ABSTRACT
Before Toy Story came out in 1995, animated movies were hand-drawn. The average person on the street never considered a career in animation because it required a talent for drawing and painting. Computer graphics and Pixar’s Toy Story changed the landscape. Suddenly, you no longer needed artistic talent to be an animator. You needed only to know how to operate a computer. And if you were really lucky, you too could have one of those swell jobs at Pixar where you get to build a cave or saloon in your own personal work cubicle and ride cool scooters to fabulous onsite lunches that are included in your house-buying salary. Profitseeking animation schools sprang up overnight, promising exciting careers in the high-paying field of computer animation. Really, they said reassuringly, if you were expert with Maya software, your exciting career was a lock. Pixar’s success with Toy Story was followed in 1998 by Jeffrey Katzenberg’s new company, DreamWorks, and the second CG movie, Antz. In 2004, Disney closed its satellite animation studio in Florida and laid off 250 animators, technicians and assorted personnel, moving to shift from traditional animation and into CG for all of its animated movies. In 2006, when Disney bought Pixar for US$7 billion, Pixar cofounders John
Lasseter and Ed Catmull took over Disney Animation and, for a brief period, attempted to bring back traditional animation. That didn’t work, and by 2010 Disney was totally out of the hand-drawn feature animation business. This was good news for all those animation schools around the world because, with Disney not requiring drawing skills, there would be no reason at all to teach it. A few – a very few – schools, such as the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, Bournemouth University in England, Ringling School in Florida and Gobelins School of the Image in Paris, continued to require drawing skills, but by and large Disney’s move away from traditional animation opened the floodgates to a generation of mediocre entry-level animators, animation technicians rather than animation artists. They were young wizards on computers but could not tell a compelling visual story if their lives depended on it. They took their places on giant three-movies-per-year assembly lines at major Hollywood studios and proceeded to turn out mega-budget movies that were of debatable artistic worth but that were marketed brilliantly into billion-dollar returns. Pixar, which started as a shining light artistically with Toy Story, became a cog in the Disney Company marketing machine. John Lasseter personally directed the Cars franchise movies, which have been among the most successful marketing marvels in Disney history and which have not a whit of artistic value. Pixar drank Disney’s Kool-Aid and accepted some of its billions, and that is where things stand today. Animated feature-film technology has been harnessed to serve commerce.
There are many challenges that must be met if a studio is going to produce three or more big-budget feature films each and every year. It is, first of all, a miracle that even a single movie of any kind gets made, with the production-distribution-exhibition process as complex as it is. To make three financially successful movies in a year is equivalent to an Olympic figure skater trying to execute three triple-axle spins in 30 seconds. One is hard enough, and two in 30 seconds is historic. The third one in 30 seconds is quite likely to send the skater sprawling on the ice. Live-action movie studios such as MGM and Warner Brothers produced assembly-line movies in the 1930s and 1940s, and the result was a sea of celluloid mediocrity. The truth is that you cannot be creative in a hurry. On a three-pictures-per-year production schedule, consistent excellence is almost impossible. Did you ever hear of The Good Dinosaur? Pixar released that one after its hit Inside Out. Critical response was mediocre, mainly because of its weak script, and it flopped miserably at the box
