Written by steet :

Recently, I've read a lot of news on many sites (especially animators sites), in order to know "what's coming". And I have found many "behind the scenes" (mostly Disney related) , that I thought were enough important to share :

- Universal has closed down their "Universal Animation Studios" facility since mid-2009. I'm not sure how to understand this news, because it seems they're still making CGI films though not indoors ("Despicable Me" is coming soon), but we DO know that they stopped making anymore Land Before Time sequels and series. So yes, we can safely assume that the facility behind the Balto, An American Tail or Land Before Time Direct-To-Video sequels is no more...Their last film is Curious George 2, which is finished since ages but has yet to be released in most countries. (including USA)
http://animationguildblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/state-of-industry-and-tag.html

- The trend since the 2000's for big animation companies, is to hire animators for one project when they're needed, and get rid of them when it's finished. For example, most of the staff behind The Princess & The Frog has been dismissed since last summer. (a few months BEFORE its release) During the last century, the animators would stay at a company as long as there were projects. That doesn't sound very respectful to their employees...And you have to wonder what happens when they switch from one company to the other. (what's the point in teaching, giving out secrets of animation making, if that's to "give" the employees to other companies?)

- Disney's Snow Queen, which was going to be the next "big" 2D project, has been shelved. Likewise, their other CGI project ("King of Elves") has also been cancelled. Which makes us wonder : what's going on? Not only this means there won't be any other hand-drawn film before ages ( ), but their mid-term future is a blur, something that rarely happened before. (Of course, I'm not counting the Pixar projects - they're a different entity. Not counting the "Pooh" feature film either, because...well...you see what I mean.)

- Currently, it seems that Disney is blaming the not-fantastic box office of The Princess & The Frog on its name - they now think that adding "Princess" in the title wasn't a good thing (so what are they waiting to change the DVD cover, then??) Personally, if I were them, I would rather blame their "Disney Princesses" brand for giving a very bad image of fairy tales stories to anyone who's not a little girl... As a result, Rapunzel (their current CGI project slated for release this year) is very likely to have a name change before it gets released this fall. Apparently, the chosen name is "Tangled" (strange name for a Rapunzel fairy tale...) As always, that's a very short-term vision : it may do some favors to the film on its release, but will someone want to watch a Disney film named "Tangled" in decades, which doesn't give any hint on what the subject of the film is? I seriously doubt it.
 

Yes, that's not very joyful news - sorry!  Stay tooned for more to come...