Dream On Silly Dreamer


		Dream On Silly Dreamer In chronicling the last days of Walt Disney Feature Animation’s traditional studio, director Dan Lund created a time capsule of the Disney studio. Lund and producer Tony West tell how the documentary came to be. By Jake Friedman *Originally published in the June, 2006 issue of FPS Magazine.
		In 2002, Walt Disney Feature Animation shut down its 2D Burbank studio in favor of focusing solely on a new CG department. This was the studio that Walt himself built and which produced classics since 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Soon after the studio shut down, the studios in Orlando, Paris, Tokyo and most recently Sydney all followed suit, laying off more than 1300 people. Funny thing is, there was very little commotion in the press about the layoffs, an issue that would surely have left distaste in the mouths of the public who had grown up with the classic films. Then the animators noticed that the few blurbs to reach the papers were describing the halt in traditional animation as only temporary. The Disney PR department appeared to be releasing false information, and Disney’s era of drawn animation was deliberately being fizzled out quietly.	Picture courtesy of Dan Lund Films
		Enter Dan Lund. Lund started at Disney in 1989 as a PA and worked his way up as an effects animator through films like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King. Back at that time, there was still an air of the original magic at the studio with a common heartfelt investment in the projects that were being produced. It was to recall these glory days that Lund set out to document the stories of the recently laid-off Disney animators. Almost four years later, his videotaped interviews became the documentary Dream On Silly Dreamer, produced by fellow Disney animator Tony West, and focusing on the closing of Disney 2D feature animation.
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