The Walt Disney Co. said on Monday that it will close its feature-animation facility at Disney-MGM Studios, confirming what many animators already knew was coming.
Disney said the closure completes the final stage of a reorganization that consolidates all feature animation creative and production work at Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, Calif.
David Stainton, president of Walt Disney Feature Animation, said the Orlando facility “houses talented artists and staff,” but the decision to close the studio was based “on what is best strategically for our business in both the short and long term.”
“Having the entire animation group working together in Burbank under one roof will further enhance our filmmaking process,” he said.
The group’s last day was Monday, although production ceased at the studio about two months ago.
Disney is expected to move at least some of the Orlando facility’s nearly 260 artists to Burbank, but a spokeswoman said the studio hasn’t specified how many. Several employees said the number was small, with estimates ranging from two to 20.
Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida, which produced the movies Brother Bear, Lilo & Stitch and Mulan, began in 1989 as a small studio with 40 to 50 employees and grew into a major production center with about 400 employees at its peak in the mid- to late 1990s.
It is featured in the Magic of Disney Animation at Disney-MGM Studios. Large windows in the attraction’s gallery overlook the drawing tables and workstations on the studio’s ground floor.
On Monday, even as the artists were being told the facility was closing during a tense and emotional meeting with Stainton, employees were telling visitors to the attraction that “you’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at what we do here.”
The attraction will remain open, although its script will be changed slightly to reflect the production center’s closing, park spokesman Craig Dezern said.
“The Magic of Disney Animation has always been designed so even if guests toured on weekends or late hours when animators were typically not at work, they still could have a complete entertainment experience,” Dezern said.
Disney’s California Adventure in Anaheim and Walt Disney Studios Park outside Paris have similar attractions but don’t produce animation, he said.
Monday’s announcement had been widely expected. Disney cut 50 jobs in Orlando in October and halted work a month later on the facility’s only project, A Few Good Ghosts. It also has closed animation studios in Paris and Tokyo.
Disney, which pioneered the art of hand-drawn animation, is trying to shore up its Burbank studios amid a seeming audience preference for so-called 3-D animation, which is created entirely on computer. Disney has about 600 animators in California.
Finding Nemo, released by Disney but produced by computer-animation pioneer Pixar, earned $339.7 million in U.S. theaters alone. It has earned millions more overseas and on video.
Brother Bear, the final hand-drawn feature produced by Disney in Orlando, came out in October and had made $83.7 million through the weekend against an estimated $90 million to $100 million budget.
Disney’s next major animated feature will be this spring’s Home on the Range, which will combine hand-drawn and computer animation. The company has no other major 2-D projects on its schedule, although two are in development.
“It’s such a volatile time” in the industry, said Ron Saks, department chair for time-based media at the Columbus College of Art & Design in Ohio, which trained several of the artists who worked for Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida.
“When you have an entity that’s as highly visible as Disney and they’ve been cutting back and retrenching for a couple years now, it paints a very unclear picture,” he said.
Roy E. Disney, the nephew of company founder Walt Disney, blamed the closing of the Orlando studio on Chairman Michael Eisner’s “de-emphasis of creativity and total indifference to the impact his decisions have on the people who helped to make the company great.”
Last month, Disney quit the company’s board, calling on Eisner to resign. Disney has complained that the company “has lost its focus, its creative energy and its heritage.”
On Monday, he said, “The drain of talent over the past several years from the company’s feature animation department in Orlando, Burbank, Paris and Tokyo has been absolutely gut-wrenching. People are being asked to leave because management — particularly Michael — can’t figure out what to do with them.”
Soon after Disney stopped work on A Few Good Ghosts, major animation and special effects studios such as DreamWorks and Industrial Light & Magic came to Orlando to recruit Disney artists.
But current and former employees said the studio’s decision to close the facility meant something to them besides losing their jobs.
“There are a lot of emotions involved,” said animator Travis Blaise. During a staff meeting Monday to announce the closing, “I saw the whole entire studio there in front of me, and I thought, this is the last time I’m going to see the whole studio.”
What’s more, artists such as Tony West were hired straight out of college. “It was my dream job,” said West, a special effects animator who worked at the studio 14 years before being laid off in October.
“It was the job I always wanted to have as a kid,” he said Monday. “Now I have to figure out what I want to do when I grow up.”
