One thing I often hear is this… Animation is “evolving.” Animation has “come a long way.”
I’ll make it very clear upfront. I have a very unconventional and possibly controversial view on modern American feature animation. The films that rule the scene are family-friendly movies, many of which really haven’t moved us forward from where we were prior to what I perceive as the era where American animation first lost its spark. The 1960s.
In my view, animation’s 1st Golden Age slowed down to a grinding halt during this time. The theatrical short cartoon died a slow death, Walt Disney left the world, and the idea of primetime animated sitcoms for adults made way for innocuous kiddie Saturday morning cartoons. From here on out, animation suffered a major image problem that persists unto this day.
After much struggle and some victories, feature animation became a hot commodity in the late 1980s and this was the springboard to where we are now. At least five animated features come to theaters every year. Nowadays, many animation studios are successfully releasing films to theaters that audiences have flocked to see. Even in the early 90s Renaissance, we had issues with studios that weren’t Disney, many of their films simply went belly-up regardless of quality. A lot of arguably mediocre and even low-quality films actually do decent-to-good business today. That is quite something…
For me, this creates a good-sized problem. The American feature animation industry continues to treat animation as a genre. Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar’s mission is to make quality family films, other studios follow the “leaders,” as do all these up-and-coming studios, it’s always all about “family entertainment” and kid-friendly stuff. Where’s the challenge? Where’s the push to make animation diverse and full of storytelling variety?
This year, we saw a little zap in the animation water, I’d like to think.
Wes Anderson’s dark PG-13 canine adventure Isle Of Dogs managed to get a staggered wide release that helped it make a decent amount of coin. Even the family films this year packed a little something. Aardman returned with another quirky stop-motion romp in the form of Early Man. Brad Bird returned with a bang at Pixar, giving us Incredibles 2, which may be on its way to grossing $600 million at the domestic box office. A first for an animated feature, and it was already the first animated film to make $500 million here. Wow!
Even the more middle-of-the-road family-friendly crop has been impressive! Hotel Transylvania 3 is arguably the best in the series, and a fun romp all around with inventive visuals throughout. Teen Titans Go! To The Movies is often a brilliant send-up of the DC universe and all things blockbusters, and is a stylish 2D animated (yes yes, based on a pre-existing TV show, I know!) movie to boot. We even saw an animated movie attempt to tell a story about World War I for families, the uneven but admirable Sgt. Stubby. Only Sherlock Gnomes, an out-and-out kiddie flick, was the odd duck out. Quite telling when the first seven months of the year have been pretty good. Not exceptional, mind you, but we’ve seen some strides.
On the horizon is some cool family-friendly stuff, but what excites me is the stuff that’s going to take CG to levels hitherto unexplored. Films like Sony’s Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, and other CG films that look to eschew the long-standing hyper-realism tradition that’s been dominant for so damn long. As I said back in 2016, where’s our UPA-esque movement in computer animation? It may be around the corner. If Spider-Verse is to do well, who knows where CG is going to be – visually – by the middle of the next decade.
Something I’ve noticed about animation in the post-Walt world we live in…
Nothing stays the same. There will always be some kind of change, even if not much has changed in general. Something will stick for a while, but then it will be shuffled out of sight.
The late 80s brought back an age where animated features could be blockbusters, films that competed with the live-action heavies. No more of this counter-programming business. Of course, nearly all the successful movies were kid-friendly and didn’t really push animation past any boundaries. I feel that the films of Disney, Don Bluth, and others didn’t quite open doors in the way the early Walt films did, contrary to popular belief. That is not to say they didn’t do interesting and new things. The showrunners still demanded that animation fit into a kid-pleasing, boomer nostalgia-channeling “genre.” These films conformed to that. Disney’s films during this era were mostly formulaic.
The mid-1990s brought us the dawn of computer animated features. Pixar’s Toy Story may have changed the visual game, but it certainly didn’t bring animation to staggering heights. It was a pretty-looking buddy movie for the whole family, it just happened to be very, very good. At Pixar, it lead to a long string of equally good movies. Toy Story‘s success did a lot of good for the animation industry, but it also inadvertently brought a lot of bad: The killing of traditional animation, the insistence that every animated movie has to be photo-real, etc. Its success, like The Little Mermaid‘s, was misunderstood on several levels.
The early 2000s brought us DreamWorks’ Shrek, which may have been seen as “revolutionary” back in the day, but for me it was really nothing more than a gross-out family film with some dick jokes sprinkled onto it. It’s fine as that kind of movie, I’m just not fond of how some folks used it to down Disney’s works and legacy, as if they only specialized in squeaky-clean kiddie flicks. People called the film “adult,” but it really wasn’t. It didn’t start any adult animation movement, it only really lead to a ton of imitators. Films spearheaded by suits who thought that farts, innuendos, and edge made an animated movie “mature” or even “good”. Audiences weren’t fooled, by the mid-aughts, many CG films began crashing down. This, to me, ultimately proved that audiences didn’t give up on traditional animation. They got swept up for a little while on this relatively new form of big-screen animation, and then began choosing the movies they wanted to see. CG is now just coating to them.
