Working Knowledge 2.0

It turns out that a lot of my favorite Disney movies were made in the 1990s.  From 1990-1999 Disney rolled out a bunch of their most successful films like Tarzan, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and Aladin.  I have had at least 2 songs from each of these movies memorized for a while, so they must be pretty good right? Well, each of these movies won at least one Oscar or Grammy for one of their songs or soundtracks.  Actually, every Disney movie made during the 1990s that had songs as an integral part of the story received at least a nomination for an Oscar for a song.  The 3 highest rated Disney movies of the 1990s (according to imdb. since they have such a large sample size i'd assume it's rather accurate), The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin (ordered number 1-3) all had the Oscar for "Best Music, Original Song" which beat out a couple of their other songs that got nominated.  I really doubt it's a coincidence that the more amazing songs there are in a movie the more people like it.

Research Question from Class

To what extent does the music in Disney Animation movies in the 1990s affect their profitability and why does it do so?

     1.  How has Disney Animation shaped the culture of our youth?

     2.  What aspects of Disney Animation movies makes it appeal to such a wide audience?

In this question I shifted the focus from what Disney does to what the consumer likes about Disney movies.  This question seems to have a lot less arbitrary of answers when compared to the first and seems to have a larger breadth of topics to discuss.

     3.  How has the way Disney Animation produces its movies changed as the technology used has changed?

This question focuses completely on Disney Animation instead of looking at the consumer.  This question would focus a lot more on the movie-making process of Disney and likely have more on the history of animation.  Since this question will involve movie-making techniques there will definitely be a lot of information to use.

     4.  How has the movie industry changed to allow Disney Animation to thrive by producing animated movies?

Instead of focusing solely on Disney, this question will look at other companies and the movie-making sector as a whole to see what influenced Disney.  This will also bring into question live-action vs. animation which is pretty interesting.

     5.  What business strategies of Disney have allowed it to turn into the multimedia empire that it is today?

This question will look into the history of Disney a lot more than all of the other ones.  It will also look at the economic side of Disney and not focus as much on the movies.  There is a lot of open information on how Disney has been doing economically with the prices of its stock which can be used.  

Working Knowledge

After looking into the full cast of many Disney animated movies I was rather surprised to find that one of the smallest production teams was the music team.  Disney tends to have just one song writer and let him/her work with the directors and producers to make the music for the film.  The largest team in all of the Disney movies that I looked at was the animation team.  In the most recent Disney animation Frozen, the animation team was sent to Cheyenne, Wyoming and other teams were sent to Quebec and Norway to research.  It turns out that there is a lot of time in Disney movies where research is being conducted to produce the best possible movie.  It is also interesting how the song can influence or completely change the script of these movies.  In the case of Frozen, the song writers Kristen and Bobby Lopez created the song "Let it Go" which dictated the personality of Elsa from that point onward.  The producer of Frozen stated that once the song "Let it Go" was created it was decided that that song would be in the movie no matter what.  

Frozen took about two and a half years to produce from pre-production to release according to an interview with the films producer, Peter Del Vecho.  He stated that this was an really short amount of time for a movie like Frozen.  I was curious about how long these animated movies take to produce and found an article with a couple of animators from Pixar, a company owned by Disney.  The interview stated that a Pixar film usually takes around four to seven years to create.  This seems to be one of the main differences between animated films and live-action films.  The movie The Avengers took less than two years from pre-production to release date and The Dark Knight Rises took about two and a half years.  In an animated movie you have to start from scratch and create the environment and the characters and many frames per second have to be produced.  In live-action, many frames per second are produced but the movie is shot in real time which probably where the main difference in time comes from.

50 Questions

1. Who created Disney?
2. Who created Disney's signature tune at the beginning of each movie?
3. When did animation begin?
4. What was Disney's first animated movie?
5. What is the most successful animated Disney movie?
6. What is Disney's most successful non-animated movie?
7. How do these movies compare?
8. How does Disney create the music for its films?
9. How has Disney's revenue progressed since its creation?
10. Who are the main consumers that Disney animation tries to please?
11. Why do people enjoy music in movies?
12. What caused Disney to want to pursue a change in the movie industry from actors to animation?
13. Which animation movie company is the most successful?
14. How has Disney's movies responded to an increasingly technological world?
15. When was the first animated movie?
16. When was Disney created?
17. What are the differences in cost between an animated movie and an actor based movie?
18. How long does it take to create an animated movie?
19. How long does it take to create an actor based movie?
20. What percentage of Disney's recent animated movies' budget gone into making the music for the movie?
21. What percentage of the budget has gone into the marketing of the movie?
22. Do Disney's animated movies tend to do better than their non-animated movies?
23. How do the profits made by movies rated G and PG compare to those rated PG-13 and R?
24. What is considered Disney's best movie?
25. Why do people like to watch movies about fantasy worlds?
26. How have animation techniques changed since the creation of Disney?
27. What have these changes allowed Disney to do that was previously impossible?
28. What percentage of Disney's movies are animated?
29. What caused Disney to focus on princess stories?
30. What are some prevalent themes in Disney animation movies?
31. What is the price of Disney's stock?
32. Is Disney's stock price on a downwards or upwards trend?
33. What inventions led to the rise of animated movies?
34. What makes a movie a musical?
35. How much did the trailers of Frozen cost when compared to the total budget?
36. What are some of the most common types of music in Disney movies?
37. Is their a correlation between successful Disney movies and success in Disney World/Land?
38. Who is the most successful Disney songwriter?
39. Who has written the most Disney songs?
40. How many of Disney's movies involve a princess?
41. What is Disney's most successful princess movie?
42. Does Disney base their princess models off of real people?
43. Who is the most well known Disney character?
44. How have sequels of Disney movies performed when compared to the originals?
45. What makes a song catchy?
46. How many other animation companies does Disney own?
47. How many movies does Disney produce a year?
48. Which Disney movie returned the lowest profit or produced the highest deficit?
49. How does the success of a song from a movie affect the number of customers that see the movie?
50. What appeal does an animated movie provide that an actor based movie doesn't?

I am a born and bred Disney fan.  My favorite movie growing up was Snow White.  I remember forcing my parents to follow me around the house while we sing "Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho, It's off to work we go", and I would cower behind the couch when the Evil Queen transformed to trick Snow White into eating the poisoned apple.  I eventually came to the realization that there were other movies other than Snow White in the world, and began watching as many Disney movies as I could find.  After mastering my choreographed Snow White song and dance routine, eventually I added songs like "You've Got a Friend in Me" from Toy Story, "Go the Distance" from Hercules, "Strangers Like Me" from Tarzan, and "A Girl Worth Fighting For" in Mulan to my repertoire.

It seems like Disney does an extraordinary job marketing its music as well as its movies.  When people talk about their favorite Disney movies, it often seems like they don't pull out a quote some character said, but instead part of a song form the movie.  When a new Disney movie is released, it's like the music goes everywhere.  Recently with Disney's new movie Frozen, "Let it Go" was playing all over the place.  Just by browsing through the internet, I knew enough of the songs from Frozen to sing along during most of the movie.  If you heard an above average, possibly extremely talented person singing along to all the songs during Frozen at AMC Theaters in Tysons Corner, I'd like to apologize with this blog post.  What caused me to do this extremely rude and charitable act?  How is viewer experience affected by the addition of catchy songs during the movie?  All questions will be potentially answered in future blog posts.