Kung Fu Dangerfield
Feature length—72 minutes or longer — animated films are among the most expensive movie projects to come out of Hollywood. Additionally, they are also among some of the highest grossing films of all time, earning hundreds of millions of dollars in their initial release and, frequently, a billion dollars or more over the life of the film with sales of DVDs and related merchandise added in.
A quick look at the numbers will tell you that while families with children are a substantial part of the audience for these films and their ancillary products, there just aren’t enough of them to make up the total dollar volume being spent on them. Somebody besides mom, pop, and the kids are buying tickets, the DVDs, and the toys.
And yet…!
Business journalists, entertainment writers, and movie critics persist in referring to anything animated as childrens’ films at worst and, at best, family films. In the process, they are relegating millions of adults—filling multiplexes for eight, nine, and ten p.m. screenings of animated films —to the same kind of oblivion reserved for post 40-year-old television audiences. In other words, we don’t exist.
Note the surprise in the following excerpt from Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily blog:
North American box office gross expanded bigger than expected this weekend -- a gargantuan 25% more dollars taken in than the same weekend last year. DreamWorks Animation's feisty pot-bellied Kung Fu Panda distributed by Paramount led the way, fighting to a $60 million finish after opening to $20.3 million Friday and $22.5 million Saturday … The two studios were surprised how much the PG panda pic played like a non-family film. … exit polls showed that 55% of the audience was female, and 51% over age 25, and 71% age 17 and older.
Ms. Finke was hardly alone in her thinking about Kung Fu Panda as critic after critic continued to refer to it as a “children’s” movie, even as they praised the film’s beautiful artwork and inventive updating of a traditional underdog story.
Although Ms. Finke did do an admirable job of illustrating the typical entertainment industry journalist’s appalling lack of knowledge regarding one of the industry’s most creative, not to mention profitable, mediums:
Kung Fu Panda’s success just goes to show that DreamWorks Animations' strategy of making 90-minute toons is shrewd: not only can theaters get in a lot of screenings, but both parents and offspring can sit through anything that short without too much squirming. (Actually, this panda received rave reviews.) Plus, I have a pet theory: almost any animated film featuring characters with fur does better at the box office. Anyway, with great tracking showing big awareness and wanna-see by parents and kids, Kung Fu Panda performed better than expected.
This last bit of wisdom must have come as news to the folks over at Disney Animation, which has been churning out feature animated films roughly 85 minutes, on average, in length, with a plethora of characters of all types for nearly 80 years.
Even the venerable New York Times finds it difficult to get its journalistic mind out of the sandbox when writing about animated films. In a recent article about the relative success of the Walt Disney Company’s purchase of Pixar Animation Studios, writer Brook Barnes felt it necessary to focus on the Mouse’s concern over the sale of toys to young boys following the upcoming release of Pixar’s WALL•E, rather than the possibility that the Emeryville animation studio might create another award-winning film of universal appeal along the lines of Ratatouille:
As with Cars, Disney is counting on Wall-E, set for release on June 27, to take off with a tough crowd: little boys. It has prepared a collection of 300 robot-themed consumer products that will arrive on store shelves over the next month.
It’s Da Boomers
How did animation get to be considered kiddie fare? After all, if you look back over its history, its pretty clear that today’s animated features arose from a tradition of late 19th and early 20th century news print and magazine cartooning with a focus on gags geared to adult sensibilities of the day.
It was television that would seemingly forever condemn animation to the realm of children’s entertainment. With the Baby Boom and suburban housing explosions of the ‘50s and ‘60s came an increasing need to keep kids occupied. Hollywood responded by quickly recycling and repackaging for broadcast the least offensive of its library of animated shorts, and next by commissioning assembly-line style, animated programming.
From crude syndicated series, such as Clutch Cargo, to the limited animation of Hanna Barbera series, such as Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, The Jetsons, Johnny Quest, and Scooby Doo, animation became relegated to the role of after-school baby sitter.
Don’t blame Disney for this transition. Many of that studio’s early shorts featured barnyard gags that centered around cow udders and some seemingly cruel—by today’s standards—and often misogynistic treatment of animals and female characters. Additionally, animated short films were used to loosen up audiences prior to screening films of every genre, not simply family films.
Even after the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which resulted in Walt Disney being crowned the king of family entertainment, he and his artists continued to advance the medium of animation by producing films with characters and storylines that appealed to a broad spectrum of audiences. Some, like Victory Through Air Power, were message pictures clearly intended for adult audiences. Fantasia, with its nymphs and satyrs, was well ahead of its time, and The Three Caballeros…well let’s just say Donald was a very naughty boy.
While humorous, it’s pretty obvious in this clip from Disney’s The Three Caballeros that Donald’s intentions are anything but childlike.
Clip copyright© Disney. All rights reserved.
Donald’s psychedelic turn as a hummingbird pollinating flowers and his own Dance of the Hours, with a ranchero full of cacti, raised more than a few moral eyebrows when Caballeros first debuted.
Clip copyright© Disney. All rights reserved.
It is true that following Walt Disney’s death in 1966, his studio, more or less, operated on autopilot for many years. His successors fell into a trap of doing “What Walt would do,” not realizing that such thinking forced them to stand still as time and events began passing them by at an increasingly rapid pace.
Things changed, however, and a new generation of animators and animation directors began making animated films not just for kids and families but also for the same audiences that were lining up for films like Star Wars, ET, Indiana Jones, and Close Encounters, classic tales told in new and daring ways by bold filmmakers like Spielberg and Lucas.
The early ‘90s was the dawn of the second golden age of Disney animation. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King drew audiences in unprecedented numbers and set box office records, with Beauty and the Beast winning a Best Picture (Musical or Comedy) Golden Globe award and going on to become the first animated film to be nominated for an Academy Award®.
At the turn of century, Pixar Animation Studios and DreamWorks Animation emerged as powerhouse studios often competing against one another for the Motion Picture Academy’s Best Animated Feature Film award.
Granted, not every animated film released in the past 20 years has been high cinematic art, and more than a few were made just for kids. They remain the exception to the new rule of animated filmmaking.
Pixar’s Brad Bird has written and directed two of the most critically acclaimed animated films of all time: The Incredibles and Ratatouille, both of which were highly regarded for the quality of their stories as well as their brilliant animation and art direction. It was even suggested that Ratatouille be nominated for last year’s Best Picture Academy Award.
So why then does it seem like everyone in “mainstream media” feels obliged to speak of feature animated films in the narrowest of kid and family friendly terms?
I don’t know. Do you?
C’ya real soon!
Early poster for the theatrical release of Disney's The Three Caballeros.
Image copyright© Disney. All rights reserved.
