day 26 - 27/11/20 : Animation and Film as Art

To start this off, I will unashamedly say I've watched the animated film Inside Out multiple times and every single time, I can't help but tear up a bit. With that out in the air, I do want to make a defense of animation. There's two misconceptions I want to address; firstly, that animation is a genre and secondly, that animation is for kids. It's harder to defend the latter without people accusing you of religiously watching Peppa Pig but I'll try to give it a fair whack.

Saying animation is a genre is tantamount to saying movies shot on film or digitally are genres. In practice, there's little to tell them apart. Animation is, rather, a medium of storytelling. To demonstrate my point, let's take the animated TV series Bojack Horseman and the unrivalled tear-jerker Inside Out. What are they about? Bojack (forgive me, I've only watched the pilot. I'm using IMDB) is about a past-his-prime celebrity struggling through addiction and a fading popular relevancy. Inside Out is about a girl moving house while her personified emotions come to terms with the change. On paper, these sound like polar-opposite stories. Further to this, if you were to make live-action versions of Bojack Horseman and Inside Out, anything binding them together such as a genre label as 'animated' would be stripped away and you'd plainly see them as completely independent from each other. Why then do we group such animated movies together as a genre when a label such as animated doesn't even begin to tell you anything about their stories? For example, let's say someone says their favourite genre of shows and films is Animation. Their taste could go from Sleeping Beauty to Rick & Morty or from Isle of Dogs to My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. To me, putting such a wide and diverse range of story types together feels disingenuous and under appreciative of the medium. Yes, a large part of kids shows are animated. That's precisely their value. With animated films, you can tell such a captivating range of stories, in such greater detail and without any constraints to practicalities that would be incurred with traditional film-making. That's how animation can lend itself so well to kids TV that is already catered to a market of kids bubbling up with imagination and excitement towards a talking pig and her family. These shows do not 'dictate' the market however. ATLA was released on Nickelodeon towards pre-teens and yet, remains to be a superb and well-loved show for audiences in their 20s and 30s. I don't see the point of depriving yourself from watching truly enjoyable and unique stories unfold supposedly because you're intimidated by the 8 year old sitting beside you. Good TV is good TV, regardless of age.

Happily, in the near future, I believe that regardless of whether your opinion of animation becomes less critical, the lines between animation and live-action will be faded away. In the past few years, we've already seen multiple live-action films shot in a digital sandbox, wholly reliant on animation. Ready Player One, Alita: Battle Angel, the Disney live-action remakes and story-based video games all demonstrate this point beautifully. One of the best ways I see this playing out is to a similar modus operandi in the production of the games Detroit: Become Human by Quantic Dream of The Last Of Us by Naughty Dog. In both cases, these games were able to achieve the fantastical surrealism and world-building possible through animation as well as the realism and emotional depth common in typical film-making. Both games had real actors perform every movement, every cutscene and every double-tap to jump and then rendered this into an animated computer-built room through motion capture. While this is already pretty fckn neat, they added to this by 'filming' each scene in this rendered room. Replicating real-world camera angles and techniques in an animated plane gives the ultimate product the best of both worlds. Animation can offer added value to live-action just the same as what traditional film-making can offer animated films.

When franchises as popular as the MCU build so much of their spectacularism through special effects off of animation, it becomes much more difficult to cage in animation as simply a genre. Imagine Tony Stark flying through the sky with no Iron Man suit and just sailing suspended on strings in front of a green screen. Imagine in place of the hulk, a very normal looking Mark Ruffalo stamping his feet, grunting "Hulk, smash" and struggling to put a dent in a car's bonnet. So many popular films that owe their success to animation suddenly lose that piz-azz.

A lot of the arguments I see when asserting that animation is for kids spawns from a misunderstanding that film is solely a form of entertainment, rather than an art form in its own right. The best counter-argument I have to this is vested in the 2017 film, Loving Vincent. Just like every film but for this one I mean it literally when I say, every frame is a painting. More than 100 artists from around the world contributed 65,000 paintings in creating it over the span of 6 years. Edited together identically to stop-motion animation, this art about an artist acts as a biography of Vincent Van Gogh. In this way, it becomes clear to see how Animation is the crossover between the new world of film and the old world of visual arts. Would Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse have the same critical acclaim if it was live-action like its predecessors or would it be dismissed as a vain reboot? Maybe not, but one of its true values is how when every frame is a work of art, the whole is so unimaginably greater than the sum of its parts. In the case of Loving Vincent as well as Into The Spiderverse, I think their value as an artform - above the contempt of over-mature adults - is self-evident and actualised by how ground-breaking they prove to be and how they become landmark pieces of film for future generations of film-makers to emulate.