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Poster for the film Heavy Metal by Chris Achilléos (1981)
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 10 May 2026
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ClassicFilms
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FWIW, Moebius was the lead designer on "Masters of Time" (1982), did concept art for Dune, and probably worked on others, as well.
Very good points. Indeed, I was arguing this stuff a couple weeks ago with Mental Edge (who posts the Moomins). I do think that while Walt was alive, his films were fine all-ages fare. Not to mention, he'd personally revolutionised the animation industry with his standards and dedication. But it's also true that over time, Disney's films drifted more and more towards outright pandering to money, via childish audiences. Really, it's been hard to watch one their classically animated films for decades, due to the facial expressions and reactions being so over the top, not to mention the usual gang of wise-ass characters present where none were needed, previously.
Anyway, I could go on, but wanted to throw a proper response out to your extensive comment.
The thing with Walt is that his negatives outweigh the positives BY A LOT. He fought his competition by playing as dirty as it gets.
He pushed out Sullivan Studios Felix The Cat by doing essentially Temu version of the character with Mickey Mouse. Then he got screwed by Winkler Pictures and it led to copyright galore that still goes on even though the studio itself died a death soon after Walt raised a stink about copyright snatching. So he went scroched earth against post-Winkler Screen Gems and they never really managed to get into feature length market. He screwed Van Beuren studios out from distribution and it killed the studio shorly after (these guys also did latter iteration of Felix the Cat, funnily enough this one was also one-upping Mickey Mouse). The whole Iwerks mess - first he screwed Iwerks while they worked together, then Iwerks left to do his own thing so Walt bled him and bought his studio out of spite. Harman-Ising is another story of petty low blows. He went full on total war on Fleischer Studios and it got ugly even though Fleischer legacy is probably far deeper and far reaching than Disney ever got (basically the whole rotoscoping thing and adult animation template goes all the way back to their work). He did the same to Walter Lantz because there can be only one Walt i guess. Walt's response to 1941 Strike led to creation of UPA and Walt made sure it would be destined to stay in the television ghetto. As a result Hanna Barbera never even tried scaling up. Walt tried to fight with Warners and got literally bitch slapped for once. But don't worry - he blocked the Animal Farm adaptation in the american market and it made sure british animation would never really get going at scale. He did the exclusive Technicolor deal that locked out everyone else from using the tech and it put a brake on the entire industry up until the TV resurgence in the 1950s. Then he went copyright bullying over multiplane camera tech even though Disney didn't invent that thing - but he sure did bitch a lot about it. Investing into CalArts more or less directed the talent pipeline straight into Disney. Also Walt's Red Scare hysteria destroyed many careers because reasons. He threw Hilberman under a bus out of spite. The way he treated Art Babbitt, the man who made Disney what it was was baffling. Same for Culhane and Tytla. The jealousy and racism towards Tyrus Wong was embarrasing. The Oskar Fischinger debacle. So you hire the abstract visual music animation pioneer and then demote him to effects animator role with much of his work reworked into house style and then bully the guy into quitting because "fuck this guy". Can you imagine having Oskar motherfucking Fischinger in your company and not letting him cook? Also the whole "BUT WE HAVE OSCARS SO WE BETTER" thing is just fucking annoying.
Interesting stuff, if on the horrid side. Where did you happen to learn about these things?
As I was following up just now to see if there was a "Behind the Bastards" ep on Disney, I discovered this fascinating comment: (yes, at the evil empire)
https://www.reddit.com/r/behindthebastards/comments/1biqbz7/hey_yeah_where_is_the_walt_disney_episode/kvn0clf/
Me, I've traditionally tended to consider the impressive accomplishments of early and middle-period Disney without getting too much in to Walt himself. I knew he could be a bastard, but this stuff deserves a closer look IMO.
@mentaledge@sopuli.xyz,
I'm thinking you might be interested in the above comment I'm replying to.
TBF, H-B was never founded with that direction in mind. If anything, they were all about finding ways to cut every little bit of unnecessary technique, steps and costs to become as absolutely efficient as possible while still maintaining a quality product. And it worked. At least, I think most of their 50's - 60's work was solid, if a bit on the vapid side at times.
Maybe H-B really did ponder the idea of scaling up, but at the same time, it seems like it would have been in diametrical opposition of their core philosophy, and that tends to be risky stuff in the world of business IMO. Still, if you have the evidence...
there's a book called Hollywood Cartoons - it's an extensive look at the american scene and Disney is basically a recurring villain. There's also a book by Neal Gabler about Walt. It is very funny because Gabler tries very hard to be neutral about Walt but it is kinda hard to do at times.
H-B applied Disney factory method to Terrytoons/Warner/Fleischer style cartoons and then wrangled it further into a very cost-effective production. It would've worked on feature length projects with the right tech and talent but most of it was literally locked with Disney - they had no means and they didn't wanted to start a fight they knew they couldn't win. Their only real shot to compete was in the 60s when they did Flintstones and Yogi Bear and Disney fatigue started to show its first signs but they chose to stay on TV and long-term it was better for them. In hindsight - they would've wiped the floor with Disney if they did Johnny Quest or Jetsons feature length sci-fi extravaganzas
Thanks for those details. Yeah, several people laud the Gabler book in that thread I linked above, and I like that approach of neutrality. The long comment mentioned proposes that Disney was indeed a bastard, but a bastard for different reasons than usually charged. For example, instead of being a cutthroat capitalist who coldly and cynically drained the life out of his colleagues and employees, instead he was a true visionary who was addicted to working on his passion projects, and in fact all-thumbs at finances. A naive political stooge who could be easily manipulated by his protegees, and highly sensitive when it came to his employees' perceived loyalty to him, a big part of his anti-union activities, evidently. The comment and the book also mention some positives about Walt, which I won't parrot here since I haven't actually read the Gabler one.
