Animated Features Flood Is Coming

If you’re enjoying the recent run of Disney animated features, the studio has good news for you. Staff and facilities added over the past two years or so have enabled the animation department to crank up a production schedule that Walt could only have dreamed about.

Already, two films are scheduled for release next year. “Pocahontas” makes her arrival in the summer, singing songs with music by Alan Menken (“Beauty and the Beast,” “Aladdin”) and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz. Mel Gibson provides the voice of Captain John Smith.

The use of big-star vocal talents continues with “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” based on Victor Hugo’s novel of medieval Paris and scheduled for late ‘95 release. Demi Moore, no less, will give voice to the character of Esmeralda, the beautiful Gypsy rescued from execution by the malformed Quasimodo, who gets his voice from Tom Hulce. Kevin Kline will do the talking for Capt. Phoebus, Esmeralda’s love.

Disney turns to myth and legend in 1996 with an animated “Hercules” and with “Fa Mulan,” based on a Chinese legend. The procession continues with “Aida,” the story of an African queen as told in Verdi’s opera.

Also in 1997, Disney will release a work from Pixar, the company that was one of the pioneers in computer animation. “Toys,” done in the same stop-motion-style animation as “Nightmare Before Christmas,” is about toys which, realizing they’re about to be replaced by new presents, organize an armed resistance.

On the heels of Disney

Meanwhile, the spectacular, worldwide success of Disney animation (plans are to release “The Lion King” in about 25 languages) has not gone unnoticed.

Don Bluth (“An American Tail,” “The Land Before Time”), whose own animation studio ran into financial difficulties before it was absorbed by a division of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, recently was appointed head of a new animation division at Twentieth Century-Fox.

And Amblimation, Steven Spielberg’s animation division, in cooperation with Universal, is in the process of making a feature called “Balto,” featuring the voices of Bob Hoskins, Phil Collins, and Jim Cummings (who voiced the giggling hyena in “The Lion King”). That feature is being directed by Simon Wells, a co-director of “Fievel Goes West” and one of the animators on “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” And that’s not all, folks.