Animation Perception ’20

Before I start, I’ve been meaning to post this since December. The bulk of it was written then. I fully understand that now isn’t exactly the time to talk about the way animation is perceived by a lot of the public. Right now there are far more important things going on in the world, and the state of cinema is currently in limbo. In the recent weeks the COVID-19 pandemic, I feel, has held up a mirror to societal norms, systems, and ways of life that are more toxic than they are helpful. We are seeing how us humans create these systems, norms, and lifestyles and just how differently the world is with people in quarantine, thus putting a pause on said things…

For me, it’s an eye-opener. I wonder how many of my own anxieties and worries and struggles are rooted in these very systems and lifestyles. That’s to say nothing of the insecurities of many people, all around the world. I apologize if I come off as all-over-the-place and insensitive during this time of uncertainty and needless dying. I’m still trying to process what has been going on lately, and it’s been very scary for me. However, I always wanted to finish this and finally post it because it basically sums up where I am right now with animation, as we are now months into a new decade…

Being passionate about the animated medium and being one who has had trouble in life because of various social norms, I often think about how social norms and such convince many folks to not take animation seriously, or even give “cartoons” the time of day. What follows is not about that per se, that discussion alone might make for another post… What follows is mostly about the presence of certain films that really make some ask, what is truly a “live-action” movie and an “animated” movie these days? And how the way movies are made nowadays can perhaps expose seeing one medium as superior to the other as completely unnecessary…

Everything that follows was as written back in December/January, with few modifications…

You’ve seen it all over the movie news back in late November… Frozen II scored the biggest worldwide opening for an animated feature film. The film scored an impressive $130 million on its opening weekend, only behind the likes of Incredibles 2 ($182m) and Finding Dory ($135m) on the animated movie opening weekend ladder.

Since most animated movies’ release roll-outs are very protracted, Frozen II – released everywhere by this point in its run – managed to score the top prize for worldwide animated opening, a big $358 million total.

In addition to that, as mentioned above, it’s the third biggest domestic opener for an animated feature.

Actually, Frozen II is the fourth biggest domestic opener. What’s ahead of it? Well, the movie that’s ahead of it on this ladder is also ahead of Finding Dory and Incredibles 2…

This particular movie is also the highest-grossing animated feature of all time. However, news outlets are saying that Frozen II – which has grossed over $1.4 billion to date – is the highest. It isn’t, it’s the second highest-grossing animated feature of all time…

What is the actual biggest? What also holds that opening weekend record? I’ll give you two hints: It came out this past year, and Disney themselves released it…

Yes, Jon Favreau’s photorealistic CGI remake of The Lion King truly collected the biggest opening gross for an animated feature on American soil, and is the biggest animated feature at the worldwide box office. $191 million in the states on opening weekend, a little above what Incredibles 2 made a year and a half ago. Unlike Frozen II, The Lion King (2019) didn’t open everywhere on its first three days, thus the worldwide opening total was $245 million. Still, it holds that particular domestic record. It sits at $1.6 billion overall worldwide, which Frozen II may or may not beat…

Oh wait, what’s that? It’s not an animated feature? Oh, because The Walt Disney Company apparently said so? Despite being nominated for a Golden Globe for Best *Animated* Feature?

No, let’s get this out of the way right now. It’s been debated to death and talked about since the trailers first popped up, but the fact is… The Lion King, the new Jon Favreau movie and not the original 1994 film made by Walt Disney Feature Animation and directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, is an animated feature. Just everything here, except maybe a single shot, was created digitally. It’s an all-CG film, and Disney and the director refuse to call this film, a complete simulation of a real-life savanna with real-life-looking animals, what it is. It might just be the first-ever all-animated wannabe-live-action movie ever made.

But why not call it animated? They clearly don’t want to lump it in with “animated” movies. Their own Frozen II, their own Pixar-made Toy Story 4 and Onward, their own Blue Sky-made Spies in Disguise, and everything else like it. A CG movie wearing a live-action skin, they did not enter it for Best Animated Feature, they are adamant that this movie is not an animated movie… But it is. No two ways about it.

