Another poorly researched/sourced article on feature animation. This one declaims the immediate decline of Disney's animated oeuvre upon lyricist-visionary Howard Ashman's death in 1991. Except several unrelated things happened subsequently. Firstly, of course, The Lion King became the most successful traditionally animated feature of all time in 1994. Ashman never had any involvement with the finished product that I know of. That same year, Disney COO Frank Wells, Michael Eisner's "right hand" and "voice of reason," departed by way of a helicopter crash, famously leading to Jeffrey Katzenberg's abortive power-grab and own departure to form DreamWorks with David Geffen and Steven Spielberg … where he promptly set up a rival feature animation division with a lot of poached Disney talent. (There was actually a brief period during the 1990s when traditional animators were in hot demand at almost every major studio, as me-too animation divisions were established all over town, with expensive, terrible results).
So it was a divisive era, talent got stretched thin … and Pixar officially arrived in 1995. The primary creative/commercial fallout from Ashman's death was probably felt by his musical partner Alan Menken, whose post-Ashman collaborations with a variety of lyricists resulted in decent enough work on movies that nevertheless underperformed. (It's worth noting that the newly Pixar-infused Disney animation division recently brought Menken
back into the fold.)
None of this in any way detracts from Ashman's indelible contribution to movies that he worked on, or even his hypothetical contribution to movies he probably would have worked on if he hadn't died, nor his unofficial role as a guiding presence at the studio, but it doesn't suggest direct causality … unless your operational definition of chaos theory is still derived from Jurassic Park.
Yeah, I used to follow animation. Maybe I sort of still do. Nerd.