A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

© 2019 TWDC What are the most obvious signs from their movies that Disney is out to make money? Why are you asking such a silly question about The Walt Disney Company in general and specifically its Walt Disney Motion Pictures Studio division? Is there a valid reason for this, or are you jumping on the “let’s bash Disney because it’s a huge corporation” bandwagon? First of all, The Walt Disney Company was not created just to create “art” or provide entertainment just for the sake of making audiences happy. It was founded. in part, because Walt Disney was an artist who wanted to share his talents as an animator with the world, but it was also set up as a business enterprise. It wasn’t created to make art for art’s sake. Second, “Disney” exists to give its shareholders a return for their investments. When you buy stock in any business, you’re not merely getting a pretty piece of paper with the company logo; you’re purchasing a stake in that company’s future. Thus, if you o...

© 2002 Buena Vista Home Entertainment On Quora, David Postle from Australia asks: Why doesn't Disney release a DVD of the 1948 film So Dear to My Heart? I replied:  Um…. You mean,  this  DVD doesn’t exist? © 2003 Buena Vista Home Entertainment There are, in fact, at least two, perhaps even three, DVD editions of  So Dear to My Heart,  a 1948 film produced by Walt Disney and directed by Hamilton Luske and Harold D. Schuster. A bookend - of sorts - to  Song of the South  (it uses the same techniques of mixing live-action cinematography and animation), it earned Bobby Driscoll a special Academy Award for best “juvenile performance” and an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song (“Lavender Blue”) Walt Disney, through its home video division Buena Vista Home Entertainment. released  So Dear to My Heart  on DVD a decade ago, and it’s also viewable on Amazon’s Prime Video service.

Pros:  Seven new segments and The Sorcerer's Apprentice, nice mix of music Cons:  Would one host have been better than many? Jury is still out on that one In the late 1930s, Walt Disney and his team of animators decided to revive interest in Mickey Mouse - whose popularity was being eroded by his fellow Disney stable mate Donald Duck - by featuring the beloved rodent in a fully animated version of the Goethe-Dukas fantasy  The Sorcerer's Apprentice . Envisioned originally as a stand-alone "upgrade" of the then-popular "Silly Symphonies" shorts, this project grew in ambition and scale once the eminent conductor Leopold Stokowski got involved (he volunteered his services as conductor for  The Sorcerer's Apprentice ); from one relatively short (nine minutes or so) cartoon to a feature-length animated film featuring eight different visual interpretations of classical music pieces from at least three different eras: Baroque, Romantic and Moder...