The future of Disney in the age of AI greed
It sometimes feels hard to comprehend that the studio that once made endearing classics like Bambi and Sleeping Beauty is now responsible for some of the most egregious creative crimes being committed on the silver screen.
Disney was celebrated for gloriously beautiful films that showcased the wonder of the art form as a whole, taking the word ‘handcrafted’ to a whole new level through delicate and dreamy images. If it looked as though it was hand-drawn, that’s because it was, with dedicated teams of animators and artists who would painstakingly create entire worlds by hand.
There are scenes from early films of theirs that are genuine works of art, with any given frame in 101 Dalmatians or Fantasia being enough to fill a standalone frame in a gallery. Each movie was endlessly poured over by those who worked on them, with no detail being overlooked and no task being too much to pay for the price of creating a truly great film that would live forever.
We look back on this era with fondness, nostalgia, and now, an unfortunate sense of hindsight as we see what Disney has become. The quaint studio is no longer championing artists, quality work and original stories, and has instead evolved into another greedy corporation that views filmmaking as nothing more than a product that can be churned out on an endless conveyor belt of shit.
Disney has seemingly lost all respect for the art of storytelling, with countless projects being added to their slate each year and a clear shift in priorities as they turn away from quality to quantity. In a fast-paced world in which many people have everything they need at the touch of a button, many film studios are turning towards a model that reflects the speed of capitalism, taking the magic away from filmmaking by approaching it in a formulaic and commercial way that produces films at the same speed as an Amazon warehouse.
Where animated films used to be hand-crafted, with time and passion being infused into each frame, the movies made by Disney now look nothing like they used to, with the studio even championing the use of AI to minimise the effort that needs to go into the production of each film. Animators are forced to work within strict timelines to fit the crammed release schedule of the studio, meaning that their films rarely look good and instead look like rushed jobs that were quickly made to fill a gap in their schedule..
While originality used to be a top priority of the studio, this is no longer a concern of theirs, with their scrapped use of AI on their Moana sequel and the relentless number of live-action remakes showing that they have completely abandoned hope of ever making anything with the same charm and magic of their earlier films.
If Disney is now floating the idea of using AI to replicate the work of real actors, we can be sure that the future of the studio is heading in a very dark direction, and one that does not bode well for the rest of Hollywood if a notoriously meticulous studio is now abandoning the core principles of what it means to be an artist.
