Look! Baby Yoda!
Now that I’ve hooked you…Earlier this year, when asked about the lag time between major new titles on Disney+, Bob Iger seemed pretty relaxed. “I think the best thing about it all is that the decision that we made to go with quality and not just volume is working,” he said, in reference to the fact that, circa February 5, The Mandalorian’s first season had ended and the next marquee title was The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, arriving in August. Now, nearly two months later, production on that show has been delayed for obvious reasons. How soon are we from finding out that the show’s not arriving in August anymore?
It’s not that Disney+ is lacking in new shows, and they’re still adding a number of catalog titles each month. (The arrival of David Lynch’s The Straight Story this Friday, for one, is very exciting.) But the new shows and films are likely not going to grab a ton of buzz the way that Baby Yoda did. Have you watched Shop Class or Be Our Chef yet? They’re already on the service! I swear.
One of the other new titles is Disney Insider, a show whose first two episodes I watched yesterday. (I’d be streaming Disney+ every day, for one reason or another, anyway. But during quarantine? Come on.) You can be forgiven for not knowing what Disney Insider is, but I’ll fill you in: it’s a series whose episodes are 17 minutes each, and are all pretty squarely focused on fast, upbeat, promotional content. The first episode has brief glimpses of the making of Onward; the second has some behind-the-scenes details on Mulan. (Good timing!)
But the second episode ends with about four minutes showcasing the Disney Animation Research Library through the POV of two of Disney’s most legendary living animators: Burny Mattinson and Andreas Deja. As Deja notes, Mattinson is perhaps the longest-tenured Disney Cast Member, and certainly its longest-tenured animator at 67 years. And Deja is the man responsible for some of Disney’s best villains, like Gaston and Scar. Watching them talk about their art, and the stories of their past work, should have been incredible. Each of them has decades’ worth of stories to tell, and an incalculable impact left behind thanks to what they drew by hand.
And yet, this segment lasted four minutes. How can Disney+ fix this? Easy.
I tweeted that yesterday, and it’s still true today. Any work on new programs would need to be done remotely, but a great deal of the work would be through talking-head content, existing behind-the-scenes footage, and archival images.
Leaving aside the concerns of how the hell any show can be made right now, this is the kind of historical substance I think a lot of people would want to watch. It’s not that Disney+ should stop making shows like Shop Class or Disney Insider; it’s that they should make other shows, too. If ever this pandemic calms down, if ever we can approach something like back to normal in the world, it would be ideal if Disney+ could treat the legacy of its company as more than just a few minutes of fluff.
Your Recommendation for Today
Before there was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, there was The Old Mill. This 1937 short showcased the revolutionary multiplane-camera technology before Disney’s first full-length animated feature ever did. (Multiplane cameras allowed animation to move more fluidly than ever before.) It’s a haunting Silly Symphony, eschewing dialogue in favor of music, atmosphere, and gorgeous animation like what you can see right here. The short deservedly won an Oscar, too.