Magazine

ANIMATION’S SLOW DEATH

By Peter Adamakos

There is more animation being produced and seen today than ever before. It is EVERYWHERE! Yes, we have quantity all right. And I do not question what is being done. There always was and always will be both highbrow and lowbrow animation. There always were more Terrytoons than Disney toons, just as there always was more more pulp fiction than top-drawer writing, more Three Stooges films than Chaplin ones. And why not? A true film fan appreciates both just as a true animation fan can sing the Mighty Mouse theme song as readily as some Disney standard of old. THE SIMPSONS is still the best thing on television and no one considers it great or even fine drawn animation.

No, I do not decry WHAT is being done, I decry HOW it is done, or more precisely, animated. I decry the loss of animation craft today, the slow death of the art of animation itself. Some people think it a downward spiral to have gone from Laurel and Hardy to Adam Sandler. Abbott and Costello have become Spade and Farley. But we need not despair. There is always the possibility that our current comedic dark ages will pass. There is always the hope that some genuinely funny person will yet emerge and maybe in future even get a film to do.

But the art of animation is very different. No new great animation talent will emerge overnight. The craft of great animation must be learned, taught, cultivated and nurtured over a long period of time and in today’s reality that is virtually impossible. The studio system allowed Chuck Jones to go from directing the boring and excruciatingly slow Sniffles cartoons to making the best-directed shorts ever made. The Disney boys went from early, even crude Silly Symphony cartoons to FANTASIA in less than ten years. As the studio grew, they grew and the art of animation grew. With SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS everything changed. Compare any studio’s 1936 output with its l940 product-Warners, Lantz, MGM, yes, even Terrytoons improved because Disney set the bar higher and the art of animation progressed.

Today animation history is repeating itself. Winsor Mackay, working virtually alone, was in one way the Disney of his day, (the early silent period, mostly before 1920). He discovered and refined the secrets of quality animation. It’s all there-timing, personality, anticipation and so on. After Mackay came animation studios or factories, as animation became an industry. The product was overall quite poor and unworthy of the promise of Mackay. The bulk of it was merely comic strips come to life as his animation principles were forgotten or ignored and silent animation became a churned-out product (with exceptions) much like television animation is today (with exceptions!)

It took almost twenty years of dark ages before Disney and his people rediscovered the craft of animation. Even ten years is long enough for a craft to weaken. If good animation is not practiced, experienced animators will forget or ignore it, and new animators will have never learned it.

And so today history is repeating itself. Made for television animation today is the equivalent of the silent era dark ages. The constant forward, progressive discovering of the art of animation has faltered, giving us today ersatz quality animation. It is a dark period for drawn animation not only on television but in features as well.

Even $60, $70 or $80 million dollars can’t instantly create talent. It has to develop. You can’t buy talent anymore than you can have a baby in four months no matter how much money you’re willing to pay. People who work in television animation can’t become feature quality animators just because they’re hired and paid as such. It’s like that company that calls each new animated feature a “classic” or “masterpiece” when it goes to video just ‘cause they say so. To paraphrase Chuck Jones, those are gift words. You cannot apply them to yourself.

The best of the feature animators, those at Disney, came up through the ranks working on shorts. TV today is not the equivalent training ground those shorts were because there is no upward curve, no striving for excellence or improvement. They’re just churning out the same product over and over again on an assembly line. With practice you can look at an early Disney cartoon and know if it was made in l932 1933 or 1934 or whatever. Their progress was that obvious and consistent. What’s the difference between RUGRATS show number 16 or 160 animation-wise? Not to pick on the often-amusing RUGRATS: you can substitute any TV show instead. The point is that the producers of these shows don’t want anyone messing with the assembly-line formula for business reasons, not even to improve it, anymore than your McDonald’s manager wants a new cook to mess with its recipe for what it considers “food”.

Due to the loss of craft, features today are a pale imitation of what they once were. Look at the credits At the end of a feature if you have a spare ten minutes. Hundreds of names of ciphers. Books of the Middle Ages would look like the end credits of today’s animation features if they had put at the end the hundreds of monks who copied their detailed pages by hand.

These are skilled, talented people to be sure, performing necessary tasks worthy of respect. But what chance do any of them realistically have to get to the top echelons of animation as they do their repetitious job? Where are they to learn the craft of animation beyond the level at which most of them toil? How are they to learn? Who cares about rower-animator number 567 on the good ship Ben-Hur? What quality of work are they going to get that challenges them? And where will they ever do true quality personality animation?

