VIDEO INVADES
DISNEYLAND Disney hallmark. Gone with Tron are the days of fairy dust, Jiminy Cricket and lisping ducks. Computer animation from Disney might seem to go he sweeping changes now underway at the against the handcrafted sensibility of the studio, yet Disney studios represent a radical departure Disney’s moral and political conservatism always from the conservative image fostered by Disney disguised a creative liberalism bordering on the revolu for so many years. Due for release in the middle of thistionary. The early Disney animated films broke new year, Tron, with its spectacular effects and state-ofground in color, believability and story development, the-art techniques, is aimed at capturing the imagina and set the standards for everyone else in those early tion of children and adults today as surely as those days. early Disney films did years ago. Disney himself had a basic instinct for American A feature-length combination of animation and live taste and for new tools that would help him provide action, Tron heralds a new age of computer-generated entertainment the public would welcome. In the same film and video graphics. There are new faces and a new spirit, Wilhite is banking $13.5 million on being able to creative spirit at Disney: they belong to 29-year-old combine the Disney tradition of the well-told story with Tom Wilhite and his assistants, a group of young live action and animated characters co-existing in a animators who are about to reshape drastically the computer-generated landscape. tradition of cute hand-animation that has been the He is doing this in collaboration with a few old-school animators and a gaggle of whiz-kids recently out of Cal Arts (California Institute of Art; Valencia), the animation Donald Duck, one of the many popular characters created by Walt and film school set up by Disney. Since graduation Disney, the pioneer of high quality single-frame animation. these new-breed animators have been honing their skills at the Disney studio on the corner of Dopey Drive and Mickey Avenue; and now those skills are to be tested on Tron, a story conceived by Steven Lisberger, visualized and storyboarded by futuristic industrial designer Syd Mead, comic artist Jean “ Moebius” Giraud and high-tech commercial artist Peter Lloyd. Whiz-kid animators, animation choreographers and technobrats include Jerry Reese, Bill Croyer, Rick Heinrichs and Tim Burton — to name a few among hundreds.
John Salkin and Julie Stone
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LICORICE
he action of Tron centres on the premise that computer games house real people in another dimension which is controlled by a single malevolent program. The protagonist, Flynn (Jeff Bridges), who begins as a flesh-and-blood character, is blasted into electronic particles and awakes in a fourth-dimensional world whose overlord is the evil Dillinger (David Warner). The saga is played out in a setting where the life force is electricity, where computer programs are the alter egos of the programmers and where electronic
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