Imagine that… A trailer for an upcoming Disney sequel has me thinking about animation in general. What else is new?
Trailers can be funny beasts… They can present a movie in a way that’s so different from the tone of the finished product. Animated movies can certainly be an example of this. It’s always quite something how a little bit of editing of available scenes, music choices, and sequencing can present something in a unique way.
This could very well be the case with the upcoming Walt Disney Animation Studios sequel Frozen II…
The marketing for Frozen II is so far a 180-degree turn from the usual marketing for Disney’s animated features, post-2010, *especially* the marketing for the first Frozen. I remember the animation community was none too pleased with the first teaser for the original Frozen, a cute little skit of Olaf and Sven racing across an ice lake to get Olaf’s carrot nose. The majority of it wasn’t even in the movie itself, much like many of cousin studio Pixar’s teasers that are composed of scenes created special for these types of previews. I remember folks on Twitter being furious about it, but when I saw it before Monsters University in theaters with a big audience, there were laughs aplenty.
Disney marketing knew what they were doing. Tangled was similarly marketed, and was a good-sized hit back in 2010. They propped that film up like it was “Disney’s Shrek“, with pop music and modern day snark and taglines like “She’s been grounded for like… EVER!” While Frozen did have one last trailer that presented it in a more serious light, complete with the songs that they had been hiding (Tangled‘s marketing hid the songs, too. People singing! How icky!), the majority of the marketing passed it off as just another silly animated romp. What a majority of the public wants out of their animation. Reel them in with silly stuff, then they stay for the great stuff. Reminds me of what my friend Jim Miles once said, “They go to animation for the comedy, and stay for the warm fuzzies.”
Frozen II‘s marketing is opting to show different stuff… Serious stuff, drama, beauty, action. Very little comic relief and barely any Olaf shenanigans. It looks like an animated high fantasy epic for the family. Why is that? I think it’s very simple… Because they can. Frozen is the highest grossing animated movie in the world, it collected $1.276 billion back in late 2013/early 2014, was a massive merchandising phenomenon on top of that, and it will likely keep that top box office position for a long while. (Unless Toy Story 4 really surprises.) Disney can now get away with presenting this animated sequel as something different, which they can’t quite afford with a more original animated movie.
As such, the marketing for Big Hero 6, Zootopia, Moana, and even Ralph Breaks The Internet was more of the same. Comedy was of course the main focus, trailers played out like typical North American animated movie trailers, where comedy and one-liners were front and center more so than story, other emotions (you know, like sadness and whatnot), and other things. Frozen II is a sequel to the highest-earning animated feature, Disney can promote it as something other than “look, another fun for the whole family cartoon!”
That’s actually not my takeaway from this marketing so far…
Look at some of the scenes in this latest trailer. Elsa encounters a magical mythical horse underwater, Elsa conjures up illuminated outlines of creatures, painterly pinky-purple blasts appear throughout an autumnal forest, there’s lots of magic here… More so than in the original and a lot of the recent CG Disney animated features. Presenting them without much dialogue makes them lyrical and blissful, in a way. I have no idea how these scenes will play out in the movie itself, but right now… This trailer made me think a bit about what’s going on with a lot of modern feature animation and what it’s lacking.
Or maybe, modern feature animation is just too… Literal.
I don’t want to put blame on studios like Pixar and DreamWorks, but I feel a lot of what goes on in animation today from a storytelling and visual standpoint originates mainly with their works. Now, animated features being talkier and less abstract in their storytelling has been a thing since the post-Walt years of feature animation, but there remained big chunks of a more lyrical, abstract storytelling that was prominent in Walt Disney’s first run of animated features. Namely Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi. The last three especially… A sort of storytelling much more prominent in European animation, and lots of anime.
Pixar’s first feature was 1995’s Toy Story, and Toy Story remains an excellent movie. It’s tightly scripted, the characters are rock-solid, the voice acting is all across the board strong, the directing is fun, the music is infectious, and it’s that perfect middle kind of family movie where it’s for adults but just happens to be appropriate to show to kids. However, Toy Story is quite literal. A scene plays out the way a scene conventionally would. Computer animation allowed the filmmakers to make immersive three-dimensional sets that they could move around in, like actors would on a real-life set. All of Toy Story‘s flair, if there is any, is in the way they chose to shoot the scenes. This approach to computer animation laid the groundwork for pretty much all of Pixar’s films, and just about everyone else’s as well. DreamWorks did it with films like Shrek, Blue Sky with Ice Age, and so on and so forth.
Contrast that with the way most hand-drawn animated features and cartoons were approached during the Golden Age. The early Disney animated features remain a fine example of what the filmmakers did with animation as opposed to what they were able to do. More primitive technology, budgets, and circumstances didn’t really allow Disney to create fully 3D environments and place characters in them. Walt Disney couldn’t make a Toy Story-esque movie in the 40s or 50s. The competitor Fleischer Studios tried to mesh 3D settings with cartoon characters in the mid-1930s, with their groundbreaking stereoscopic process, but it only allowed them to do these side-scrolling scenes, which are nevertheless still really cool.
