Modern animation of the United States
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| History of animation in the United States |
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| The Silent Era |
| The Golden Age |
| The TV Era |
| The Renaissance |
| Contents |
1988 to present
The Return of Disney
By the mid-1980s, the American animation industry had sunk to a decrepit state. Toy commercials masquerading as entertainment dominated the afternoon cartoon shows and Saturday morning cartoons, with the only experimentation and development in animation taking place in small, independent animated cartoons. Animated feature films still appeared occasionally in theaters, but the glory days of old had disappeared. Even giant Disney, which barely fought off a corporate takeover attempt in the 1980s, was considering abandoning the production of feature-length animated films.
Film fans, audiences, critics, and animators alike were all taken by surprise when the long-awaited renaissance of animation began with the most ancient, conservative, and mainstream cartoon producer: Disney.
Disney underwent a company shakeup in the 1980s, and new chairman Michael Eisner got the company back on its feet by returning the company to its roots and revitalizing its movie studios. With great fanfare, in 1988 the studio collaborated with Steven Spielberg and produced the animated feature film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, directed by Robert Zemeckis. The movie was a runaway box-office smash, and it provided the shot in the arm to the animation industry that was so desperately needed at the time. Not only did Roger Rabbit make a pile of money for Disney, it also sparked a popularization of classical animation that continues to the present day. The history of animation suddenly became a subject for serious scholarly inquiry (as well as animation fandom). Several aging legends in the business such as Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng suddenly found themselves the center of attention, receiving acclaim and accolades after decades of being virtually ignored by audiences and industry professionals alike.
Disney followed up Who Framed Roger Rabbit with The Little Mermaid, the first of a series of new animated feature films that seemed to re-capture the magic of the golden days of Walt Disney himself. The studio invested heavily in the new technology of computer animation to beef up its animation, producing animated extravaganzas such as Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin that drew in audiences of the sort not seen in decades, while providing a feast for the eyes unmatched since the 1940s. The peak of Disney's success was in 1994 when their film, The Lion King, surpassed the wildest hopes of the studio to become one of the most successful films of all time.
Disney also made new inroads in the long-neglected area of TV animated series. With the success of its TV cartoon series The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh and Gummi Bears, as well with Duck Tales the "new" Disney made its mark in TV cartoons. This was the first animated TV series to invest a lot of money and make it back through syndication and repeats, thus affording high-quality animation for TV. There followed a series of acclaimed syndicated series in the early to mid 1990s with some critics singling out Gargoyles as Disney's most ambitious and artistically successful TV animation project.
Spielberg and Warner Bros.
But while Disney was bringing new life to the state of animation, Steven Spielberg was making his own inroads as well. A lifelong animation fan, Spielberg was also interested in producing high-quality animation, and he also worked with rival animation producer Don Bluth to produce An American Tail. The box-office success of this movie, and Bluth's subsequent followup The Land Before Time made Hollywood realize that Disney did not have a monopoly on profitable animated feature films. The other Hollywood studios began producing their own animated feature films once again, though they still fell for the trap of trying to imitate Disney.
Spielberg, meanwhile, turned to TV animation and worked with the Warner Bros. animation studio to produce Tiny Toon Adventures, a high-quality animated series that paid homage to the great Warner Bros. cartoons of Termite Terrace. Tiny Toon Adventures scored big with young TV viewers, inspiring Warner Bros. to resurrect its moribund animation studio and become a contender once again in the field of animated cartoons. Tiny Toon Adventures was followed by Steven Spielberg Presents Animaniacs and Batman: The Animated Series. Not only did these cartoons bring in new viewers to Warner Bros., they also captured the attention of older viewers (teenagers and adults).
Outsourcing Animation
The major reason for the increase in the quality of American animation was the ability to outsource the actual animation grunt work to cheaper animation houses in countries in South and South East Asia resulting in high frame rates at lower costs. Writing, character design, and storyboarding would be done in American offices. Storyboards, model sheets, and color guides would then be mailed overseas. This would sometimes cause troubles as none of the final product would be seen until the completed cells were mailed back to the states. While budget became much less of an issue, overseas production houses would be chosen on a per episode, or even per scene, basis depending on the amount of money that was available at the moment. This resulted in wildly different levels of quality from episode to episode. This was particularly noticeable in shows like Gargoyles and Batman: The Animated Series where, at times, characters would appear almost wildly off model much to the dismay of their directors.
