Pixar/Disney
Submitted by jim on Tue, 01/24/2006 - 02:00
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Disney is swallowing Pixar. Perhaps the mouse'll choke on 'em. It does sound like Steve Jobs will have a fair amount of power though, so maybe this isn't as bad as it sounds. It's not official yet, I'm watching this space.
I must say, the consumption of Pixar by Disney made me glum. I hesitated to think of the implications simply because I was afraid. Reading this (incredibly illuminating) discussion about the whole matter (with evolutionary philosophy thrown in) has simultaneously depressed, frightened, and fascinated me.
Disney must be stopped. After teas and cakes and ices, [will anyone] have the strength to push the moment to its crisis?
Why is everyone so depressed? We must realize that Disney was once the creator of the best animation out there. Who knows? All this might be for the best... commercialization doesn't mean evil. Hell, if it weren't for money, there won't be ANY sort of competition, let alone natural selection.
By practise of the past, it seems we have all become habituated not to appreciate the importance of blending commercial with the artistic.
I'm sure you didn't mean to say money is necessary for natural selection.
The artisitic, like *everything* that can possibly be put on the market, is grist to commerce's mill. Nothing is sacred to commerce but profit. Not your freedom, not your dignity, not your most cherished possessions, not anything money can conceivably be made from.
I actually think that this will be bad for everyone. All of us. All of them.
The soulless rodent crushes everything it touches. I'm not saying that it was anywhere near as good as Pixar but think about what happened to Miramax... and shudder.
Apple has been great at packaging/repackaging media and media delivery systems... not so good with the technology. The ability to be ahead or to lead the crest of the wave is due to the conceptual and practical dexterity that comes with Steve Jobs' vision of "Visionary." Becoming a billionaire on Disney's dime (and a whole lot of 'em at that) will not help Apple to remain crisp and nimble.
Lots of people at Pixar truly despise Disney. I do mean "lots" and "despise"... and "truly." Especially as the animation technology democratizes the brain drain at Pixar should become a flood. How many of their key people left or got booted from Disney? After a quick show of hands I estimate that it is around "all." Give or take a dozen. How long before we start to hear the term "Dixar"?.. or the new Apple iQuit.
Having Disney distribute Pixar content and having Apple (i- Tunes/Pods) distribute everyone's musical content seemed to work okay. Now they have put themselves in the same situation that PepsiCo was in when they owned Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and The Restaurant Chain Formerly Known As Kentucky Fried Chicken. The Coca-Cola Company was able to get a huuuge percentage of the restaurant fountain business. Coke reps made the point to restaurants, family-owned and franchises alike, that they shouldn't subsidize their competition by serving Pepsi and Pepsi-related products. The other handful of media companies, the content generators, will have a similar disincentive to provide material for video iPods and whatever delivery system Steve Jobs might think of in the future.
The major music labels are already trying to get their rights (hah!) back to start their own distribution services. Competing formats will follow right behind and then let the Betamaxing begin. The stunning success of the cd came about because an industry decided upon a format. That worked great.
Since then we've gotten DVD regions, followed by Blu-ray Disc, HD DVD and Holographic Versatile Disc. What comes next is going to be a bloodbath the likes of which haven't been seen since television (a new way to deliver content) permanently marginalized radio and movies. In doing so it caused a great upheaval in the content and the structure of that content delivered over the airwaves and up on the screen.
The media content generated by Disney (ABC, ESPN et. al.) will undergo serious iPodification. Just as Apple smashed up the concept of an album (cd, whatever) into millions of discrete individual songs now movies and television, plots and characters will be atomized. This will all be done in the name of "cross-platform promotion and performance" or some other type of buzzwordiness.
Be prepared to be able to download 12 minute chunks of Desperate Housewives to your iPod even as the Desperate Housewives plots become (even more) segmented into four 12 minute chunks... plus a bonus scene on Good Morning America. Lost will now be available in HD and iPod versions... all the better to stuff the DVD with.
You can get ready for theme park promos on your iPod, ESPN sports features available only through Apple, the Pixar equivalent of The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show, incestuous product placement all around as well as bigger names/stars, bigger budgets, bigger prices all in an effort to attract eyeballs.
Expect less of less. Less independence, less independents, less subtlety, less off-beat performers and performances, less unique vision(s)... less good.
Happy now? Of course I could be wrong and it wouldn't be the first time. It would be the fourth...
