What, did you think the infamous Eisner-Jobs animosity was over now that Pixar and Disney are parting ways? Hardly-- and it's not limited to years-old clueless memos revealed in tell-all books, either. It seems that nary a quarterly earnings conference call can pass in which one of those guys isn't sticking it to the other, and last week's Pixar shindig was no exception. Not that we're complaining, mind you; sometimes these little potshots between Steve and Mike represent the most vaguely on-topic drama we can dig up all month. So when Steve made some snarky comments last week about the cratering level of quality in Disney's recent flicks, we did a little jig and filed them away for future incorporation into the plot.

In Steve's defense, though, if Mom asks, Eisner started it; he kicked off this round of public snippiness with comments he made during an investor conference last week at Disney World. Faithful viewer Jef Van der Voort dished up an LA Times article which reports that when Eisner was asked about Disney's current efforts to produce non-Pixar computer-generated animation, he had the gall to describe Pixar's own CGI human characters as "pretty pathetic."

My, what a difference a year can make! Because, see, Eisner calling Pixar's animation "pretty pathetic" isn't exactly consistent with his company's own moral-high-road response to Steve having called the quality of Disney's sequels "embarrassing" last February, which was to say that it was "sad and unfortunate" that Steve had "resorted to insults and name-calling." (Then again, since Eisner had already called Steve a Shiite Muslim in an apparent-- though largely incomprehensible-- derogatory fashion, the whole moral-high-road thing was hypocritical anyway.)

So in light of the "pathetic" comment, when asked during Pixar's conference call what would possess the guy to say such a thing, Steve Jobs can hardly be blamed for referring to Eisner as a "loose cannon." Of course, sarcastically adding that Pixar's films "don't stack up to Atlantis, Emperor's New Groove, or Treasure Planet" may have gone a bit far; invoking a holy trinity of animated Disney box office flops pushes the boundaries of good taste, but hey, that's what we pay the guy for. To be perfectly fair, though, as faithful viewer Kees van Reeuwijk reminds us, "good" and "successful" don't always go hand in hand. Despite the fact that it lost money, we found Atlantis to be pretty fun in a disposable sort of way, and we've heard some really nice things about The Emperor's New Groove (although not from sources we'd necessarily bet any money on).

But regardless, both Disney and Pixar are in the business of making money, and as for Eisner's focus on creating more realistic-looking computer-generated human characters than Pixar's goes, well, that's exactly what we'd expect from him: a profound Missing of the Point™. Eisner always puts such an emphasis on surface gloss that he never seems to have grasped that what made Pixar's movies so successful weren't their polygon counts, but the stories they told. So we won't be at all surprised if Disney's own CGI offerings wind up looking fantastic-- and falling flat anyway. That's nothing but idle speculation, of course, and Disney may well wind up smacking one out of the park; we're just saying that if it strikes out, instead, we won't exactly be scraping our jaws up off the pavement.

And whatever the outcome, we can be sure there'll be a zinger or two from Eisner and/or Steve when the analysts ask them what's what. Bring it on!