If you ask me, the Annecy animation festival is one of the rare moments where the medium really gets to shine, free of any preconceived notions about animation hanging on its back like a weight. A place where animation studios and the filmmakers can just present their craft and talk about it as a craft…
Sony Pictures Animation, I’ve felt for a while, was the studio to look out for. They proved that during the Annecy festival. Mere hints that they dropped a few years back are now full-blown plans, mainly an alternative animation initiative formerly known as the “All-Content Slate”. By alternative, I mean “adult” animation.
Mainstream adult feature animation isn’t quite a common thing in the North American marketplace. With the exception of films based on popular adult-oriented animated TV shows (i.e. The Simpsons, Beavis & Butthead, South Park, etc.), they’re rare beasts. Your Isle of Dogs types, your 9 types, even your Sausage Party types. It’s quite telling that Sausage Party, a sophomoric hard R stoner comedy with tons of sex and swearing and violence that wouldn’t be out of place on [adult swim], is the most successful of this bunch. Animation, here in America, either has to be family-friendly cuddles or wildly inappropriate for kids. There’s little to no in-between, though sometimes we get something that’s actually for adults as opposed to the cinematic equivalent of a 10 year old blurting swear words when their parents aren’t around. Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, I felt, was just that. It performed on par with the rest of his movies, which wasn’t a big amount, but maybe it was enough to make back its never-revealed budget.
Sony Pictures Animation has two films filling this initiative, both of which are to be directed by Genndy Tartakovsky. Fixed is about a dog who is to be neutered, Black Knight is an action saga of a knight who fails to protect his kingdom and ups his game. Fixed is outright aiming for an R-rating, Black Knight has been confirmed to be an adult film.
Any big animation fan knows of Tartakovsky’s prior works, particularly his Cartoon Network shows Dexter’s Laboratory and Samurai Jack (which got upgraded to [adult swim] for its belated final season), casual audiences are more familiar with his trio of Hotel Transylvania movies that he did for Sony. It’s no surprise, then, that one of these new films is a comedy and another is an action film. One that aligns more with Dexter’s Laboratory and Hotel Transylvania, and another that’s more akin to Samurai Jack, Sym-Bionic Titan, and his forthcoming Primal. Tartakovsky is also a very vocal advocate of animation, of 2D animation, and adult animation. To see him get this kind of opportunity at Sony Animation, who recently blew our minds with the revolutionary Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, is nothing short of exciting.
Sony Pictures Animation, interestingly, wants to go back and forth. In addition to adult-oriented stories, they want to tell more international and local ones, sometimes films meant just for certain markets. The upcoming Wish Dragon certainly fits that bill, a mainly Chinese production that’s looking to bow in its homeland sometime next year. This is a big eschewing from what the other Hollywood animation studios aim to do, even the likes of Pixar. That whole battle for the “global” market, the four-quadrant family audience, etc. etc. And here’s Sony Pictures Animation making a few of those, but also movies for adults, movies for other countries, and whatnot.
But even their family-friendly movies aren’t going to be slouching. Next year, Sony Pictures Animation is releasing The Mitchells vs. the Machines, a sci-fi road trip comedy spearheaded by two Gravity Falls alumni (Mike Rianda and Jeff Rowe), and will be produced by the ever-dynamic duo of Phil Lord and Chris Miller. The intention is to take the technology used on Spider-Verse and push it, use it in a way hitherto unseen.
“”The Mitchells vs. The Machines,” about a family and their grotesque – for some – pug dog caught in a tech uprising, pictures two universes. There’s the human, portraying a chaotic mundane family world which the film celebrates in a painterly handmade way not so far from French 2D animated movies. Then there’s a hugely stylized robot world, filled with fabricated tones of a high-tech universe. These two worlds will collide in visual and dramatic terms.” (via Variety)
From that description, it sounds like a film that’ll visually comment on the world of mainstream CG feature animation today, and the medium that the industry abandoned, that Sony’s trying to work off of in their quest to innovate with CGI. Instead of staying put, Sony Animation looks to continue what Spider-Verse started: Innovate with computer animation, and show the world that more than one kind of feature-CG can be done. It doesn’t always have to be that quasi-photoreal Pixar look. Reportedly, their other 2020 release Vivo looks to do similar things with its visuals… That’s to say nothing of what Genndy’s movies will look like. His Hotel Transylvania movies already made strides in stylization and achieving seamless classic 2D cartoon-like movement in computer animation.
via SPA’s website.
This is all under the direction of one Kristine Belson, who assumed the role of Sony Animation chief roughly four years ago. She has openly talked about these plans and pushing Sony to do things the other studios aren’t doing, like a true competitor. On social media, I caught a wave of excitement amongst folks working at other animation studios. Many of the other studios seemed to really take note of Into The Spider-Verse, a film that may not have made Frozen or Despicable Me numbers at the box office (it did turn a very nice profit, though!), but collected pretty much all of the major awards left and right… Over very stiff competition, no less! It was the wake-up call that has been waiting to be made. Now the mission is to diversify once more, not just visually, but in going for different audiences.
This of course lead a reader to ask me, will other studios – should this be successful – follow suit?
If Sony Pictures Animation is successfully able to show that there is good money to be made in the adult animation sector, and that there is good money to be made in films geared specifically towards other countries, and that there’s good money to be made in highly stylized films… I think we’ll see some movement. If anything, more adult animation could be commissioned at studios like Universal, Warner Bros., and Paramount. I could imagine Disney using Fox for adult animation, not so much their own house and Pixar. Blue Sky’s Nimona is said to be a rougher-than-usual animated adventure (one that’s based on a not-so-kid-friendly graphic novel, no less) and a stylized film to boot, but it remains to be seen how Disney will handle Blue Sky going forward, or if they’ll even keep them around.
International market-driven films? Maybe. I can see some of the studios experimenting with that, should it really work out for Sony. Perhaps Wish Dragon could be one of those foreign films that makes a ton of change in its country of origin, but does okayish everywhere else, but it wouldn’t even matter. Like a sort of animated The Wandering Earth or The Mermaid. I can imagine Paramount and WB maybe biting at that.
Such stylization could catch on at the other studios, too. DreamWorks actually is no stranger to this kind of thing, having made films like Captain Underpants and Kung Fu Panda 3. They also plan to do co-productions too, as you can see with the upcoming Abominable and the in-development Spooky Jack. Maybe smaller-scale collabs like that (Captain Underpants was a collaboration as well) could yield some very different-looking animated features. Disney could very well amp up whatever tech they were using for their shorts, and finally make that 2D/CG hybrid feature. Who knows what everyone else will pursue.
With the 2020s upon us, change is needed, and perhaps imminent. Right before our eyes. We’ve seen it happening underground, whether it’s through streaming or other venues other than cinemas. What’s been tried and true since the late aughts may finally just give way to something new and refreshing in mainstream feature animation… It’s no different from how things changed, and needed to change, in the late 1980s going into the early 1990s… Time for an animation renaissance.
