Cartoon Brew is reporting that John Lasseter has fired Glen Keane (son of Family Circus's Bil, and a long-time Disney animator) from his job as co-director of Rapunzel, and the other co-director has "ankled" the project as well (as the trade papers say). Ain't It Cool News, in response, passes along a memo from Disney which claims that Keane has stepped aside for "health" reasons.

Both sources report that Disney has replaced the original directors with Nathan Greno and Byron Howard -- who, as coincidence would have it, previously replaced Chris Sanders as the directors of Bolt. (Sanders directed Lilo & Stitch, easily Disney's biggest non-Pixar animated hit of the '00s -- and on a smaller budget than the others.)

Between this and the meddling Lasseter did on Meet the Robinsons, one wonders what is going on at Disney these days. Am I allowed to say that I also didn't care for his commentary on the new Sleeping Beauty DVD all that much?

You've got me curious -- what did he say in the commentary?

Gina wrote:
: You've got me curious -- what did he say in the commentary?

Nothing much more than how awesome everything was. He shares the commentary with Leonard Maltin (an animation historian, among other things) and Andreas Deja (who has been an animator at Disney for years, and who often turns up on Disney bonus features), and I would much rather listen to them than to Lasseter.

One of the very first DVD commentaries I tried listening to was the one for A Bug's Life, and I never finished it. I just got tired of Lasseter saying how awesome everything was. It was at that moment that I realized I much preferred commentaries for OLDER movies, commentaries where there had been time to develop some sort of "perspective" on the movie in question. (The Norman Jewison - Topol commentary on Fiddler on the Roof, recorded 30 years after the movie was made, is a case in point.) Commentaries on NEWER movies tend to be recorded while the filmmakers are still in rah-rah-for-us, publicity-junket mode. (And if you're Sam Raimi, you spend half the commentary rattling off the names of all the crew members you want to thank, which is boring and useless, because the movie already HAS a closing credits sequence.)

But now I wonder if it's just the fact that A Bug's Life was so new that turned me off to Lasseter's commentary. Because his commentary on Sleeping Beauty -- a movie made 49 years ago (even if the DVD packaging calls it a "50th anniversary" edition) -- kind of gets on my nerves in the same way.

BTW, the DVD comes with an ad for the "70th anniversary" edition of Pinocchio. It comes out in 2009. The original movie came out in 1940. Hmmm.