Perhaps this movie arriving in 2019 is fitting, because the new decade is here, and maybe it’s time – after years of advancements in computer animation – to rethink how we look at movies made in different mediums. Not a new conversation, I know, but I thought of something. It’ll probably be controversial, but I’m used to being kind of like that by now, so…

Maybe it’s time we stop saying “live-action movie” and “animated movie”?

Prior to The Lion King, you’ve had movies like Avatar, Life of Pi, Gravity, Disney and Jon Favreau’s own The Jungle Book, and Ready Player One. Films that made extensive use of CGI, to the point where they’re basically hybrid films. Hey, remember when James Cameron insisted that his Avatar (now a Disney franchise), a film with so much animation and lots of animated characters in it, isn’t an animated movie?

Perhaps what he was really trying to say back then was… It’s not a cartoon.

Well, Avatar certainly isn’t a Hotel Transylvania or Madagascar-esque kind of CG animated film, that’s true. It isn’t a cartoon at all, as the Na’vi and environments of Pandora are all photorealistic in order for them to blend well with the live-action actors and elements. It is also not a Toy Story or Finding Nemo-type of animated, animated movies like those may sport lots of detail and a photorealistic sheen, but still keep themselves in the realm of the unreal. Character design, color, look, etc. You can still tell that those types of animated movies are still animated movies.

Oh yes, that stigma of “animated movie.” It appears that The Walt Disney Company and Favreau don’t want that for their film, either. To the public, animated film still means something like Toy Story or the original Lion King or How To Train Your Dragon. It is a little understandable in a way, Favreau didn’t make a film like that, nor did James Cameron. Alfonso Cuaron, director of Gravity, is on the other side of this coin, as he seemed to admit that his film – whose only live-action elements are Sandra Bullock, and the face of George Clooney – is animated. Andy Serkis regularly denied the importance of animators who more than helped bring his motion-capture performances (like The Lord of the Rings trilogy’s Gollum) to life.

But animated could mean anything now. It could mean a Pixar movie, or it could mean the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe blockbuster. So I’ve asked many times here and elsewhere, what do we call a pure, classic-style CG animated film? Or any film done in the medium that isn’t mimicking live-action? In an older article of mine, 10 Writing About Animation DON’TS, I laid out a couple personal reasons why I don’t prefer using “cartoon”. Naturally, some disagree there, maybe that’s my own hangup. Maybe I fall prey to a cartoon stigma of sorts, but here is how I see it.

To me, a cartoon is meant to be a humorous exaggeration of something. Comic strips, political cartoons, etc. They’re all meant to exaggerate something, to caricature the subject to humorous or satirical effect.

In the world of animation, cartoons to me are works like Looney Tunes, SpongeBob SquarePants, The Simpsons, Scooby-Doo, etc.

In that, there’s slapstick that would probably get someone killed in real life. Funny contortions and expansion of the body. You know, like someone’s eyes becoming boulder-sized when freaking out at something. Physically impossible things. That sort of thing, I think that’s kind of a basic descriptor of the kind of “cartoon” I’m talking about.

I don’t know about you, but I personally can’t describe an animated feature like Grave of the Fireflies or The Plague Dogs or Perfect Blue or Akira or Felidae as “cartoons”.

But then things get muddy again, because there are plenty of animated features that have realistic situations in them *and* cartoony things going on. In the same movie, a character could fall and get really hurt, while another can be bonked on the head by something heavy and then they’re just fine afterwards, just a little hurt. We’ll look at Beauty and the Beast as an example of this! The climax of that film perhaps shows this dichotomy at play: Gaston hurts and assaults the Beast on the castle rooftops, he shoots the beast with an arrow, the beast reacts accordingly. In real pain. Gaston’s henchmen are beaten by the enchanted objects, who violently smash and smack and clobber the unsuspecting mob. LeFou gets stabbed in the rear by a pair of scissors, but he reacts as if he accidentally sat on a thorn bush. Quite the contrast…

They’re fine, they’re not horribly injured or anything. They just run away.

