Of course we should, but they need to have a strong story behind them no matter what the medium. Looking back, The Princess and the Frog didn't have much of an identity of its own, being a standard princess tale with standard wisecracking animal sidekicks. The message of how cooking brings people together I really liked, however.
100% agreed. Disney hitched the 2-D animation to a princess film (one made to pad out the ethnicity of their lobotomized merchandise line) and a franchise they destroyed with bad preschool programming. If we look at the last massive success Disney had with 2-D, it was Lilo and Stitch. An off the wall concept with a quirky female lead that didn't need princesses or original songs to get 3 DTV sequels, a TV series, and 2 Japanese animated series. Of course, eh... then they tanked it with 2 even more off the wall concepts. Brother Bear (that in no way deserves the crap it gets, it's far better at Native American legend than Pocahontas ever was), and the way too out there Home on the Range that...well... I still can't decide if I liked it or not. I give them all the credit in the world for trying to emulate Disney's 1950's and 60's Casey Jones (the train guy, not the far superior hockey based vigilante) like cartoons.
What we need is a strong enough script and concept to work as
any animated movie first. Home video/streaming and the oversaturation of
terrible tenth party studios is hurting CGI. And Stop motion films just aren't getting the love they should be.
That said, even though it's mostly because of the brand, let's not forget Spongebob's latest movie did quite well, even though it was part live action and CGI, with the CGI marketed over the rest of the movie. But the 2-D animated bits were amazing, especially in 3-D. If Nick gave a crap about any of its other current shows, I'd love to see them make a movie out of one. Harvey Beaks would look great in a Ghibli-esque way with that high a budget animation. Too bad they've been trying to keep that one down.
It would be great if Don Bluth could pull off one more 2D masterpiece (and at 78, he ain't getting any younger), but the format requires three major expenditures:
1. Time
2. Labor
3. Money
Then finding a strong story, a studio to finance and market your film, dealing with merchandising tie-ins, and hoping to break even. After that, it's a breeze.
Oddly enough, depending on the studio and the size of the project, 2-D animation is actually
cheaper than CGI. Even Stop motion somehow costs less. There's this stigma that CGI is a cheap substitute for something, but like I say, Green Lantern certainly didn't flop because it was cheap to produce. I'm sure some studio would glom onto the idea of a cheaper to produce film at some point. Especially when a heavy hitter like Dreamworks can't shake their recent string of barely past the budget making films they consider flops.
As for Don Bluth, I really would love to see him come back to his glory days of American Tail and Land Before Time One. He had a steady slide in the 90's and very early 00's, mainly because of the emulation of Disney they forced on him in that period. Thumbellina
sucked. And things got worse until when he had Titan AE, which was too much of a money loser to keep things up. There's a Kickstarter to get Don to make the Dragon's Lair movie. Hopefully that pans out.