When human intelligence, human know-how, began to develop it was at first selected-for in the natural environment. But now it has developed so much that it is actually a way of by-passing natural selection. Thanks to the cumulative nature of know-how there are now many more people alive than could survive in the natural environment.
Something analogous is now happening at the culturul level. At first, advances in 'cultural know-how' were selected-for by the cultural agent-of-selection, the audience. But now advances in cultbiztech - cultural business and technology - are beginning to reach the stage where it will by-pass its natural agent-of-selection and will permit the survival of many cultural items that could not survive 'naturally'. Another factor, of course, is the relatively subtle but equally deliberate re-moulding of the audience to suit the cultbiztech's requirements - just as, analogously, humans have re-moulded the physical environment to suit their requirements.
Where the analogy breaks down is in the consideration that the biological environment doesn't need human beings as such, but 'the audience' does need its culture, a culture that will become increasingly out of focus as its audience's selectivity is by-passed.
Well, to just point out one wonder-out-loud, can all the tech blitzkreig really wipe out human intelligence and force all into accepting whatever is sold to us?
Who said anything about wiping out human intelligence? On the contrary, human intelligence is necessary both for the biztech and the audience. What's beginning to happen is that (as McLuhan foresaw) the medium is becoming at least as important as the message. The audience, intelligence intact, cannot but follow where biztech leads on penalty of being behind the technological times and so also behind the cultural times. Thus biztech can re-shape the audience until it is an agent of cultural selection in appearance only, the new power of selection being in the hands of biztech.
I think I know what you're saying (sorta.) I think I agree (sorta.) I have no idea what tracks your train of thought is riding.
...but I do think that intelligence was selected for in the "natural environment" (whatever that is.) But I don't think that intelligence can bypass natural selection, I don't think anything can bypass natural selection. Intelligence can just shift the criteria.
I do like the recognition of "the cumulative nature of know-how." That's the thing that allows us to have a keg party of whup-ass over other species. If you read (or watch) Jared Diamond it is also the thing that has allowed one culture to have an extra six-pack of whup-ass over one another.
I actually think that culture is what has sparked human's rise to the top of the food chain. Most species compete one against the other. We compete against each other. Evolutionary bootstrapping.
The way that I imagine the "cultbiztech" developing is analagous to agriculture. Hunting-gathering is a lot more "natural" than the family farm is a lot more "natural" than big business agriculture. Walking around collecting fruits, nuts and tubers while waiting for the guys to stumble across the occasional pig is a much more relaxing, healthy and carefree existence than the life of the traditional farmer which is still better than having to put in a 60 hour week at the office. But once one group of people start farming, settling in villages, building cities and canceling Arrested Development then everybody has to follow suit. Morons.
Left to their own devices perhaps everyone would decide to grow their own tomatoes, snare their own rabbits and watch independent films around the fire. But that's not the world that we live in. It takes a lot of effort to buy whole-grain bread instead of Wonder Bread.
...let alone raise the wheat, grind it, separate the wheat from the chaff, read Roger Ebert, knead the dough, bake the bread from scratch and eat it. I'm not even going to mention kneading, scratching and feeding Roger Ebert. So we all need food, we all need culture, it's just that we are now in an environment that provides us all of the junk food and trash culture that we need.
To measure success by the most crude and crass of metrics you can say that chickens and three-camera sit-coms are two of the greatest things since sliced (Wonder) bread. They are mass produced, everyone loves them and they are filled with huge chemically enhanced breasts... and very little dark meat (stop it!)
The selectivity of the environment and the culture in which we live isn't any less selective... it just makes its selection based on different, shifted criteria.
And yet again, I'm rolling on the floor.
Ever since Moonwatcher picked up that thigh bone and got the bright idea of using it as a weapon, people have been underestimating the radical potential of science and technology. Did you learn nothing from Clarbrick's one-frame transition from thigh bone to.....whatever the hell kind of space-vehicle it was? I think in particular of those 19th century religious scientists, devout in both, who had no idea what sort of egg they were helping to incubate, could not begin to imagine what possibilities would hatch from it. Know-how (the cumulative nature of which) promises to allow us to not only further change our surroundings to suit ourselves as we are but also to design our genetic / somatic character to suit ourselves to radically different environments. And please note that the question of whether we can do a thing is significantly distinct from the question of whether we ought to do it. To point out the always radical potential of science and technology is not to sing their praises without qualification. When the ancient sophist said "Man is the measure of all things" he was speaking of man's propositional knowlege (knowlege-that), but his pronouncement might equally well apply to man's technology (know-how). And it wasn't until a couple of millennia later that anyone thought to question the unspoken (perhaps even unconceived) pre-supposition that man (with his God-given free will) is also the *moral* measure of all things, including all things technological, the question of whether we ought to continue to follow our noses along the technological path of least moral resistance.
