Disney Tells Talent TTFN: Disney is set to close its Florida animation studio. Was it a move to get back at Roy? Did his knowledge that it was coming play a part in Roy's resignation? Why my obsession with Disney?

Disney is a good company that was founded on business principles I believe in--that if you create something incredible for people, they'll reward you financially for it and you still get to feel good about yourself.

They're still doing it. The Lion King, which was made just under ten years ago, is still in the top 10 highest grossing films of all time (although Return of the King will probably bump it pretty soon). Disney's California Adventure is starting to find it's real target audience--families with small children (There are lots of play places and things for littler kids, something Disneyland used to have, but has abandoned for decades now.) If you count the Pixar stuff, Disney put a new film in the top ten films of all time just last year.

But Pixar really is the issue isn't it? Because those boys keep cranking out hit after hit while films like Atlantis and Brother Bear keep getting lukewarm receptions. Why? Have people somehow given up on Disney?

Yeah, right. Because last year, even though everybody in the world thought that a movie called Pirates of the Caribbean sounded like a bad idea, and were hesitant to see it, the fact that it was good drew them out in droves. It made more money than the Sixth Sense, Home Alone, and Shrek, all of which were considered smash run away successes.

So where's the problem? I'll just say this--it's not the animators. The animators are cranking out some beautiful stuff. For all anybody can gripe about recent Disney films, the animation is still incredible, and they still continue to raise the bar all the time.

So it's too bad that some of the most talented people at Disney are being let go because Disney won't scope top writing talent for their features. The writing team behind Brother Bear are those fine folks who brought you The Extreme Adventures of Super Dave and The Battle for the Planet of Cheese.

The guys that wrote Pirates are Ted Ellioit and Terry Rossio, the team behind the excellent WordPlay website for screenwriters. Granted, a large degree of the credit for the success of Pirates has to go to Johnny Depp's performance and Orlando Bloom's eyes, but those two boys also got it going on.

(And yeah, I know they got the writing credit on Godzilla, but trust me, if the script they wrote had been the script that got filmed, you'd be sitting through Godzilla 4 at the theatres right now.)