Bancroft is a character animator who directed once for Disney and once outside it. Mulan (1998), made with Barry Cook, is the film that matters: leaner and more serious than the studio's habit, and better in its army than in its jokes.
Fi1m perspective
Watch the soldiers in Mulan (1998). They train, they march, and then they meet the enemy in a snowfield, and for a few minutes a Disney cartoon is a war film. That is the part Tony Bancroft and his co-director Barry Cook get most right. The enemy kills people, the army is an army, and the heroine's trouble is a promise to her father rather than a prince. It runs 88 minutes and feels shorter, and it is leaner and more serious than the studio's habit.
Bancroft was an animator before he was a director and, on the evidence, an animator after. He came out of CalArts into Disney in 1989 and worked on The Rescuers Down Under, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin; by The Lion King (1994) he was supervising animator on Pumbaa, which is to say in charge of the warthog. Mulan was run the way a character man would run it. He and Cook split the film by department, Bancroft taking the animation, clean-up and CG, Cook the layout, backgrounds and effects. As he put it: "Barry came from the effects department and used to be a painter while I came from clean-up and then animation. So, we split off the film based on departments and our skill sets." Afterwards he went back to a character, Kronk in The Emperor's New Groove (2000), and then left.
The look is the film's other achievement. Bancroft and Cook set out to blend Disney drawing with Tang Dynasty art, watercolour and woodblock and calligraphy, and it gives the picture a spareness the studio's other films of the decade lack. The daughter and her father moved us more than we expected of a Disney film of the period, and the reason is the drawing rather than the script: the characters were Bancroft's department, and the characters are where the film is good. Then Eddie Murphy's dragon arrives and the film pays a tax on it. The songs are ordinary. The comic relief belongs to the studio, not the story, and every time the film cuts to it you can feel the better picture underneath waiting to get on.
After Disney the work thinned. He founded Toonacious Family Entertainment in 2002, supervised the animation on Stuart Little 2 the same year, and did not direct again until Animal Crackers, a CG feature made with Scott Christian Sava from a graphic novel, finished in 2017 and released in 2020. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it here. He now runs animation programmes and talks about the craft on a podcast with his twin brother Tom, who animated alongside him at Disney. That is a decent career for an animator, and the one time it produced a film we would send you to was 1998. See Mulan for the snow, and forgive it the dragon.
Biography
Tony Bancroft is an American animator and film director. He co-directed the 1998 Walt Disney animated feature Mulan with Barry Cook.
Bancroft trained at the California Institute of the Arts and worked at Walt Disney Feature Animation on several films of the 1990s, including as supervising animator for Pumbaa on The Lion King (1994). He later served as animation supervisor on Stuart Little 2 (2002) at Sony Pictures Imageworks and founded Toonacious Family Entertainment. He directed the 2018 animated film Animal Crackers.
Bancroft received an Annie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Directing for Mulan. He has a twin brother, Tom Bancroft, who is also an animator.
