Good riddance? How come? Dindal is a pretty good guy, don't let the article make you think that he spends all his time working at Disney tho'. He has also had stints with Warner Bros. as well.
Dindal was responsable for basically creating a film from scratch with Emperor's New Groove and still having it released on time - meanwhile, the film had already been in production for about two years when they decided that the story really wasn't good....in any way. Everyone that worked that film was forced to work faster and harder than they animators and co. generally do and though I love Emperor's New Groove, the box office shows that it had story problems. It cost $100 million to make and only brought back 89 million...that's generally not a good sign for any movie, but the rest was made up through DVD. That isn't what a company wants tho', they want the DVD's to be icing on the cake...not part of the cake.
Dindal and Fullmer were also pressured heavily by Disney to make Chicken Little a hit. All of that stress was their own, if it flopped they would've been shown the door. Luckily for them, people did like it (I thought it was mediocre) and it was considered a relative hit, nothing near Pixar/Shrek popularity, but it did it's job.
For anyone interested...the best film that Dindal has ever done was for Warner Bros., it's called Cat's Don't Dance. It's an amazing piece of animation (just for the animation) and though it received mixed reviews over the storyline, I love it and the characters have are tops in my book. It's bascially about a cat (Danny) who goes to 1930's-40's Hollywood to become a star....he finds out that humans and not animals are used in star parts....but, even through this revelation (which he doesn't understand) he still continues to try and become a star. It's, if you look at it deeper than face value, is a great film about following your dreams and not giving up on them just because the oppurtunity isn't presenting itself. If you have kids, I guarentee that they will like this movie, I'm 30 years old and I love this movie. When I'm having issues drawing...or getting started, this is the main movie I pop in (the second being Frank and Ollie). Rent it first if you have to and you don't want to take a chance with $15.
