There was a great wart-n-all documentary I was watching about the Disney renaisance. It describes Michael Eisner's (Who had previously been forcing Disney away from it's core-animation brand and into all these other areas and sh*tting all over the animation department) revelation that if they made new high quality animated films it would give them new intellectual properties to exploit. The perfect marriage of commerce and art. So Eisner got back behind the animators (And became there biggest champion ironically) and truckloads of Oscars followed by huge profits ensued.

Disney now need to remember this lesson with Star Wars. For example, there are only so many Vader mugs that they can sell in a year. Sticking a resurected Vader in the new films won't really increase the sales of those mugs. But if they can create a whole new cast of characters that we love as much as all the OT crew then they'll have just doubled the size of their profits.

Sadly under the new management I feel that Disney has forgotten Esiner's philosophy, with them now churning out animated sequel after animated sequel instead of investing time and money in new ideas. The last new hand animated film being the brilliant 'The Princess and the Frog' from 4 years ago... with no new traditionally animated films planed. Sigh.