As for those at the top today, yeah, right. Look at any great animation of the past. At random, let’s pick Captain Hook and his bosun, Smee, from Peter Pan., whose main animators were Frank Thomas And Ollie Johnston, respectively. In the hands of anyone else, these two characters would have emerged in the film quite differently onscreen. Each animator brought something of himself to his character, defined then refined it until it became a real flesh and blood character, a true personality unique in all the cartoon world. If you give five actors the same script and if they are good actors, you’ll get five different performances. Good animators, like good actors, make the role their own. It’s all in the WAY the characters are animated and go through their paces. It is the craft of personality animation.

Hook and Smee are fleshed out and become real people in the way they do things that reveal their personality, as the best animation will do. You could write a small book on these two characters alone and what they reveal about personality animation. In the best animation the animator makes his or her unique mark on the character, even with bits of business or attitude. It’s there when Pinocchio twirls the bottom of his short pants as he nervously talks with the Blue Fairy. It’s there whenever Mickey Mouse pulls up his overlong sleeve in THE BAND CONCERT. And it’s there when Lady and Tramp eat spaghetti. The sincerity and integrity of that sequence-its comedy, romance and believability pay tribute to all who created it, a fragile piece of magic that has no imitators much less an equal today.

I remember Frank Thomas once telling me there was a moment in SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS that for him was pure magic and gave him a chill up his spine whenever he saw it. Just a tiny moment when music, action, animation and character combined for a perfect moment onscreen. I told him I had a similar moment in the film. Incredibly, they were the same moment, one neither of us thought anyone else would share because it was just a fleeting tiny moment in an 89 minute film, not a highlight at all in the film-just a moment of animation magic.

After seeing MULAN I reflected on what I enjoyed and what disappointed me, and I wondered: If I were doing a documentary on the art of animation, what moment would I select from the film MULAN? What moment of magic is there in the film? What moment to even begin to compare with a spaghetti-eating sequence, with a Skull Rock adventure, or a hundred other magic moments in animation? I marveled at the computerized hordes swooping down the hill, right on cue in my theater seat, but it wasn’t an involving moment, as computer scenes are about spectacle, not emotion. I liked the father’s animated quiet dignity, especially when he dressed for battle and tried to carry himself as a warrior again but could not. It was poignant, but no crying dwarf. I realized that there was no moment of greatness in that or in most other new animation features, They have no unique Hook or Smee that result from an individual animator’s inspiration that could come from no one else. Had the main animator of any character in MULAN not been available to work on it, they would have found someone else, and the result onscreen would have been almost identical to what we ended up with amyway. There was no unique stamp. The characters went through their assigned paces without that sparkle you saw in “the old days.”

You won’t find any in PRINCE OF EGYPT. Its flat, cardboard characters, as embarrassing as they are boring to watch act like amateurs in a bad high school play. If they frown and yell they are angry. No nuance, not even bits of business. And again it does not matter if animator X or Y did a given character. The result would have been pretty well the same because the animator made a preexisting storyboard move rather than create a unique flesh and blood character. The apparent marvel in TARZAN (which I enjoyed) is that he skateboards like Glen Keane’s son through the trees. In dozens of articles this is Glen Keane’s main contribution to the film, we are told.. Had Glen Keane, one of our top animators today not done the Tarzan character, how different would the character had turned out? Had he been done by one of the other top Disney animators today, what would be different? What did Glen Keane (or anyone else working today) add to the storyboard, sketches and posing that would be unique to this animator? Tarzan may have swung on a vine, and probably lost some fine subtle acting in a number of scenes but not much else. Similarly the mother gorilla would still have been a standard dew-eyed mother type, who, watched silent would have only stock mother animation to show. The “father” gorilla would be just as gruff a character, frowning through the film, whose unique personality would be just as elusive. Animate the storyboard, repeat the formula, create stock characters rather than unique animation characters and experiences. The experiences will come from the computer effects, not from our involvement with the characters. So when Belle and Beast dance and grow closer, we are zooming around the room on yet another roller coaster ride, even swooping around angel paintings on the ceiling rather than getting intimate with the characters. Had they had computers when CINDERELLA was produced I suppose we would have seen Cinderella dancing with the Prince at the ball, interrupted by swooping shots into the fountains they danced around.