Animation for Adults
The 1990s saw the beginnings of a new wave of animated series targeted primarily to adults. The Simpsons, based on a short animated cartoon segment of The Tracy Ullman Show, was the first prime-time animated series since The Flintstones to capture a sizable viewing audience. It was the first major hit series for the fledgling Fox network, and it caused a minor sensation, entering popular culture and gaining wide acceptance.
Alongside the mainstream revival of animation in the 1990s there was a stranger and more experimental movement occurring. In 1989 a festival of animation shorts, organized by Craig "Spike" Decker and Mike Gribble (known as "Spike & Mike") and originally based in San Diego began showcasing a collection of short subject animations in regional movie theaters. The collections were largely made up of Oscar nominated shorts, student work from the California Institute of the Arts, and experimental work funded by the National Film Board of Canada. Early festivals included work by John Lasseter, Nick Park, and Mike Judge. Judge's piece, "Frog Baseball", marked the first appearance of his trademark characters Beavis and Butt-head.
The festival gradually turned into an exhibition for more "sick and twisted" flavors of animation, becoming an underground movement for adult humor and subject matter. As more edgy and disturbing underground animation came to light, it began to pull mainstream television animation towards more frenetic and perhaps scatological territory, as exemplified by The Tick and Duckman.
Other TV networks also experimented with adult-oriented animation. MTV produced several animated series especially for its young adult audience, including Liquid Television and Beavis and Butt-head. Even USA Network found a cult following with its Duckman show. But the most successful adult-oriented animated series of the 1990s was South Park, which saw its beginnings in 1996 as a pirated Internet cartoon.
In 1994, Cartoon Network gave the nod to a new series titled Space Ghost: Coast to Coast. In a particularly postmodern twist, this show featured live action celebrity interviews mixed with animation from the original Space Ghost cartoon. The series opened the vaults of Hanna-Barbara Productions, now owned by Cartoon Network, to even greater plundering in the years to come.
In addition to the deep archives of old and cheap animation, independent animation has also begun to benefit from newer digital technologies. An artist with sufficient technical skills can explore new styles and forms with much greater freedom. The traditional animation skills of drawing and inking have given way to pilfering and digital manipulation to produce new and more aggressive forms of animation.
In addition to these new programs, American audiences—particularly those in geographic areas influenced by the intermixing of Pacific Rim cultures—began to embrace Japanese cartoons, or anime, sometime in the 1980s. This growing anime home video market catered to the teenage and college crowd, with a large number of Japanese animated series being translated into English. Initially access to the videos was limited, but as anime became more mainstream it found its way into the larger video stores all across the US. Because animation occupies a somewhat different place in Japanese culture, it includes a range of subject material not often addressed by American animation. (see also: manga)
The Decline of Saturday Morning
After being nearly comatose for over two decades, the American animation industry experienced a sudden surge of growth in the 1990s. A number of new, risk-taking animation studios arose, and they found a wide number of markets to peddle their talents to. In addition to animated TV series, animation of all sorts was used in TV commercials, video games, and music videos. Newer, smaller animation studios arose to challenge the dominance of Hanna-Barbera Productions for the TV animation market.
Indeed, Hanna-Barbera found itself unable to compete in the new, varied market for cartoons. During the days when they had dominated the entire spectrum of Saturday morning cartoons, Hanna-Barbera had virtually no competition; this caused the quality of their series in general to deteriorate. Now in the 90s, the studio could only offer retreads such as A Pup Named Scooby-Doo and C.O.W.boys of Moo Mesa to compete with the Fox Kids Network shows and Warner Bros.' new WB Network. Hanna-Barbera lagged behind, and found itself being bought outright by Turner Broadcasting.
