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Over the past few years Disney has remade a lot of their hand-drawn films with either live-action or [modern] computer animation. Examples that immediately come to mind include: The Jungle Book, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Christopher Robin, Dumbo, and Aladdin.
That being said, does Disney no longer produce hand-drawn cartoon films? Have they completely strayed away from this and now only offer computer animated and live-action films?
In a 2013 interview with the Guardian, chief executive Bob Iger said that none of its animation companies are working in the traditional 2D format, and there are no current plans to do so again.
Speaking at an annual shareholder's meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, on Wednesday, chief executive Bob Iger revealed that none of the studio's animation companies was working on 2D, hand-drawn material for the big screen. While Iger did not rule out returning in the future to the style which made the company famous, the long gestation period for Hollywood animated productions means a gap of several years before any new film might emerge.
"To my knowledge we're not developing a 2D or hand-drawn feature animated film right now," said Iger. "There is a fair amount of activity going on in hand-drawn animation but it's largely for television at this point. We're not necessarily ruling out the possibility [of] a feature but there isn't any in development at the company at the moment."
No, Disney does not produce nor is making any traditional hand drawn animation.
There is probably a good reason for this in Disney's eyes.
Traditional hand animation is a lot of work. It's very time consuming and can't be changed easily late in production like CGI can and is expensive because of that.
To give a demonstration, there is a nice video about Who Framed Roger Rabbit which goes quite into depth about "Live" animation, but just goes to show how much work can go into producing traditional animation.
As I explained in this answer about mermaids (At the time of writing, The little Mermaid is the last traditionally hand painted cel animation disney film...) and this answer about Disney princess' marrying older men. Disney is a lazy company and definitely looks at the cost of things.
To quote a quote from Steve Huelett, a Disney animator:
I've worked on CG features and I've worked on hand-drawn features. And hand-drawn features are harder to make. Hand-drawn cartoons take a year to produce. Once you've produced sequences, it's hard to change the work. You have to go back and do everything over.
But with CG, you can animate the movie in three or four months, change things close to the release date. You can't do that in hand-drawn animation. If you find out the story doesn't work when you're two-thirds done, you're stuck. With CG, we change the story and rework sequences until late in the process.
It's close to live-action in that way. You can rework until late in the production. With hand-drawn animation, the plot, action and dialogue has to be locked down way earlier, or the picture won't get done in time for its release.
As you can see, traditional animation just can't cut it compared to CGI cost-wise. Though it's not impossible that they won't try to go back to it. There is a small renaissance in going back to more traditional filming methods, as we saw with the new Star Wars films the return of practical effects.
Or a surprisingly good looking trailer for the Dark Crystal Prequel.
Should traditional animation all of a sudden become a demand, compared to the money machine that CGI is, you can be sure that Disney will jump on the hand drawn bandwagon.
The Little Mermaid was the last hand animated film Disney produced by the way you mean "traditionally-traditionally" hand animated or? What about Princess and the Frog (2009) and Winnie the Pooh (2011)?
Although other people have answered the question on full hand drawn films very well, a notable recent relevant fact is that Maui's tattoos in Moana were, in fact, hand drawn animation superimposed on the CG film.
From the Hollywood Reporter article "How 'Moana's' Animators Brought a Tattoo to Life":
"Somewhere in the process, Mini Maui started to emerge, almost as a Jiminy Cricket alter ego; the tattoo can't speak, but he can communicate with Maui," explains John Musker, who directed with Ron Clements, of the telltale tat's development. "Maui's full of himself, and here is someone who could poke fun at him — literally poke him." The two directors, responsible for such Disney classics as The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, are making their first foray in a near-fully computer-animated feature with Moana, but for Mini Maui, they decided to return to their roots and create a hand-drawn character. So they recruited the legendary Eric Goldberg, best known as the lead animator of the Genie in Aladdin, to serve as Mini Maui's animation supervisor."
Actually, per the NY Post article "Forget CGI: ‘Mary Poppins Returns’ uses hand-drawn cartoons" and other sources, the Mary Poppins Returns movie from late 2018 did all of the animation hand-drawn. I believe the purpose of this was to make the new movie have as close to an identical look/feel to the original one as possible.
Their most recent hand drawn/2d movies were very poorly received. They really did try to keep that age alive, but it just wasn't making enough money to account for how expensive they were to make. Here's part of an interview with Bob Iger (a chief executive of Disney).
"To my knowledge we're not developing a 2D or hand-drawn feature animated film right now," said Iger. "There is a fair amount of activity going on in hand-drawn animation but it's largely for television at this point. We're not necessarily ruling out the possibility [of] a feature but there isn't any in development at the company at the moment.
The profits are discussed in the above linked interview.
The studio subsequently put the hand-drawn animation The Princess and the Frog into production. The traditional musical, based on the Brothers Grimm story the Frog Prince but relocating the action to 1920s New Orleans, was well-reviewed but failed to mirror the astounding success of Pixar at the box office with a middling return of $267m (£178m). Another hand-drawn animation – 2011's Winnie the Pooh – drew praise from critics but pulled in just $33m across the globe. Meanwhile, Disney CGI efforts such as 2009's Bolt and 2010's Tangled grossed $310m and $590m respectively.
So, their CGi movies are clearly making a lot more than their 2D animations, this is probably why they were abandoned.