Similar was the Disney multiplane camera, which worked off of layers of paintings on glass than a rotating device.
In short, 3D effects weren’t always implemented into 30s and 40s animation. Disney, I think, worked off of not having those kinds of tools. Bambi, for example, opens with a mesmerizing full multiplane camera pan of the forest setting, but it also has many sequences where no one is grounded by the fact that they’re flat drawings on flat painted backgrounds. There are multiple scenes in Bambi that have this ethereal, almost heavenly feel to them… This was achieved with flat, 2D drawings and paintings… That wasn’t a “confine”…
That of course is due to the individual choices that the artists made. These scenes didn’t need fully three-dimensional backgrounds or ritzy effects, they work perfectly just the way they are. Like being transported into a beautiful painting, Bambi is an example of an animated feature that immerses you into the art in a very unique way. Nothing all that literal about it. Especially compared to a later Walt-era film like, say, The Sword in the Stone or Lady and the Tramp.
Outside of the abundant visual flourishes, Bambi also has less than 1,000 spoken words of dialogue in it. Many early Disney animated movies use dialogue when necessary, without resorting to spouting exposition or constantly peppering scenes with snappy one-liners. All the hallmarks of most modern animated movies, even a lot of the better ones. I would argue that this particular approach to animated storytelling originates in the Disney Renaissance movies, the Pixar movies, and early DreamWorks successes. Patterned after many live-action movies. Talk, talk, talk. Like I do, on here, about animation!
However, a lot of the Disney Renaissance films have their fair share of visual flair. Mainly in the musical numbers, but it shows that they’re not completely literal. Sometimes they took complete advantage of the fact that they were animated, which often allowed them to indulge in some wildly surreal imagery and ideas. Unique ways to tell a story that no live-action movie can muster up on its own. Well, without the use of animated special effects, that is.
Thankfully Disney did preserve a little morsel of that in their CG age feature Moana…
Nowadays, in most CG animated movies, the closest you’ll get to the early lyricism is a sequence that’s beautifully composed and shot. The lanterns shots in Tangled‘s ‘I See The Light’ sequence are a good example of this. For a minute or so, the cinematography, the color grading, and the directing take your breath away and you almost reach that special state of euphoria. However, you’re still looking at what’s there: The setting, the objects, the characters. It’s not like a different animated film where the atmosphere completely changes, metamorphoses, or gives way to something completely different. Neither approach is inferior to one another, but why have we scrubbed the latter from most animated feature filmmaking in the United States?
Pixar has sometimes attempted this sort of storytelling, even within the confines of their style. Toy Story 2‘s ‘When She Loved Me’ sequence is an early example of this, along with some particular shots in Finding Nemo, a few short bursts in Ratatouille, and a few portions of WALL-E. Up sometimes adds a dreamlike quality to its digitally-created setting. Still, these films don’t go that particular extra mile and really change things up, visually. What you’re seeing is what you’re seeing, the only visual change being in cinematography and color grading. Coating to what’s already there, the models and sets created.
DreamWorks, interestingly enough, has sometimes pushed harder for stylization in CGI. Not just in character design and art direction (Madagascar, for example), but in the actual overall look… Kung Fu Panda 3 at times almost becomes a full-on painting, and this is the third entry in a movie series that already employed traditional-like sequences.
The whole circus performance in Madagascar 3 attempts to do something similar, to create a sort of near-Pink Elephants like dazzler where the circus setting gives way to a black void, and the colorful effects do the rest.
And that’s to say nothing of Captain Underpants‘ gleeful use of mixed media to tell its wacky story of two creative, comic-drawing fourth graders…
Then of course, I have to gush – once again – over Sony Pictures Animation’s Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse. Every frame of that movie is euphoric.
Films that all show that computer animation doesn’t have to be limited to just sets and characters, with some color variations or the usual cinematography. Just like how a live-action movie works. You shoot the real-life subjects, then add the additional stuff to make it look nice… Animation is not live-action, and thus you can get away with really playing with these characters, these settings, these designs… The way many artists used to do, and still do elsewhere. American animation need not be bound by scripts and hard-cold rules, nor a requirement to be as close to live-action as possible… Animation can actually be more alive than you can imagine. Alive in ways people in real life can’t be, and in ways a live-action camera and all the VFX in the world can’t portray.
Again, there is nothing wrong with Pixar’s approach to CGI. There’s no wrong with the approach most of the studios use. I’m not trying to take away from films like, say, Up, How To Train Your Dragon, Frozen, and many more… I just like seeing the great artists behind these very films really play with what they have on hand…