Oh, and there do exist live-action movies that try their damnedest to be cartoons. Real-life cartoons. Robert Altman’s Popeye immediately comes to mind, as does the live-action Flintstones movie. Most of them, unsurprisingly, adaptations of cartoons or comics.

So if you’re like me, and you don’t want to say certain animated works are “cartoons” (don’t worry Spider-Ham, I never mean “cartoon” in a demeaning way, don’t smack me with that mallet!), what do you say then? Someone suggested “stylized” movies vs. “photoreal” movies once, but I don’t know, really. A classic Disney animated feature, or a psychedelic Yellow Submarine-type odyssey, or even something relatively unremarkable-looking, is indeed stylized. A stylization of life, like a painting or drawing would be. Obviously, a Jon Favreau Lion King-type isn’t that at all. Stylization vs. simulation?

We’re far past the age where you either made live-action movies or animated movies. True, many live-action movies have had animated special effects, going all the way back to the beginnings. Stop-motion animation was used in spectacles like The Lost World and King Kong, live-action movies with animated stars in them. However, most of the time, live-action stayed in its lane. The movies typically used props, stages, practical effects, etc.

You ever notice how some folks out there complain about the use of CGI in current blockbuster movies? Not the quality of the CGI, but the fact that the films used CGI to begin with? Practical effects, man! That’s the only way! It seems like people go gaga when a new film makes heavy use of practical effects, like say, a Christopher Nolan film. Heck, people go gaga over something being shot on physical film. But whichever way you make the effects doesn’t matter, the execution does… If anything, the groaning about CGI being used in blockbusters is perhaps rooted in the stigmas that animation in general gets. There’s apparently no “human” element to animation of any kind, but that is very much untrue. Even in animation fan circles, CGI has been and is seen as inherently inferior to traditional animation and stop-motion because it isn’t “hand-made”, therefore not genuine. That was always a major bone of contention, but really, that kind of talk (“anyone can go on a computer and make Finding Nemo“) is just a lashing out in frustration over how the American film industry haphazardly ushered out traditionally animated features in favor of all-CG films. Actions, not the medium. CGI is not robotically made, it requires human beings behind the computers to create the imagery and make it move. It doesn’t even matter if the whole movie was made using a computer, it’s not like the computer itself, all on its own, made the movie or the imagery. Human hands are capable of making bad-looking physical stuff, too, be it bad special effects or bad hand-drawn animation. I’m both a digital artist and someone who uses pencil and paper, and I don’t think the difference in technique diminishes any kind of work.

Interestingly, with the 2010s over, we’re seeing a small pushback, a long-awaited one. An alternative to the norm in mainstream feature animation. In 2018, Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse was like a culmination of offbeat visual experimentation in mainstream CG features. Up unto that point. As if The Book of Life, The Peanuts Movie, and Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie were stepping stones to this kind of feature that could show that CG animation didn’t need to be just “the Pixar style”. We’re going to see more CG films that kind of eschew the realism while still being 3D. Warner Animation Group’s Scoob!, Paramount/Nickelodeon’s Sponge on the Run, and Sony Animation’s Connected look to keep this idea alive, as do parts of what we’ve seen of Pixar’s Soul. On the streaming front, Netflix is committed to visual diversity in animated features. Klaus took traditional animation serious steps forward, something that particular medium has been needing for years. They will continue to back 2D films and distinctive CG films, they are currently streaming the new outre French animated film I Lost My Body. That’s right, no limited theatrical release that you might have to travel a great distance to, it’s right there on your TV. Talk about accessible! Netflix is surprisingly showing the masses that it all doesn’t have to be just Pixar-looking movies, regardless of the medium being used. No big studio would’ve backed Klaus as a theatrical picture.

