(3 of 5)
You needn't cry for Eisner. Hunchback, his personal favorite as a passionate work of cartoon artistry, added $500 million more to Disney's bottom line. But you are free to wonder whether studios without the mouse-ears logo can count on customers that even Disney is losing.
DreamWorks is too committed to wonder, too busy to worry. Next November the company will release The Prince of Egypt, the Moses musical that DreamWorks insiders have drolly tagged The Zion King. To build early support for his chancy project, which has no merchandising tie-ins, Katzenberg has shown clips to religious leaders, from eminent rabbis to rabid Evangelicals like Jerry Falwell and Donald Wildmon. The real test, though, is to make The Prince of Egypt not like Sunday school but powerful and fun. "If you're a disbeliever," says a crew member, "you can see it as a fairy tale." DreamWorks then moves from the mountain to the anthill for a computerized comedy, Antz, with the voices of many Hollywood familiars (Woody, Meryl, Sharon, Sly).
Warner, which saw the part-animated Michael Jordan jape Space Jam earn $350 million in world theatrical release and merchandising, is preparing a fully animated feature, The Quest for Camelot, an Arthurian romance about a girl's search for Excalibur. The film, with songs by hitmakers David Foster and Carole Bayer Sager (at home she is Mrs. Robert Daly), has had a troubled history: it lost its director and two lead animators, and its release was bumped from this holiday season to next May. The Warner team's next project: Iron Giant, from Ted Hughes' novel about a boy's friendship with a mysterious metal machine.
Since 1990, Warner Bros. and Spielberg's Amblin have collaborated on the small-screen Tiny Toon Adventures. Ah, TV, where the real money is, and where Paramount went for its 1996 hit, Beavis and Butt-head Do America, which grossed (heh heh, he said "grossed") a robust $63 million. (Next up for Paramount: a Rugrats feature.) "A movie can't compare financially with a successful series like The Simpsons on TV," says Fox's Mechanic. Says Peter Chernin, president of Fox's parent News Corp.: "We should have done a Simpsons movie five years ago." Simpsons creator Matt Groening and his colleagues toyed with expanding a 1993 episode, Kamp Krusty, before deciding no. "But," notes Chernin, "we also wanted to start a traditional cel animation division and thought Anastasia was a compelling property to begin with."
Based on a true-life fable that was the source for Fox's 1956 film with Ingrid Bergman and Yul Brynner, the new Anastasia leaps from factoid to fantasy and turns pre-Leninist Russia into a fairy-tale realm. "We lived in an enchanted world," says the Czar's mother Marie (voiced by Angela Lansbury) of a land that festered with hot heads and empty bellies. The film then pins the whole Revolution on the monk Rasputin (Christopher Lloyd). Furious at being ejected from the Czar's court, he vows revenge, unleashes the forces of revolt, dies and returns, madder than ever, to chase down Anya. "We invented a lot of Rasputin's story," acknowledges Mechanic. "But parents and teachers who have seen the film feel this is a piece of history kids don't really know about, and it gets them interested in it." Right--so they can learn that it's all lies.