WALT DISNEY - DISNEY RETURNING TO CLASSIC ANIMATION IN 2009

John Lasseter, who currently holds the title of chief creative officer of the Walt Disney Co., selected a stockholders annual meeting in New Orleans Thursday to announce that Disney will return to hand-drawn animation in 2009 with a feature set in New Orleans. The feature, The Frog Princess, will be directed by John Musker and Ron Clements, who oversaw The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, and who were forced out by the studio's previous management when it decided to abandon hand-drawn animation in 2004. The movie will also feature the first African-American princess to appear in a Disney animated film. "We're going back to hand-drawn animation," Lasseter announced at the meeting. "This movie is going to be classic Disney and yet you have never seen this before." The studio said that it plans to rehire many of the animators it let go during the bloodletting following the failure of 2004's Home on the Range, Disney's last "2D" animated film.

09/03/2007