Page 95 - The Disneyization of Society

THE DISNEYIZATION OF SOCIETY

the films, quite irrespective of the previously mentioned passive approach to
licensing. The animation department produced a series of feature films that were
86 well received at both the box office and critically, culminating in Beauty and the
Beast (1991) which was released to great acclaim.
But it was The Lion King in 1994 that was the turning point. A major reason for
the revival of animation at Disney was the Disney team’s conviction that animation
was, or at least should be, at the centre of the company’s activities. A successful
Disney animated feature, they felt, led to success in other spheres of the company’s
portfolio of activities. Nowhere was this clearer than with merchandising, since
animated characters are extremely adaptable and amenable to being transformed
into merchandise. A successful feature heralded the prospect of greater profitabil-
ity elsewhere, not just in the feature itself. Interestingly, the article in The Wall
Street Journal that was quoted from above included a diagram with a Disney copy-
right indicator showing the links between the company’s various activities
(television, Disneyland, merchandising, comics, publications, and music), but at
its centre was its films. Somehow in the years after Roy O. Disney’s death, the
significance of this point seemed to have been marginalized.
The Eisner team were right to restore animation to the centre of its activities and
in a sense even more correct than they had anticipated. Masters has written of the
release of The Little Mermaid in 1989: ‘Disney had not really been prepared for the
bonanza and didn’t have nearly as much merchandise on hand as it could have
sold. … Disney began to appreciate the staggering amounts that could be wrung
from a medium that allowed the studio ultimate control and didn’t include any
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live actors who were in a position to demand a percentage of the gross’. However,
this box office and merchandising success paled into insignificance when com-
pared to The Lion King. Not only was the film a massive box office success, it rep-
resented a merchandising bonanza for Disney that vastly exceeded expectations.
Giroux has suggested that it was so successful that it became a model for market-
ing and extracting value from subsequent animated feature films. Lion King toys
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achieved retail sales in the US of $214 million by Christmas 1994, which made it
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a tough act to follow. In its 1996 Annual Report, Disney reported that comparable
sales at the Disney Stores were down 2% from the previous year ‘primarily due to
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the strength of The Lion King merchandise in the prior year’. It is generally reck-
oned that revenues from the film amount to just under $1billion, of which around
one-third is from the box office. The rest will have been made up from revenues
from videos, computer games and from licensed merchandise, as well as other
sources. Since The Lion King, Disney has been even more enthusiastic about
animated feature films and has been producing nearly one animated feature a year
(which is much more frequent than in Walt’s later years when animated feature
films were being released every three years). This includes films using traditional
‘flat’ animation techniques (albeit enhanced by computer animation) and 3-D
animated features produced through computer graphics: the two Toy Story films, A
Bug’s Life, Dinosaur, Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo.