After eight years in the animation business, and one year into founding a new company, I had to ask myself a difficult question: What keeps the entertainment public from respecting animation as a legitimate form of cinema on a par with live action?
After all, animation is probably the most creative form of moving pictures—it can be the ultimate "auteurist" cinema, in which directors control every element of their films’ content right down to the individual frame. In Understanding Animation, animation scholar (yes, there are such things!) Paul Wells underlines animation’s unique character and ability to "violate and compress any notion of time and space."
This mutability, this power to deceive our preconceptions, is what gives animation its distinctiveness.
Last year seven feature-length animated films were among the top 50 box office performers. This year there will be a record 21 major animated theatrical releases (six of these partially animated). This does not count the "casted animation" in films like The Mummy Returns. And even more animated features are in the works for 2002. Although that might pale next to the 300+ live-action releases, it’s significant. The medium has gained inroads into the popular psyche, and if films are a litmus test of the types of entertainment we collectively enjoy, why do we see so little animation in advertising these days?
And by animation, I don’t mean the visual effects work that supports decidedly "reality-based" live-action spots. No one doubts visual effects’ place in live-action-conceived commercials, but that shouldn’t be confused with animation.
Animation is a technique, granted, but for better or worse it’s also come to be classified as a "genre" of cinema. It has visual and story attributes that make it immediately identifiable. It has its own shelf at the video store. In fact, we see animation and expect a certain message.
And that’s the problem.
There is a continual malaise in our perceptions about animation-a type-casting plague born, no less, out of the industry itself. Not surprisingly, after the initial box office failure of Fantasia, and soon after the passing of animation’s greatest visionary Walt Disney, in 1966, the medium began to define itself solely by its appeal to children.
Animation was shunted to the ghetto of Saturday morning television in the ’70s, and a barrage of infantilized programming followed, seemingly designed to fill the spaces between more lavishly produced cereal commercials. It’s been a slow climb out from the trough of kiddie fodder ever since. Despite the Ray-Ban guy in the bus shelter ads telling me that all his heroes are animated (and I respect him for it—I really do), most people still perceive animated characters as juvenile, the acting as overbearing, the themes rife with sentimental excess and the value system sophomoric. Subtlety is nowhere to be found, and insight scarce, because that is what we have collectively come to expect from the medium. But as adult decision-makers, we should expect more.
Not until Who Framed Roger Rabbit did we get even an inkling again of the possibilities of animation. It was a noir spoof with a cross-pollination of film techniques, mature casting and great comedic acting. The world of these characters was a hybrid one with its own set of rules. Yet even after this landmark’s debut, the string of highly successful Disney films that followed regressed the medium to mimicking the early classics of animation with a formula of appropriated fables and infectious sing-alongs.
In Disney’s pervasively defined hyper-realism, we judge what we see by criteria similar those relating to live action. But a true exploration of animation’s potential as a communication medium requires that writers and creators forget about verisimilitude and the rules of the familiar world, and learn to establish their own sets of rules for their own realities. This is what animation does best.
It breaks the myth of "genre." The dominant Disney-style hyper-real story and the sugar-fueled cereal adventure pander to a narrow demographic and perpetuate the "genre" mentality.
Cartoons require the ultimate suspension of disbelief. We have to buy into this alternate reality-a reality entirely subjective in both style and content. A reality in which the viewers can immerse themselves without feeling the need to identify with the lead or play up to the status symbols presented.
Writers who feel the need to disengage their intelligence when they write for this medium only throw fuel on the fire. Animation conveys emotional depth, intelligent thought, irony, wit-all the things that we come to expect in live-action films–personified by creations that exist outside our immediate reality, drawing us in through an emotional connection. The incredible box office success of Shrek and Toy Story prove that cross-demographic appeal is indeed possible for animated films.
Granted, films like these and South Park trade heavily in irony–but is irony the only way? Can we continue to sustain a new generation of animated films that poke fun at what is so typical about this familiar genre? We’ll tire of that as fast as we tired of hearing Generation Xers whining about the state of their lives.
No, in a perfect world, the playing field of ideas is thrown open to both mediums without prejudice. After all, animation directors commit their impulses to moving images just as a live-action director does.
Both direct the course of moving pictures. Both collaborate with writers, producers and art directors. A live-action director sits at the top of a chain of specialists as varied as grips, gaffers, DPs and actors, while an animation director sits atop an equally complex chain of specialists from in-betweeners to ink and painters, to set construction, to CGI character riggers, digital lighters, and animators. Each is engaged in the representation of an idea or a story-a reality, imagined or otherwise-and each uses the skills and techniques he is familiar with, to engage the viewer’s intellect and passion.
Paul Wells writes in his upcoming book Animation: Genre and Authorship, "Arguably, animation provides the greatest opportunity for distinctive models of ‘auteurism’ and revises generic categories."
So, how should we begin revising these categories? If commercials are the popular experimental medium of our age, why are feature films breaking these boundaries for us? We test the water for new ideas. That’s why we should define the future of the genre in spot work.
To challenge the prominence of live-action movie-making, animation directors must earn their credibility by supporting and creating intelligent and mature work, while producers and agency creatives cast aside their preconceptions and represent the medium bravely to their clients.
