What’s your favorite Disney movie? If your a 90’s kid you may say something like Lion King, or Aladdin. If you’re a little younger perhaps you’d blurt out Tangled! Or maybe even Moana. Well, for me a personal favorite has always been Treasure Planet, I mean what is cooler as a 6-year old boy than freakin’ space pirates. That plus the thrilling storyline, the lovable characters, the banger of a soundtrack and the stunning animation, both 2D and deep canvass 3D. This film will always hold a special place in my heart, but recently I was sad to learn that this movie was the reason that Disney stopped putting their time and effort towards making 2D animated films.

It used to be so simple with the Walt Disney Company, Pixar made the CGI stuff like Toy Story and A Bug’s Life, and Disney Animation stuck to hand drawn stuff that I will always prefer over 3D. But today, the two branches of Disney are almost indistinguishable from each other, of which only an experienced viewer with an eye for different animation styles would be able to tell apart. For example,  out of  the movies Wreck it Ralph and Brave, which one is Disney and which one is Pixar? Don’t google it I’ll just tell you. Since Brave stars a princess, I bet your first thought was, “that’s gotta be Disney” but actually Brave was made by Pixar, with Wreck it Ralph being produced by the Disney Animation Studios, but you get my point. This uncanny similarity is due to nothing else, than the production of the astute Treasure Planet, and its expensive venture into the mix of 2D animation with 3-dimensional backgrounds.

If you follow this blog you’ll know about deep canvass as I’ve mentioned it multiple times before. Deep canvass is the integrative 3-dimensional mapping of environments or items that characters interact with in order to get camera perspectives and shots that one normally wouldn’t be able to get with traditional 2D animation. The hand drawn characters are then put over the 3D renderings with 2D textures and it’s easier to animate a scene with a sweeping and panning camera. Treasure Planet wasn’t the first Disney film to make use of deep canvassing, but it’s still the reason Disney began to put a halt on the 2D process, but why if Disney has been using deep canvass since Beauty and the Beast and it continued to make hand drawn animated movies after that. Well the main reason is where films like Beauty and the Beast and Tarzan had around 5-10 minutes of deep canvass animation, Treasure Planet had it in nearly every shot of the film. From the settings, like the ship where the majority of the movie takes place, to the characters, like B.E.N. and Long John Silver’s right arm and leg, it’s difficult to find a frame without deep canvass. At the time, the bucket loads of money that had to go into something as extensive and detailed as a film like this were enormous. The cost of the film clocked in at $140,000,000, with an extra $40,000,000 for marketing, whereas the film only made around $109,000,000 at the box office.

With such a high cost that didn’t result in a profit, it turned Disney off from repeating a film like this one out of fear that it would lose the company money. They even had a Treasure Planet sequel with storyboards and everything set up, only to be cancelled because of what the first movie lost in revenue. But that begs the question, why did the movie do so poorly? Disney often does wonders with marketing their films, but for some reason, Treasure Planet was just poorly marketed. It had trailers that either didn’t entail the story at all or straight up spoiled every plot point of the film. Not only that but it released the movie against the first Harry Potter film and Disney’s own highly anticipated sequel for The Santa Clause. With such poor decisions in marketing, it almost makes it look like Disney didn’t want the film to be successful. Despite the poor timing of release in the winter, around Christmas, stacked up to hit theaters at the same time as two highly anticipated franchise films, with little to no effort put into existing advertisements, all patterns any executive, or even marketing chair would notice, Disney made no attempt to ramp up marketing in anyway, setting up Treasure Planet for failure.

The reason? Disney knew where the money was headed. 3D animated films from Pixar and Dreamworks were absolutely killing in the box office and in reviews. The technology used for fully 3D animated films like Toy Story were cheaper and less time consuming than deep canvassing with traditional animation overtop. So why continue spending more time and money than necessary animating something as detailed and thought out as Treasure Planet, when you can go animate an entire movie with CGI quicker and cheaper? Despite the warm and fluid feel of traditional animation that 2D films brought us, Treasure Planet’s setup failure did the trick. 2D animated Disney films dwindled in comparison to their 3D counterparts, up to 2011 where the traditionally animated Winnie the Pooh was the final 2D film in a sea of CGI Disney.

While Disney may never return to the traditional style of animation, at least we still have them to watch over again. We can still appreciate the work that goes into the masterpieces created by the artists of the time, and while it’s sad we will never see it continue to grow, we always have the memories that they provided us.