Tarzan says he wants to be “the best ape ever.” As he grows up his arms and legs extend so he assumes the Proportions of a simian when needed. It’s kinda creepy. Mowgli was raised by wolves in THE JUNGLE BOOK but didn’t grow fur and a tail as he aged. He did try to climb a tree like a panther and extended his arms outwards (in their right proportion) to simulate a bear as he imitated Baloo’s waddle walk and it was a fleeting magic touch. The early part of TARZAN could have used some similar animation to inspire a touch of awe or magic rather than standard relationships and the serviceable but hardly inspired animation this brings. There is so much yak yak yak in animated features today. We prefer to say something rather than show it, leaving little room for the magic of the past.

Yet, today’s animators at all levels are better artists than those of the past. Even those near the bottom of the film credits are superb draftspeople. We’ve come a long way from the days when only Disney had art classes. We hear that recruiters for the studios prize good life drawing over imagination and cartooning skills. THE PRINCE OF EGYPT is the sterile result. Just think what solid life drawing AND other animation-related art skills would yield! I’ll take rougher imaginative drawing over cold correct drawing any day. And “cartoon” is not a dirty word.

The highest achievement in animation of the human male hero has “always” been Milt Kahl’s Prince Phillip in SLEEPING BEAUTY. But I think that Phoebus in THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME Is superior in every way, without Kahl’s occasional stiffness or PRINCE OF EGYPT’S woodenness.

We have a greater array of fantastic talent in greater numbers than ever before, and we are wasting it. Our potential gourmet chefs are cooking hot dogs. Their potential is incredible, their opportunities limited.

They say that a fish stinks from the head, and the blame for today’s malaise goes to our producers today. Before animation meant big bucks it was led by dedicated producers who were as interested in filmmaking as they were in profits. A producer creates opportunities for those he hires. He is a creator not only of jobs but of careers. How high is that in the list or priorities today?

There are many studios today that produce television animated series that do not even do their own animation. They send it out to be done in foreign countries, usually the Far East. They produce footage, product, not a creative endeavor. They call themselves animation studios but don’t do animation! They are preproduction and postproduction companies. They do storyboards, soundtracks, character etc design And that quicksand of hopes, “ posing”. People are hired to do posing of characters but not animation. The real animation is done by strangers who go through the motions without emotion, imagination or craft. They make the storyboards move using the posing as guides. It is a mechanical operation.

These companies still have the temerity to call themselves animation companies yet the heart of the whole enterprise (animation-duh!) is sent out to be done by people who have less talent than those who create the storyboards and posing that guide them. I’ve never heard of a restaurant that sent its food out to be cooked. It wouldn’t be a real restaurant if it did. A company that does pre and post production is not an animation company. It is a packager only, that does not understand that it is the act and the art of animation that will either bring their story and characters to full life or remain mere moving drawings, storyboards brought to a zombie-looking form of “life” that passes for animation. So where does this leave today’s artists? Doing storyboards and posing, usually, a far cry from the training and personality the Thomas’, Johnstons and Kahls received. So now we ride the movies.

We ooh and ahh over layouts, design and of course special effects. I love Deep Canvas in TARZAN. It’s done and used well. But I never heard of a live-action feature’s publicity that told audiences “Just wait until you see the sets Mel, Julia,Tom and the other actors act in!!!!! Effects and the like cannot replace characters we care about, made real by the art and craft of animation. A moment of animation magic is worth a hundred moving backgrounds. And it’s twice as filling for the spirit. Effects may excite some senses, but they cannot touch the heart.

A near-constant McDonald’s-type animation is making us complacent audiences, used to an ever- expanding but less nourishing ocean of animation. Are today’s audiences undeserving of a new PINOCCHIO? No. Are today’s animators not talented enough to eventually produce a new PINOCCHIO someday? No. Do producers have the uhm, courage to do a new PINOCCHIO? No.

Our audiences, our talent and our art are all being shortchanged.

Peter Adamakos is an animation producer and director who founded an animation company 28 years ago. He is also founded the Animation Museum which has sent travelling exhibitions to museums in various countries for many years. He also teaches in animation. He can be reached at e-mail or at P.O. Box 37009, 3332 McCarthy Road, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada KlV OWO.