ANIMATED FEATURES IN THE DIGITAL AGE ARE BIG BUSINESS AND NO LONGER JUST THROWAWAY FILMS MADE ONLY FOR KIDS
Comically creative
It was virtually unanimous. Ask any real American movie critic about the five 2008 Oscar Best Picture nominees and almost everyone agreed something was very wrong with it. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button?” “The Reader?”
Where on earth was “The Dark Knight,” for pity’s sake? And, especially, where was “Wall-E?”
The latter question, at least, had an answer, albeit a very bad one: now that the Oscars had an entire category devoted to animated features, the prevailing suspicion was that we were unlikely to see an animated film nominated for Best Picture again, no matter how clear it was to so many people that “Wall-E – which some of us consider Pixar’s masterpiece – was one of the truly magical achievements in movies in 2008.
The big new Pixar cartoon “Up” opens Friday. It has already been praised at the Cannes Film Festival and is, by any reckoning, one of the most eagerly and happily awaited films of the year.
And for the simplest of reasons too: The great animated features in the digital age are no longer kid-flick throwaways. They haven’t been for decades. In the past 15 years, especially, the major new animated films have turned into major cinematic occasions. Certainly Friday’s opening of “Up” will be.
To put it mildly, it wasn’t always thus. Those of us who wanted to take our young children to the movies in the ’70s and ’80s were, more often than not, confronted with recycled Disney classics and mediocrities (“Tron” was an exception but “The Black Hole” was not.)
To paraphrase a line from the great poet and critic Randall Jarrell, if this isn’t the Golden Age of American Animated film we’re living in at the moment, things, nevertheless, seem awfully yellow.
Animated films have always been among the glories of American movies but only in the past two decades has that elemental fact been gaining currency.
What happened? How did film animation become the extraordinary thing it has become in 2009?
Two big things happened: Walt Disney’s socially homogenized Midwestern vision of America was decisively overthrown along with his company’s virtual ownership of feature-length animation for the family; and digital technology gave animators not just a new toolbox to work with but, in effect, whole new factories. With the addition of the computer, they were like cooks suddenly working on a modern stove after previously cooking everything over a campfire.
Everyone knows about the quantum leaps in movie technology in the past 25 years. It’s been abundant and continually apparent on screens in the past 25 years.
Leaps and bounds
What happened behind the screens –corporately, socially and politically –is the story so little known.
What we had for so many years in American animated film was a kind of unofficial war between two diametrically opposite enclaves of genius: the poets of terror, wonderment, fantasy and cuteness who turned out films, both short and full length, under the direction of an American film and corporate genius named Walt Disney; and the wildly irreverent wise guy geniuses of Warner Bros., who worked in a bungalow they dubbed “Termite Terrace” and produced seven-minute explosions of wit, energy, invention and artful anarchy that are as prized today in their small subversive way, as all of Uncle Walt’s grandiose “Fantasias,” “Bambis” and “Cinderellas.”
At least two of the great Warner Bros. animation directors –Tex Avery and Chuck Jones –are now considered among the most creative and brilliant figures in the history of American movies, no matter how many heavyweight tomes on American cinema still leave them out.
Disney’s dark side
For all the magic, though, of Disney’s dream factory, there was a very dark side to it and it wasn’t just the terror and horror that his animated movies so freely slathered onscreen (probably more people –especially children –have been traumatized by a movie supervised by Walt Disney than were ever frightened by a film by Alfred Hitchcock. It’s a tossup which maternal fate is the larger terror in the history of American film –the one in “Bambi” or in “Psycho”).
The dark side of Disney’s genius was the social and political constriction that came with it. The fantasist from Marceline, Mo., had a vision of small-town America which emphasized smallness and parochialism and was notably cool to the ethnic jostlings of coastal America. Rightly or wrongly, he was widely perceived in Hollywood throughout his extraordinary reign to be, among other things, anti-Semitic (which was, of course, not really possible over at Warner Bros., or most other studios, whose founders and executives were so often Jewish).
In his mammoth biography of Disney, Neal Gabler –who had previously written about Hollywood’s Jewish patriarchs in a book called “An Empire of Their Own”—calls the matter of Disney’s anti-Semitism ambiguous at best. Disney was a political arch-conservative. That meant he was unavoidably a fellow traveler at the time with some decidedly intolerant and even fanatic people.
Nevertheless, writes Gabler, when a Jewish Disney employee (there weren’t that many in Hollywood, then) told Uncle Walt he was going to work for Columbia, “Walt called him into the office, feigned a Yiddish accent and said ‘OK, Davy boy, off you go to work with those Jews. It’s where you belong, with those Jews.’ ”
Opposing views
Rightly or wrongly, the general perception of Disney’s magic kingdom is that it was decidedly Midwestern and Utopian—a world away from the wild ethnic heterogeneity of Warner Bros. (Yiddish, for instance, was the first language spoken by Mel Blanc, who was the voice of all the great Warner Bros. cartoon characters—Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Foghorn Leghorn, etc.)
Think of the ethnic identity of the first batch of Disney Mouseketeers. Annette Funicello was the exotic.
And then, in 1984, 18 years after Walt Disney’s death, one of the biggest sociopolitical earthquakes ever to hit Hollywood hit the floundering Disney corporation. Appointed its No. 1 and No. 2 executives were Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, two conspicuously Jewish moguls who’d had much success at Paramount.
There was a new unquestioned king of Hollywood family fantasy at the time. He was Steven Spielberg, the man who would eventually make “Schindler’s List,” arguably the most personal Holocaust film ever made in Hollywood. Simultaneously an admirer of Disney and one who couldn’t help being sociopolitically opposite, Spielberg produced a Disneyesque animated film which was virtually a middle finger flipped at Uncle Walt’s ethnic arrangement of America. It was called “An American Tail” –all about an American mouse who came from where those in Spielberg’s gene pool came from, Russia and Eastern Europe.
The Eisner/Katzenberg Disney was on its way to being the exact corporate opposite of Uncle Walt’s kingdom— a place with wide open doors welcoming everybody of all ethnic, political and sexual persuasion (it was soon renowned as the most gay-friendly of studios). Over and over the triumph of exiles and outcasts becomes the theme of the biggest and most elaborate Disney animated features.
When Katzenberg –a passionate apostle of full-length animated features –left Eisner’s Disney to join Spielberg and David Geffen to create Dreamworks, their biggest and cheekiest animation hit feature was “Shrek,” whose lead ogre was clearly modeled on Eisner’s face – one of the most overt “in” jokes in Hollywood history.
And that’s what the “Shrek” films are—just two-hour compendia of the kind of gloriously cheeky pop cultural irreverence that used to be crammed into seven minutes by the geniuses at Warner Bros.
Meanwhile, at Disney, the whole tradition was suddenly turned upside down by its corporate marriage to Pixar, the wildly creative leaders in computer animation.
By no means incidental is the staggering amount of money made by these new animated features –not just in initial theatrical release but on video and DVD. The “auxiliary” markets for kid films are gigantic.
Every major studio, then, wants to get into the act with animation. All now do it well –some surprisingly well.
The result is that Hollywood animation has become a home for some of the most creative minds in American moviemaking.
Walt Disney may have created a magic kingdom. What we’ve got now looks, quite gloriously, a lot more like a magic democracy.
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