It's a "cost-cutting" move from a company that isn't so much soul-searching as selling its soul - and selling short. This follows years of overseas studio closures as well as recent layoffs in Orlando and at the studio's flagship animation operation in Burbank, Calif. Disney has even been selling off the animation gear, down to the desks the animators used to do their scribbling.

Disney isn't getting out of animation entirely. But the company is abandoning a way of making films that has connected with audiences for more than 70 years - an expensive, labor-intensive and painstaking style of animation that always had been worth the expense - up to now.

That means that the Orlando-made "Brother Bear" and April's computer-and-hand-animated "Home on the Range" will be the last Disney cartoons animated by artists sketching and painting and making the characters move. They will be the last films that Walt himself could have picked up a pencil and pitched in on, were he thawed out from that freezer where he has long been ensconced in urban legend.

No more "Fantasia" hippos in tutus, dancing with caped alligators, given their fluid, comic dimension by painstaking, cell-by-cell drawing and painting.

No more little elephants who can fly or little Hawaiian girls who go their own way, breaking our hearts because feelings transmit better when they go straight from hand to page, without a silicon chip in between.

Computer-animated movies from "Toy Story" and "Finding Nemo" to DreamWorks' "Shrek" have boasted of the increasing "realism" of the forms and motion. But nobody goes to a cartoon for the realism. We want the abstract, the whimsy, the personality and humanity that rendering figures by hand, frame-by-frame, gives us.

Disney, the studio that invented and perfected the classic hand-drawn animated feature film with 1937's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," 1941's "Dumbo," and 1967's "The Jungle Book," will never win a best-animated-feature Oscar for the sort of handcrafted films that made the studio famous. That's ironic, given that this is an Oscar category pretty much invented to honor films such as "Beauty and the Beast" (1991), "The Lion King" (1994), and "Tarzan" (1999).

Sure, all those films had a bit of computer assistance here and there. And Disney expects to share in Pixar's computer-animated 3-D glory if "Finding Nemo" cops the animation Oscar this year. But already the buzz is building for the eccentric and personal - and decidedly hand-drawn - French cartoon "The Triplets of Belleville." Disney doesn't make them like that anymore.

The little studio that started as a walk-through attraction at the Disney-MGM Studios theme park earned its stripes by making "Roger Rabbit" shorts. It later became home to much of the animation division's best work - the Eastern-art inspired "Mulan," the retro watercolored "Lilo & Stitch" - films that recalled the golden age of animation while reminding Disney that story and emotion are what bring cartoons to life.

Disney's historic difficulties in wrestling with stories that weren't the whitest of white bread disappeared when the work was done far from the eyes of the big bosses in California. The Chinese folk tale "Mulan," a dazzlingly stylish telling of the African-American legend of John Henry, the watercolor Hawaiians of "Lilo & Stitch" and the American Indians of "Brother Bear" all rolled out of Orlando.

After the success of "Beauty and the Beast," "Aladdin" and finally "The Lion King," the rare and doted-on animation "events" that came every few years - roughly once in a childhood - became something the studio wanted to count on a couple of times a year. Films that previously might have gone direct to video now found their way into theaters. Worst of all, those cut-rate films, from 2000's "The Tigger Movie" to 2001's "Recess," cost less than producing a classic film - and earned money.

The pricey "event" films became devalued - compromised, formulaic or attached too strongly to a single clever notion (Gerald Scarfe's distinct animation style in 1997's "Hercules," for instance).

But that's happened before. Disney has weathered dry spells, when the ideas and the animators got stale and the management crotchety; the whole "Robin Hood" (1973) through "Oliver & Company" (1988) era was the most recent. Other animation houses either outsourced their hand-drawn animation overseas, or got out of it altogether.

But there was always somebody at Disney - some credit Disney nephew Roy Disney, who just quit the board in a struggle over power and vision - who wouldn't let the bean counters kill off Walt's animation division.

It took Jeffrey Katzenberg to micromanage animation back to life. Now he's the K in DreamWorks SKG, making "tradigital" Disney knockoffs such as "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron" and "Sinbad."

Maybe the staggering success of the computer-animated "Toy Story," "Finding Nemo," and "Shrek" has truly rendered hand-drawing characters "old-fashioned" or impractical.

But take away the 3-D novelty of "Finding Nemo." Give its story and jokes to men and women with pens and ink. It wouldn't have been the same movie. The folks who drew "Beauty and the Beast" or "Mulan" might have made it even better.