Animation is cinema?
An exploration into the baby-fication of animated films
It all started with Guillmero Del-Toro saying those three dreaded words.
"Animation is cinema”
This opened the floodgates for thousands of Twitter users to proudly and unabashedly profess their love for the medium of animation, any tweet about an upcoming animated film or how well the latest Netflix-produced animation was doing in its incredibly limited theatrical release would be flooded in the replied of an animated character holding up signs quoting Del-Toro’s statement, there was a shift in this community. Before this fans of animation were incredibly common but they definitely weren’t as vocal in their defense of the medium and its legitimacy in the wider context of film. So what happened for those three words to start such a movement in the sub-culture of a sub-culture known as “film Twitter”
Into the Spiderverse was released 5 years before GDT’s Oscar-winning picture Pinocchio, it felt like a breath of fresh air during the MCU’s reign of the theaters during 2018’s lead-up to Avengers: Endgame the (At time) conclusion to the Marvel Universe. Spiderverse was a cultural hit and did well at the box office, as someone who was in his phase of denouncing everything superhero related to prove to my peers that my taste in films was “superior” to theirs, even I went to see the film to see what the fuss was about, and I love it, it felt so new, so charming and the best superhero film to be released since Raimi’s Spiderman 2, 14 years later. This film broke out of the circle of animation lovers and was being viewed in the wider context of films released that year, it wasn’t being put at number 1 of animated films released that year, it was held in such regard many people were putting it in their top 10 films of the year list.
And I think that’s where a lot of this stems from. The animation medium was always viewed as something “separate” from live-action films. Why do you think that the Oscars have their own category for animation? These films are fundamentally not the same as making a live-action film, they require entirely different skill sets, with some overlap but since 2002 the Oscars have taken a stance. Animation and Films are two different things. (There have been rare exceptions, Beauty and the Beast, UP and Toy Story 3 are the only animated films to be nominated for best picture, all Disney films)
I’m not here to make fun of people who enjoy animation, if I was doing that I would be lampooning myself, I love animation and I think the medium is severely underexplored and under-represented by the academy itself, in the 21 years since the animation has category was added Disney has won 15 times, they have a stranglehold on the medium and how it is viewed, and now with their animated films struggling to find an audience they’ve dove into their back catalog to remake their golden age films starting in 2017 with their remake of Beauty and the beast and since then they’ve only ramped up on production of these remakes with 9 films being released in 6 years perhaps this is Disney saying that “Animation isn’t cinema, live action is”
The response to these films has been poor at best, the biggest critique being that transferring these stories and films into live-action makes them lose all their own unique qualities, an image that gets thrown out a lot is the comparison between the shot of Simba from both Lion King films reacting to his father’s death, while one is filled with horror, dread and yellow eyes piercing through the shadow the other one looks like he’s deciding if he wants Mayo or Chilli sauce on his subway sandwich.
So right now animation is in a strange place, the historical kings of animation are turning their backs on the genre for live-action remakes of their stories, while other production houses are experimenting with the format, such as Spider-verse or Klaus which have been celebrated and loved by the community. So how did we go from this to the scene we know now where the responses to animation become more vocal and defensive of its place within the film?
All it took was one cat to have a realistic panic attack.
If you were on the internet earlier this year you will have heard about Puss In Boots 2: The last wish. The film was a smash hit, and people loved this film, and for good reason, it’s incredibly well-directed and animated with so much charm that pops off the screen. But there was one scene that seemed to resonate with a lot of people, Puss In Boots the titular character experiences a panic attack at the halfway point of the film. This changed everything.
Having an animated character experience an experience as common and upsetting as a panic attack in a children’s film is a unique creative choice and is something I think works really well, but a lot of people saw something different. This proved to them that animated films have the ability to tell adult stories and deal with adult themes, they were free to cast off the shackles of being a children’s medium and proudly declare that “I love animation”
It seemed like a lot of people pointed to this scene in particular when talking about the film and how it really shows the potential of animation as a medium, but remember. We are talking about a children’s film, where we these people when Charlie Kaufman released Anomalisa? A film that deals with identity, why haven’t I seen people talk with the same praise about Phil Tippets's Mad God or even Flee from 2021, an animated documentary about a refugee’s experiences fleeing his home due to war and exploring his sexuality in a foreign country?
While writing this article I shared it with a few friends to get their advice and opinions. My friend Mu lead me down an interesting path of thought. When you were younger chances were you had a hoard of second-hand Disney and Pixar VHSs or DVDs in your house, a lot of children’s first exposure to movies is through animation, if you think about your earliest memories to do with film chances are it was animated (My personal one is getting so excited over the Yu-Gi-Oh movie I would chew the chairs in my parents living room, I was 6 give me a break)
As CGI leaped forward and creating animated films on smaller budgets became more common. Studios would switch over to 3D animation from traditional 2D hand-drawn films. 3D animation became the norm and now that was the standard for children’s films, 3D animated films. But back in the 60s all the way to the 90’s you would go to the movies every few months to watch the new Disney picture or Warner brothers flick while also having a healthy share of live-action films not aimed at children, but at family, The E.T’s, Back To The Future and Goonies, these are films children can watch and have an amazing time but they are not made for them, their audience is everyone. There was an artificially created separation between “These films are for children” and “These films are for families"
Fast forward to the 2000s and almost all of the major and well-received family films that kids watched are Disney/Pixar 3D animation, live action films shifted to being the “Adult” medium, this wasn’t a deliberate shift in the culture but with the death of the family film the audience has been split in two. They were still there but now they were few and far between with most of them being goofy comedy films that had very little for the parents in the audience to connect to. Comparing these films to Pixar/Disney's output in the 2000s, the gap in quality is as wide as you can get, but these films are still being aimed at children. The average person will rarely go to see an animated film without taking their child even if they will enjoy them. I remember a conversation between me and my uncle about how he wanted to go see Spirited Away when it came back to the cinemas a few years ago but didn’t want to go since they didn’t have any children to take with them, as if there is some innate shame about asking for a ticket to an animated film without a child present.
So we have a generation that grew up on animated films during an era when the family film was dying, there is a preconceived notion that live-action films are for the “big kids”, but these films that they still love and hold dear are all animated so they feel the need to defend them. The Mario Brothers movie premiered last week and since then I’ve seen so many reviews of it my brain is rotting away when anything Mario-related is mentioned, but there’s always been a running theme to the conversation around Illuminations film.
If you expected it to be good, you had too high expectations for a film for kids
So now we have a problem. We have a community that will defend the legitimacy of animated films made for children purely based on the medium they are in, they say that the medium deserves respect and should be held in the same regard as live-action cinema (They’re right) but when faced with criticism they deflect and say you’re the one who had too high expectations for a film for children. Its held to the highest standard until it is criticized then it hides behind the wall of “children’s media)
So where do we go from here?
Do these people who post memes declaring that animation is cinema actually care about the medium or do they want to watch kids’ films without being judged? That comes down to an individual question that can’t be answered easily, but we need to see more education about Animation, pushing forward that this medium has so much to offer past Disney and Pixar, explore foreign animation, go watch Angels Egg or Fantastic Planet. Check out Linklater’s rotoscoped films and dive into independent shorts. Watch the films that didn’t win the Oscars. Animation IS cinema, but that doesn’t mean that all animation is good and needs people to come to its defense. We will have to wait and see how this culture of defending animation for children will play out and if these audiences will spread their wings to find a more amazing cinema that awaits them, but until then, let’s argue on Twitter about another animated character having a panic attack.