Yet with all this movement and conversation, animation’s stigmas still remain.

The Academy itself… Run by actors, actors will never let it happen. An animated movie will not ever win Best Picture anytime soon, and only three have ever been nominated in the 90 years of the Oscar ceremony’s existence. It took the Academy till 1991, nineteen-ninety-freakin’-one to nominate an animated feature for Best Picture, and then 18 years later they nominate another all-animated feature. The second to last, the last of which was nominated the year after. Nothing since. They created Best Animated Feature to keep animation “in its place”. It’s as if filmed live actors is what makes a “real movie”. This has been animation’s biggest problem since the very beginning. To many, only filmed actors, regardless of whether the sets are real or not anymore, makes for a “real movie”. Is it because animation is seen as kids’ stuff? Live-action family movies get the pass, animated ones don’t. You never really hear folks diminish something like The Wizard of Oz or E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Those are almost nonexistent nowadays too, theatrical stylized animation seems to own the family film outright these days. Once in a while you get a Hugo or a Kid Who Would Be King or any garden-variety Disney “live-action” movie.

Anyways, a motion picture is simply a moving picture. Whether it’s filmed with a camera or made in a computer or made up of several drawings or made up of models on sets… It’s all motion pictures at the end of the day, and at this point in time, it’s ludicrous to suggest that one filmmaking form is better than the other. Live-action is literally just filmed theatre, okay? Animation is illustration brought to life. Photographs vs. paintings. No art show would ever heavily favor photographs because they’re captures of real-life subjects (including flesh-and-blood people), so why in moviedom was it ever determined, set in stone that movies filmed with cameras featuring living, breathing people are the superior kind of movies? You would think that the likes of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs would’ve more than told the population that, hey, this is an equally valid form of moviemaking! What’s with this unfounded concern that actors could be supplanted by drawings or CGI models? Paintings and photographs co-exist to this day, no photographed subject ever felt threatened by a painted portrait. In today’s climate, live-action filmmakers use animation to do things they can’t do in real life, and that’s apparently okay. Using an art form that can make abstract illustration move, no that’s a no-no, that’s not real film! Oh, but it’s okay to use it for your gain, a stand-in for real sets and practical effects for your living, breathing actors to work in. But some scoff at that, too!

I mean, when you write this all down, it just sounds ridiculous. Has been, for decades! Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs should’ve been nominated for Best Picture in the winter of 1938, no “special” award given out long after the fact. All of the great animated features over history deserved a firm shot at Best Picture. Gregory Peck was one of the few who saw the light, did you know that he campaigned extensively for Walt Disney’s The Jungle Book to get nominated for Best Picture *and* to win?

In simple terms… If it’s moving onscreen, it’s a motion picture! Not one way of making it is superior to the other. Within live-action, there’s nothing inherently wrong with choosing to make a CG hybrid, or a film shot entirely on a smartphone. Within animation, there’s nothing wrong with choosing drawings, 3D models, found real-life objects, anything. Execution is what really matters above all else.

Maybe the existence of the new Lion King is just another step to getting folks to simply make the distinction between a realistic movie and a stylized, illustrated movie. Live action vs. animation has been a long-done thing, and you certainly can’t call certain “live-action” movies being made today “real movies”. At this point, it is pretty much about “approach”.

Or maybe we can just take the easiest way out, and just call movies… Movies. How it was made is almost secondary, really. Well, if a lot of people didn’t have hang-ups about seeing “cartoons” or have trouble praising them, perhaps we could all just see movies of all kinds without fretting, and that any quality film is worthy of consideration, animated or not. Animation is my field and interest, my passion, so I still specifically refer to animated movies as animated movies, for convenience. For many, that’s still the way to get an idea of what a movie is, visually. But even then, saying that myself starts to feel a little contradictory…

I really don’t know yet…