H-B did make the Yogi and Flintstones movies back then, so there are those. I have to think that if they'd been profitable-enough, they would have just kept going with that. I mean, why not?
I've watched a tonne more Venture Bros than I have Johnny Quest, so couldn't say on that one, but I'm not sure I agree with you about the Jetsons' viability. The original show only lasted one season, and it had nowhere near the depth and originality of the Flintstones. Basically just a way to briefly cash-in on Space Age mania. I've watched maybe 50%+ of the episodes, and they get pretty vapid pretty quickly, with nowhere-near the writing quality as on the Flintstones. I frankly don't think it would have been anything special as a movie, and turning it in to a 'SF extravaganza' would have been like reinventing the show, and that wasn't H-B at all.
Indeed, across their entire set of franchises, I'm really not sure they had many that were theatre-viable within that 50's-60's time-frame. So no, I don't really think they would've wiped the floor with *anybody* , much less Disney, which was vastly-better geared to do smash-hit animations. Just look at what 1966 held, the final year of Walt's life-- yes, that masterpiece called The Jungle Book.
true visionary that had a habit of crushing his competition with unfair business practices and weird fetish for hiring other visionaries and then defacing their work and relegating to secondary roles like what happened to Oskar Fischinger. Wasting his time on Fantasia only to change the whole thing was a bitch move. Dude did too much ugly shit to get any grace.
The Jungle Book is trash. It is technically sophisticated waste of source material. I don't like in-name-only adaptations that craps all over the source material because it work better with the audiences. If that's so - just do your thing - should've just changed the names instead of "mining the IP" if he didn't liked the book's message that much. The book is about survival and it gets quite grim getting its point across - so naturally instead of that we get a bunch of namechecking and some Broadway setpieces. It just makes "sense:. It is very hard to take any of the Disney movies seriously because they are quite bad at adapting their source material and more often than not they convey the opposite of what the source material was.
As for H-B - their fighting chance was with embracing New Hollywood and providing a total alternative to Disney. They showed they could do that with Yogi Bear and Flintstones - these movies are weird and inventive. Jetsons had their issues but they also had one thing that could keep them rolling - a setting and given the sea change by the mid 70s and the postmodern return of film serials (spearheaded by Star Wars and later Indiana Jones) - they could've morphed even more into proto-Futurama kind of sci-fi (or go full Lost in Space for the hell of it).
Well, I know Kipling, I've read those stories, and I've a bit of Indian cultural context under my belt. I do my best to respect all that, but also give myself the latitude to appreciate creative riffs from different angles.
Fact is, I adore Disney's The Jungle Book for a great many reasons, and from a great many angles. It's clear that we simply can't talk "Disney" in an even-handed, facts & reality-based way. Oh, well. Welcome to the human species, amirite?
Mildly so. And those two certainly weren't cash cows by any stretch. The reality is that H-B took a dip in the filmic pond, found that it didn't work all that well, and retreated to their strengths, i.e. TV.
Dude, you're lost in personal fantasy, at this point. The Jetsons barely had enough creativity going to limp over the season one finish line. I mean, you wanna know why it ended after a single reasons...? It was a cute space-age concept, but a nothing-burger in terms of an engine under the hood.
not everyone's a fan of Disney treatment and since i didn't grew up with these movies i never had any sentiment for them. but I had to analyze much of their classic output for the literary analysis classes back at university and looking at those movies from that perspective nurtures a severe distaste for Walt-era Disney. They figured out how to do it right by the late 80s though - the Sherlock Holmes one is legit one of the best feature film adaptations of the character. Jungle Book isn't the worst offender (compared to Pinocchio, Peter Pan or Alice its treatment is bordering on harmless) - my dislike towards it is based on the fact that the original Bill Peet-led iteration of the project was actually an adaptation of the book and it was rejected in favor of greatly streamlined end product.
as for H-B stuff - none of it rooted in reality because the reality was that none of it was possible because the whole american animated feature market was shaped by Disney - so yeah - none of my comments are realistic and that's the point - there was nothing to be done until Disney faltered in the 70s into the 80s.
That's all well and good, but from an analysis standpoint, if you can't appreciate the many things Walt-era Disney accomplished alongside your slew of critiques, then I have no interest in talking about such with you. On top of that, calling my favorite animated film "trash" is personally offensive.
You say that, and yet those two H-B movies did come out, alongside others I've seen that spanned some decades, like Gulliver's Travels, 1001 Arabian Nights, Yellow Submarine, Fritz the Cat, LotR, Heavy Metal, Fire & Ice, American Pop, The Secret of NIMH, Little Nemo, and I'm sure plenty of others I'm now forgetting.
So I take your point that Disney dominated the market for a time, and I take your point that they may have used capitalistic, underhanded methods to achieve such, and I take your point that it could be financially risky for studios to try producing their own animated films. But you can't tell me that it was outright impossible.
Look... you can have the last reply on these subjects if you like, but I'm withdrawing myself from these particular convos. Also, I would appreciate it if you don't attempt to deliberately steer other convos we might have back to these same topics. Thanks, and bye for now.
Moebius also did The Fifth Element which is basically Valerian meets Incal (and quite glorious at that). My fave Moebius film work is the Nemo Adventure. It goes harder than it should.
You really like that phrase, don't you? 😁
i guess so. gotta find another one