2-Disc Special Edition
I haven’t found time in my busy schedule to watch anything like a proper movie this week, even though Hellboy 2 has now made it into cinemas. Hurrah! Instead, this post’s title should be sufficient to warm the heart of any longtime DVD purchaser, and was prompted by my recent acquisition of the Walt Disney film, Lilo & Stitch: 2-Disc Special Edition, the edition that almost never was. This week’s title in bold is the title of the documentary on Disc 2.
The Story Room: The Making of Lilo & Stitch (2005)
While it might seem in many ways a minor entry in the Walt Disney canon, recent developments in the world of animation have assigned it another place of importance: it was the Disney studio’s last major 2D animated hit when in 2002 it outperformed the much more expensive (and by no means terrible) Treasure Planet (2002) at the American box office. And this 2nd disc of the DVD release includes an indepth 2 hour exploration (which can be expanded to about 3 1/2 hours with a bunch of supplemental featurettes) of how two first-time writer/directors (though both Disney veterans in other areas), Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, pulled it off.
This release followed in the tradition of the exemplary 2-Disc Special Edition release of Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), where, regardless of the qualities or not of the finished product, a comprehensive 2 hour documentary (amongst many other features) told in impressive detail how and why it had been brought to the screen.
It was at this stage that the Disney villain of the piece, then-CEO Michael Eisner, enters the picture. Propped up by a bunch of unreliable marketing reports (”parents didn’t like changing the discs” - so don’t buy the SE, buy the standard edition, you dopes - duh!), irritating corporate bottom-line-ism and his own personal prejudices, Eisner decided that 2-Disc Special Editions which paid respect to a large number of the artists who created these films were to be shitcanned and replaced with bog-standard, feature-light DVDs packed not very full with crappy DVD games for kids and Gareth Gates music videos for no one.
This wouldn’t have been much of a problem except that at this time Disney had embarked on a series of dedicated 2-Disc Platinum Edition releases packed to the gills with the kind of indepth documentary materials, commentary tracks, DTS soundtracks and the like, the majority of which was clearly aimed at adult DVD collectors like me, and not the kids that Eisner thought should be the Special Edition’s intended market; this is precisely the kind of arrogant, blundering wrongheadedness that was ultimately to cost Eisner his job.
The immediate effect of this was that The Lion King (1994) still came out as a 2-Disc Special Edition, but was curiously denuded of a lot of the kind of exemplary background material that had characterised previous releases in the series. Instead there were any number of plugs for The Lion King Broadway musical and featurettes about how great Walt Disney World was, and wasn’t it about time you paid a visit? And The Lion King had been Disney’s biggest recent hit! It deserved much better treatment than this.
One of the other casualties was the 2-Disc Special Edition of Lilo & Stitch, which at the time of writing has still not been released in the US. Eisner has now gone, Pixar has taken over Disney, and it is yet to be seen whether or not the much ballyhooed commitment the Pixar team have publicly made that they would support a 2D animated feature if they felt it was the right way to tell the story will come true. Let’s hope so.
Lilo & Stitch was the little film that could, it was the last film of the much derided Thomas Schumacher era (appointed Animation CEO in the wake of Jeffrey Katzenberg’s controversial departure, though disappointing returns from Treasure Planet led to Schumacher’s departure as well) to connect with a popular audience, proof that a good story, well-developed characters and great jokes could still win through in 2D at a time when the domination of 3D animation had started to become one obvious future. But, for just one example, as the films of Hayao Miyazaki showed, especially Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), not the only one.