Two of Disney's artists tell Steve Pratt about the shock end of the time honoured tradition of hand-drawn animation, and why they decided to make a film about it.

SHAREHOLDERS arriving for a Walt Disney company convention in Minneapolis soon will be given a special film show. Director Dan Lund and producer Tony West are planning special screenings of their film Dream On Silly Dreamer, which had its world premiere at Teesside's Animex festival this week.

The documentary with animation reveals how Disney artists were told they were being replaced by computers and that traditional 2D hand-drawn animation was ending.

"The idea is not to dump on Disney but if shareholders watch the movie they'll go into the meeting with something to offset all the graphs and charts they'll see, something with human emotion," explains Lund, who lost his job in the cull of animators. "It might resonate in their head and make them ask, 'why aren't we doing this any more?' I really care where the company is going."

He and West were in the North-East for the premiere at the week-long international festival of animation.

Lund picked up his camera within minutes of what became known of the Tom Meeting in 2002, when the then-president of Disney's feature animation division, Thomas Schumacher, told more than 200 artists in Los Angeles that they were being replaced by computers.

"The reason I began filming artists was that I'd heard about Steven Spielberg doing interviews with all the remaining Holocaust survivors for a project. I thought that in a couple of months we were all going to be thrown to the wind, so why didn't I go round and interview the animators?," he says.

After the LA closure, Lund moved to Disney's Florida animation team - only to see that closed down too several months later. While there, he and West formulated Dream On Silly Dreamer, which relates the tale like a storybook come to life.

"I had my whole world ripped out from under me twice," says Lund. "I had most of the ideas for the movie before I went to Orlando. While other people were out looking for jobs, I was at home doing the animation for the movie.

"I didn't want to make something nasty, pointing the finger at management or Disney. What surprises people who've seen the film is how much I hold us responsible for believing our own hype."

Lund spent 15 years at Disney, from 1989. The first film he animated was Beauty And The Beast, which signalled a revival in the fortunes of animated feature films. Animators could, seemingly, do no wrong and believed their own publicity, he feels.

"We lost the simple pleasures. We moaned because bonuses were lower than they'd been. We became like rock stars in a way. Most of the generation I deal with in the film were people who started around the time of The Little Mermaid, which no-one knew was going to be such a success.

"It was wonderful being part of something, discovering things for the first time. Beauty And The Beast was the first animated feature to be nominated for an Oscar. There were midnight screenings, which hadn't happened for a cartoon before, and I remember driving to theatres to see the queues," says West.

The only hand-drawn work now is done by artists developing characters. The remainder is computer-generated. "I always thought Disney was a big enough and rich enough company to indulge themselves in tradition. People thought if anyone could afford to hold on their roots, they would," he says.

"There are a lot of mums and dads out there who like the idea that there's a magic factory continuing to make entertainment for their kids, like it was made for them and their parents."

West adds: "We were witness to the death of an art form. I didn't think it would happen because of the tradition of the studio. I know it's cheesy to say but it started with a mouse and for a long time animation drove the company."

The pair are currently seeking a distribution deal for the film, which will be screened at the Florida Film Festival in April.

Although the documentary is one-sided, being told from the animators' point of view, he hopes Disney management will regard it as a good film first and foremost. "I'd go back to Disney tomorrow if they called me," says Lund.