Bye Bye Blue Sky

Well, the axe finally dropped.  Blue Sky Studios, home of the "Ice Age" movies, is being shuttered by Disney in the wake of their acquisition of Fox.  In addition to all the talented artists being put out of work, the move will leave their last production, an adaptation of the webcomic "Nimona," unfinished despite being 75% complete.  With WDAS and PIXAR to worry about, and the pandemic making the economics difficult, it didn't make sense for Disney to be running a third major animation studio.  It's still disappointing that this is the way Blue Sky is going out.

Most of us know something about the origins of PIXAR, which has already become subject to a certain amount of mythmaking, but Blue Sky goes just about as far back, starting with founder Chris Wedge creating early CGI animation in the 80s for the original "TRON" before founding Blue Sky in 1987.  They did a lot of commercials and special effects work in the '90s and produced the Oscar winning short "Bunny" in 1998, before moving into features, starting with "Ice Age" in 2002.  Over the next eighteen years, their output had a lot of ups and downs.  There were five "Ice Age" movies by 2016, as well as more ambitious projects like "Robots," "Epic," and "The Peanuts Movie," which was easily the most critically acclaimed feature they ever did.   Most of their films performed well, with the third and fourth "Ice Age" movies both banking over $800 million.  For a while, in the early 2000s, they were the third major player in American animation next to PIXAR and Dreamworks/PDI.

However, Blue Sky always felt like a second stringer, all the way to the end.  Their budgets tended to be smaller, and frankly I always associated Blue Sky with a very stripped down, bare bones look.  Their character designs tended a little more toward the grotesque, and it's really only been in the last few films that their visuals have noticeably upgraded to keep up with their competitors.  Likewise, while I enjoyed many of their films, I always thought of Blue Sky as a very dependable producer of much smaller scale, unfussy kids' fodder.  Clearly that wasn't all they were capable of or wanted to do, but it never felt like Blue Sky ever really broke out in a meaningful way.  "Peanuts" and the recent action comedy "Spies in Disguise" were the best films I ever saw from them, and it still felt like they were working up to making a really great film somewhere down the line.

Maybe that film would have been "Nimona," which gets more interesting the more I read about it.  This would have featured one of the first animated films with queer leads, something that Disney and Dreamworks might not be in a position to try, but a smaller outfit like Blue Sky could.  This is yet another example of the kind of opportunities being lost as the entertainment industry consolidates.  I wonder if it was ever a possibility for Blue Sky to strike out on its own, and maybe make a distribution deal with a streamer like Netflix or Apple, the way that SPA Studios ("Klaus") and Cartoon Saloon ("Wolfwalkers") did.  Other projects Blue Sky had in development include adaptations of the "Anubis Tapestry" book series and the "Mutts" comic strip.

Of course, Blue Sky's existing library will live on, helping to fill out the Disney+ back catalogue. We'll still be able to visit Scrat any time we want to get nostalgic, and pretend that he's still out there, somewhere, chasing that damn acorn into the sunset.  

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