauty and the Beast would eventually become the first animated feature to win the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy and the first animated feature to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, followed by 2009's Up. In 1993, Disney released The Nightmare Before Christmas, the first feature-length stop-motion animated film. Disney's success peaked in 1994, when The Lion King grossed $328,541,776 ($ in today's dollars). As of 2010, The Lion King ranked as the 22nd highest grossing motion picture of all time in the United States. Subsequent Disney films such as Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Mulan and Tarzan were box office and critical successes as well, albeit modestly so when compared to The Lion King. In 1994, the death of Disney President and Chief Operating Officer Frank Wells, and the departure of studio chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg to co-found DreamWorks, left Michael Eisner in full control of the company. At the turn of the century, films such as Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Treasure Planet, and Home on the Range failed to meet the critical and commercial expectations set by the early 1990s phenomena, in spite of exceptions such as Lilo & Stitch and The Emperor's New Groove. At the same time, the high level of popular acclaim bestowed upon Toy Story, the first film animated entirely using Computer-generated imagery (CGI), sparked an industry trend. Based on the commercial success of Pixar's computer-generated animated films and other CGI fare (especially DreamWorks' Shrek, which contained numerous jabs at Katzenberg's former workplace and boss), Disney came to believe that CGI was what the public wanted—so it ceased producing traditional two-dimensional animation after Home on the Range, and switched exclusively to CGI starting with 2005's Chicken Little. Public rifts grew between the animation staff and management, as well as between Michael Eisner and Roy E. Disney. Roy resigned from the board of directors in 2003 with a scathing letter that called the company "rapacious and soulless", adding that he considered it to be "always looking for the quick buck." He then launched the internet site SaveDisney.com in an attempt to preserve the integrity of the company and to oust Eisner, who resigned in 2005 after public opinion turned against him. Robert Iger succeeded Eisner; one of his first acts as CEO was to regain the rights to Walt Disney's first star Oswald the Lucky Rabbit from NBCUniversal (Iger did so by offering NBC the services of Al Michaels, a play-by-play host then under contract to Disney subsidiary ABC Sports, as a trade). After Disney's acquisition of Pixar in 2006, Pixar executive producer John Lasseter became Chief Creative Officer at both Pixar and Disney, with a plan to reintroduce two-dimensional animation, starting with The Princess and the Frog in 2009.