Not only did Hanna-Barbera have trouble adapting to the changes sweeping across television. The "Big Three" networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS) all found their once-loyal audiences being eroded by competition from the newer networks, including newer cable TV networks such as Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel, and the Cartoon Network. Video games and movies available on video also helped to change the market, to the point where for a while NBC abandoned showing cartoons completely. ABC was purchased by Disney, and Disney transformed its Saturday schedule into a series of Disney-produced animated cartoons.
While animated series on the major networks seemed lackluster, the cable television cartoons gave rise to a number of hits. Nickelodeon gave birth to the cult hits Ren and Stimpy, Rugrats, SpongeBob SquarePants, and The Fairly OddParents. Meanwhile, Hanna-Barbera's new owner Time Warner focused the studio on the creation of new cartoons for the Cartoon Network. Hanna-Barbera saw an infusion of new blood, and a new generation of Hanna-Barbera cartoons was born with such cartoons as Dexter's Laboratory, Johnny Bravo, Cow and Chicken, The Powerpuff Girls, and Courage the Cowardly Dog.
Still, not every new piece of animation struck gold. Disney's animated feature films began to suffer in quality in the late 1990s, after producer Jeff Katzenberg left the studio and teamed up with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen to form the Dreamworks studio. Likewise, a number of animated feature films released during the 1990s tried to imitate the success of Disney, but just as in the 1930s and 1940s, the animated feature offerings from 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. failed to capture a sizable segment of Disney's feature film dominance of the market. Warner Bros., in particular, had a string of failures as its animated features Cats Don't Dance, Quest for Camelot and The Iron Giant (the last being praised by critics and audiences, but virtually ignored by the public at large) died at the box office. Warner Bros. also tried to re-create Roger Rabbit's success with Space Jam, an attempt to combine the popularity of Bugs Bunny with basketball superstar Michael Jordan.
In addition, the kiddie-marketing trend continued throughout the 1990s, even if it wasn't quite as pervasive as it had been a decade earlier. Two major toy phenomena dominated most of the weekday-afternoon kid-oriented TV programming: Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in the mid-1990s, and Pokémon in the later half of the decade. Even as animation underwent a new rebirth in this decade, a great deal of attention (and consumer dollars) continued to be funneled into merchandising.
The rise of computer animation
Yet another wild card was added to this crowded, competitive atmosphere with the rise of a new wave of computer animation. The decade of the 1990s saw exponential improvement in the use of computer technology to enhance both animated sequences and live-action special effects, allowing lavish computer-animated sequences to dominate both. This new form of animation soon dominated the world of Hollywood special effects (the movies Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Jurassic Park included stunning computer-animated sequences), and it was only a matter of time before a full-length feature film would be produced entirely with computers.
Once again it was Disney that led the pack in this area. Disney animators had quietly introduced computer generated sequences into their movies as early as 1991's Beauty and the Beast. A computer-generated magic carpet played a significant role in Aladdin (1992). In 1995, Disney partnered with Pixar to produced Toy Story, the first completely computer-generated feature film. The movie was a phenomenal success, and it created a wild Hollywood bandwagon, as other studios looked into producing their own computer-animated (or CGI) films.
Perhaps because it was developed first as a new method for creating special effects, computer animation was not seen primarily as a form of "children's entertainment." After decades of existing as related but separate industries, the barrier between "animation" and "special effects" was shattered by the popularization of computerized special effects, to the point where computer enhancement of Hollywood feature films became second-nature. The best special effects were often so subtle that they were completely unnoticed. The Academy Award-winning Forrest Gump (1994) depended heavily on computerized special effects to create the illusion of realism, even to the point where actor Tom Hanks was seen shaking hands with President John F. Kennedy. The film Titanic used computer imagery to enhance nearly every scene in its three-hour length, and this produced a level of realism that helped propel the film to become the biggest box-office smash of all time.
Computer animation also made inroads into television. The Saturday morning animated series ReBoot won a large cult following among adults, and this was the first of a number of CGI-generated animated series, including Transformers, War Planets, and Roughnecks. The quality of the computer animation improved considerably with each successive series. Many live-action TV series (especially science fiction TV series such as Babylon 5) invested heavily in CGI production, producing high-quality special effects that their predecessors could only dream of for a relatively low price.