We saw change towards the end of the decade. DreamWorks began to ditch the Shrek schtick and started channeling their energy into epic adventures like Kung Fu Panda and How To Train Your Dragon, but still had some fun comedies and interesting experiments (Megamind) on the side. Sony Animation broke some ground with the mockumentary Surf’s Up and the aesthetically different Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Blue Sky, if you look past the Ice Age franchise, actually doesn’t stick with a house style and has a visual smorgasbord. Illumination, despite my feelings on their later output, did show that a breezy comedy could be done right in the form of Despicable Me.
I remember, in 2010, feeling this excitement. That animation was being lifted from the doldrums it was in. The years 2007-2011 marked a stretch of progress. No longer was farty stuff and cheap pop culture referencing a norm, genuine storytelling made a nice return and little by little we saw some cracks in the CG establishment. We already saw hyperreal films with exaggerated designs, now we were seeing CG slowly being taken down paths that were unseen. On top of that, our stop-motion fix was doubled with the presence of newcomer Laika. Traditionally animated features saw a lightspeed-quick revival.
Most of the 2010s has been a frustrating mix of heartfelt stories and gimmicky crowd-pleasers. The Pixar and Shrek influences of the early 2000s seem to have boiled down into a bland concoction that’s plagued a lot of modern animated movies. Few stand out, because of their stories and characters, and some stand out because of how cool and inventive they are. Some films, you can hear the beats, you can hear a boardroom trying to figure out how to emulate other successes.
As usual in Hollywood, the wrong lessons are often taken away from good animated movies. The Little Mermaid was good because of its story and characters, but suits didn’t see that when commissioning so many Disney-esque knock-offs in the early 1990s. Toy Story was good because of its story and characters, but suits only saw photo-realistic animation and its edgy jokes and its plotty stuff. “How do we get that?” Shrek was good because of its story and characters, but suits latched onto the PG stuff and the farts. Now it seems as if Despicable Me heavily influences the feature animation landscape. How cute can we make this? How many farts can we load it with? How can we make it like those other movies?
That shouldn’t be the intent behind the making of an animated feature. You have crews of over hundreds, budgets of over tens-of-millions, you have a limitless medium at your fingertips. If you’re going to make a family-friendly film, commit to it. Tell the best damn story you can think of.
Why are we only specializing in family movies? Animation is not a genre.
A few family movies with good storytelling and/or some bite aren’t enough. However, if American feature animation must stay within that “family film genre” trapping, the studios should at least continue to have fun with what they’ve got. Last year may have given us a few Captain Underpants and Coco-types, but there should be more. This year, we’re seeing that with the likes of Early Man, Sgt. Stubby, Incredibles 2, Hotel Transylvania 3, and Teen Titans Go! To The Movies. Will Smallfoot, Ralph Breaks the Internet, and Into The Spider-Verse keep that going? Could The Grinch even surprise?
2019, 2020, and 2021’s line-up? It’s all family films. Let’s see them at least try, or better yet, do something cool – and whether they fail or not… That’ll be better than losses that don’t leave much of an impression. You look at some of the unfortunate animated movies of the 90s, some of those movies at least have interesting things going on in them, whether it’s in the visuals or the storytelling choices.
There is still some hope for big-scale adults-only animation that isn’t based on popular TV shows. At Sony Pictures Animation, Genndy Tartakovsky is hard at work on two new original features, one of which is going to be an R-rated comedy suitably titled Fixed. The other film in development is an action-oriented adventure called Black Knight, which looks to channel Tartakovsky’s own Samurai Jack and fulfill his wishes to make a genuine animated action movie that eschews all the fuzzy comedy-adventure trappings. Whether Sony Pictures Animation doesn’t go back on these plans and actually commits to these films or not, that remains to be seen, but I’m thrilled that one of the big houses even brought such plans to the table. The studio that gave us The Emoji Movie could very well change the game. Hell, they’ve got Into The Spider-Verse coming, so maybe.
Sony Pictures happened to release Sausage Party a couple years back, and while Sausage Party didn’t really do anything for adult animation that hadn’t been done before (you’ve seen it before in things like South Park and [adult swim] shows), it was still a good-sized success. I bet that film’s performance was what spurred this, because prior to Sausage Party, Sony Animation was at one point planning an adult-oriented stop-motion/live-action hybrid movie called Superbago. While it seems like that film has gone the way of the quagga, maybe Genndy’s movies are the next step. Maybe those smaller adult movies that were announced over the last few years, including films that Netflix (!) are backing, are as well. Perhaps the smaller film will once again save the day, but again, I think a major takeaway here is that a major film studio is showing signs of changing the game.