Odysseus, I know you have a right to complain that I failed to address all the points raised in your last comment. I have a tendancy to depart from the point at a tangent and it sometimes gets the better of me. It's a way I have of thinking out loud, but I'm sure it must be puzzling those who suppose me to be conversing with them. In my defence: I am upset today for various reasons, some personal, but one of them is (believe it or don't) a piece of environmental news that disgusts and disappoints me greatly.
Jim must be wondering what all this has to do with Disney/Pixar :-)
Pardon my indifference, but that bit of environmental news doesn't affect my diet of synethic stimulants in the least. That kind of thing only affects countries stuck in the 20th century who still eat "food."
A philosopher is someone who, at least occasionally, finds the courage to take life seriously. It doesn't mean he can't have a sense of humour, but it does mean that he tries to transcend his own squirming self and find his senses of both history and the self-less future and think about past and future generations, past and future worlds.
I wasn't complaining in the least. Not at all. I like your pungent tangents. I was simply unsure how (or if) this thread was fraying.
I think that "points raised" gives me a little too much credit. In any case, Thinking out loud is better than the alternative out loud.
Let's hope Disney are wise enough not to limit Pixar's artistic freedom in any way. Trouble is, Disney was founded on Walt's artistic authority, so the artistic freedom of 'underlings' may not be a concept they can fully embrace.
Bertie, you got illusions. :D
No doubt, but would you care to be more specific?
Btw, how's your Hitchcock Movie Titles story coming along?
Ah yes, it is on my reminder sheet. I hope I'll have plenty of time during the next days. Dead line is February 16, right?
Hmm, but where the hell have I put this reminder sheet???
You should have written a reminder on the reminder sheet telling you to put the reminder sheet in an easy-to-find location.
Hey, I just found my reminder sheet. Unfortunately I noticed that I had already forgotten about something. Now I've pinned it next to my PC screen.
Yup - 16 Feb. - and your reminder sheet is in that special place where you keep things you often lose - now....where *is* that?
Woody Allen: "Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought-- particularly for people who can never remember where they have left things."
Oh, and speaking as one of (just one of) Listology's resident pedants, you have confused 'illusion' with 'delusion'. An illusion is a mistaken perception (a mistake in interpreting the information of the senses). A delusion, which is what you meant, is a mistaken belief or attitude.
Frankly I have never even heard the word "delusion". In my native language, we don't make no difference between the two. But for "hairsplitter" we say "Ierbsenzieler". :-)
P.S.: I'm just waiting for you to make me aware of the grammar mistake here above. :)
I often flatter myself that I'm a philosopher, and a big part of what philosophers do is split hairs - or, to use the terminology, they draw significant distinctions between concepts. And they consider it particularly important to disinguish between similar concepts that are easily or carelessly confused. It's part of what's called philosophical analysis, and it's actually an enrichment of language. If you carelessly confuse two different concepts then you are impoverishing both your language and your stock of concepts. To some people conceptual poverty don't make no difference, but I'm sure you aren't one of them :-)
Like Kant and his "transcendent" and "transcendental" metaphysics?! :)
Wow, a Disney-Pixar-topic moved over to Kant...
Quick! Switch to Immanuel override!
LOL! You'll notice that poor Jim has given up on this hijacked page and started a whole new Disney/Pixar page above. Apologies Jim, and I promise I won't visit your new page :-)
You already have. :)
LOL! Tricky move, Jim. Well, anyhoo, I'm about petered-out here (hmm, wonder where that expression originated?).
It may not be what you think. A little digging reveals that it's a salty phrase miners used to refer to their shafts.
Now *there's* an idea for a list!
Don't worry, Jim, just kidding.
For Disney studios:
Money
> artistic freedom.
Sometimes both are possible, sometimes not. That's at least how I imagine it.
So let me re-phrase: Let's hope Disney are wise enough to know that if they limit Pixar's artistic freedom that is likely to be counter-productive MONEY-wise.
This will give Apple an advantage in the "iTunes for Movies" corporate swarm, as Jobs will have lots of clout for distributing Disney/Pixar movies that way.