Other studios besides Disney tried their hand with computer animated feature films, and here they found what appeared to be a chink in the armor of Disney's near-monopoly on animated box office success. While Dreamworks' Antz and Small Soldiers paled in comparison with the Disney-Pixar releases A Bug's Life and Toy Story 2, they finally succeeded in scoring big with Shrek in 2001. Shrek was a gigantic box-office hit, pulling in audiences and overpowering Disney's summer release for that year, Atlantis. Even 20th-Century Fox struck gold when it released a CGI animated feature in early 2002 entitled Ice Age.
But the true star of the CGI revolution seemed to be Pixar. Even before Toy Story, the studio had made a name for itself by producing stunning computer-animated short films (their short Tin Toy won an Oscar); and when Disney tried to create a CGI feature film of its own without Pixar (Dinosaur), the result was noticeably lackluster.
In spite of all its success, computer animation still relies on cartoony and stylized characters. 2001 saw the first attempt to create a fully animated world using photorealistic human actors in Final Fantasy The Spirits Within. It met with moderate critical and box office success. While computer generated actors such as Jar-Jar Binks (Star Wars) and Gollum (The Lord of the Rings) have become acceptable to moviegoers, fully animated films featuring virtual human actors, or "synthespians", appear to be a few years away.
CGI special effects increased to the point where the 2002 science fiction film Star Wars: Attack of the Clones was considered by its director, George Lucas, to be primarily an animated film that used real-life actors. Indeed, CGI effects had become so lifelike that it was difficult to tell computer animation from real life. A growing number of family-oriented films began to use entirely computer-generated characters that interacted on the screen with live-action counterparts, such as Jar-Jar Binks in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Gollum in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and the title character of Hulk.
As of 2002, the use of computer animation on both the big screen and the small was so pervasive and so successful, there was talk of major animation studios abandoning traditional cel-drawn animation altogether and focusing solely on computer animation. Disney seemed poised to lead the pack in cutting back on hand-drawn animation; despite the box office success of Lilo & Stitch, the holiday failure of their much-hyped Treasure Planet seemed to ensure that there would be major cutbacks at Disney's animation studio. Disney's loss was further undercut when the 2002 Oscar for Animated Feature Film went to Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, giving Disney its second loss in a row at the Academy Awards.
Disney has recently sold off all their custom animation desks and Dreamworks also announced that they will be abandoning traditionally drawn animation and will focus exclusively on computer-generated features from 2003 on. While traditional cel animation is likely to remain a mainstay of TV cartoons and TV commercials for the foreseeable future, scholars of animation history believe the era of classically drawn American animated features which began with Walt Disney's Snow White is about to come to a close. Others disagree pointing to the moderate success of the cel animated film, Brother Bear, and the fact that Pixar has announced that it will produce cel animated films in its own attempt to revive the artform.
In 2004, the Movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was released. It is notable for being filmed entirely in front of a bluescreen with the background being completely computer generated and only the actors and some props being real. Robert Zemeckis' film The Polar Express starring Tom Hanks in five roles is completely CGI animation but uses performance capture technology to animate the characters.
Animation accolades
Animation had become so widely accepted by the beginning of the 21st century that in 2001, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences introduced a new Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. The two major contenders for first honoree in this award were both CGI feature films: Shrek, by Dreamworks, and Monsters Inc., by Disney and Pixar. The award that year went to Shrek. However, there were complaints that the award seemed to be oriented to family films since a relatively minor, albeit praised, animated film, Jimmy Neutron, was the third nominee and not the acclaimed innovative adult oriented film, Waking Life nor the visually ground breaking Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Hayao Miyazaki's critically acclaimed Spirited Away triumphed in 2002 as described earlier, and Disney/Pixar's Finding Nemo received the 2003 award and defeated nominees The Triplets of Belleville and Brother Bear.
The Annie Awards are handed out by "The International Animated Film Society", association internationale du film d'animation-Hollywood (ASIFA-Hollywood) every February for achievements in the fields of Film and Television animation in the US. For more information, the official site is http://www.annieawards.org/