Emru Townsend of fps magazine has some perceptive thoughts on the challenges facing Disney and Pixar, such as, what will Disney do now that it owns two fully-staffed feature animation studios that essentially do the same thing. Emru writes:
[T]he crux of any merger or acquisition is how the new company deals with having two departments that do the same thing. This situation can be handled in one of three ways: closing one department (massive layoffs, with some reassignments); merging the two (some layoffs, one much bigger department); or having two parallel departments. All of these options can lead to culture clashes and resentment between departments without some truly masterful diplomacy.In an ideal world, we'd see some combination of the second and third options: a vast animation talent pool that gets divided up into mostly autonomous sections depending on the projects currently in production—much like the Disney and Warner studios of old. Maybe we will see that in the future, but right now they're talking about two separate studios, separated by the physical distance between Glendale and Emeryville.