What’s often not talked about is that there was an attempt at starting adult feature animation in the early 1990s. In-between the few Disney mega-hits and the Don Bluth movies was a little film called Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
While mainline Disney and Bluth’s output landed G ratings (in Bluth’s case, the work was forced and focus-grouped till it got the G rating the studio heads wanted), Who Framed Roger Rabbit – distributed through Disney’s “adult” label Touchstone, at the insistence of Michael Eisner and Roy E. Disney – was rated PG. Nowadays, in the year 2018, PG is slapped onto every kiddie film imaginable. Back in 1988? You had to goddamn earn that rating. Roger Rabbit was no kids’ movie, it had cussing, some harsh stuff, frights, innuendos, and Jessica Rabbit. ‘Nuff said! It treated whoever was in the audience with respect, instead of talking down to them or inserting something to make the bored kids happy.
Roger Rabbit also happened to be a runaway box office smash and a critical darling to boot, and no Walt Disney Feature Animation venture topped it until the release of Aladdin in 1992. No, not even Beauty and the Beast outgrossed Roger Rabbit on its initial release. (Re-releases bring Beast past $200 million, back in 1991/92 the final total was $145 million domestically.) Roger Rabbit spawned very few imitators, even from Disney themselves. Disney backed Henry Selick and Tim Burton’s spooky stop-motion delight The Nightmare Before Christmas, that got released through Touchstone in 1993 and did fairly good business, becoming a cult sensation in the coming years. Nowadays, because of its status and perhaps it being part of Kingdom Hearts, it’s billed as a mainline Disney movie. Most current home video editions of the movie eliminate the Touchstone logo and mentions. Roger Rabbit may be undergoing this process as well.
Anyways, enough of the waffling, Roger Rabbit‘s success didn’t lead to too many similar features. In 1992, we saw two adult-oriented features hit the scene, both were backed by Paramount. Sadly, these didn’t take off. Cool World – pictured above – was one, Bebe’s Kids was the other. One was adult animation mainstay Ralph Bakshi’s return to features, the other was the first big animated feature to have an all-black cast. Both were watered down from their initial drafts, both were critical and commercial bombs. Bakshi started a small movement in adults-only animation in the early 70s with his Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic, but later teeter-tottered between his usual controversial kind of films and relatively lighter fantasy films. Cool World could’ve been a return to his early work, but the movie’s producer had Bakshi’s original horror script redone as a PG-13 fantasy film. Bebe’s Kids was also molded in order to miss getting an R rating. The late comedian Rodney Dangerfield attempted to do an R-rated animated film as well, with Warner Bros. WB, however, demanded a G-rated film, in the end we got Rover Dangerfield. (Fun fact, the same studio behind Rover Dangerfield was former Disney executive Thomas Wilhite’s Hyperion, who also gave us Bebe’s Kids and The Brave Little Toaster.)
Afterwards, you didn’t really see any mainstream movement in adult feature animation. Few anomalies like Shane Acker’s 9 popped up and then quietly floated away. Most of that was limited to the indie circuit, even to this day. Sausage Party could’ve very well opened the door for more features meant for older audiences, or it could’ve told the studios “make more raunchy animated comedies for 15-year-olds!” We don’t know what’s to come of all this, given that the movie is a little over two years old. (And took 8 years to get to the screen!)
For me, American feature animation isn’t exactly stagnant, but it has comfortably been in one place… And sometimes that place gets boring after a while. I love a good family-friendly movie, but there’s much more to animation than that, and anyone who appreciates art would know that. Europe regularly shows us what animation is capable of, ditto Japan. We have the resources to make beautiful, high-end, “world class” works of different genres. Animation can very well do big blockbusters, thrillers, dramas, mysteries, and so much more. Live-action needs a specific kind of animation to make things like Marvel movies even happen in the first place, why not let pure animation have that freedom here? Perhaps this year’s Incredibles 2 is the closest we’ve got to giving all those hulking blockbusters a run for their money.
I can’t be angry anymore, especially as I’m now inching my way into this field. Ultimately, animation has been a victim of unfortunate circumstances and has been locked into place for a long, long while. That’s the harsh reality that’s plagued the medium since the 1960s, five decades. I will continue to advocate my favorite art form, because I know what it can do, I hope one day more people can see that too. Live-action and CG’ed re-imaginings of Disney animated features can come, blow up the box office, and then leave. What can I do about that? Are they helping keep pure animation in its place? Or just functioning as money-sucking diversions that mean nothing to the medium in the end? Will Netflix’s plans change feature animation for the better? What will the studios latch onto in the next decade? Is a surprise hit around the corner? Will this be a film that has a strong influence on the industry in all the wrong ways? Or the best ways?
While last year was rather blah and sometimes downright rage-inducing, I saw a little ripple in the water this year. I like that. It may not be much, but I’ll take it at this point.