Hollywood’s Continuing War On Animation

https://twitter.com/DiscussingFilm/status/1663630369030111234

Yep, it’s not just Disney anymore, though they are still the worst offender.

Loosely based on the novel series by Cressida Cowell, the How To Train Your Dragon franchise spans movies and television, both animated. However, someone in their lack of wisdom now wants to do a live-action version. This is after numerous flops by Disney in their attempts to replace their own animated legacy of the “Disney Renaissance” and even fun hybrid movies like Pete’s Dragon with totally photorealistic CG and live-action hybrid movies. While some of it can be blamed on the social reengineering being done by modern Hollywood, preaching to an audience who doesn’t want to hear it and playing to media snobs who won’t watch it despite demanding that message, the real problem is the translation itself. Even the pandering-free ones have ignored Disney’s animated roots, which means they’ve forgotten why they exist as a studio in the first place.

This is of course to play to the aforementioned media snobs, the ones who look down on cartoons, comic books, and video games as “lesser media”. Whiny actors and directors led the Oscars to shove animated movies into their own category less they dare end up on a “best picture” list alongside their live-action “superiors”. Studios replace voice actors with the “approved” Hollywood celebrities who are only doing it so their kids can tell them how awesome it is to hear mommy and daddy in their favorite shows. Making a live-action version of a kids book made into an already successful kids franchise is not surprising, but it shows how little modern Hollywood cares about any storytelling that isn’t about them.

Disney has been the worst offender and given that Walt Disney’s successes started in animation that’s pretty bad. Sure, he and the later studio productions had their share of live-action material as early as the original The Mickey Mouse Club, but that’s not what built the House Of Mouse. Walt fought hard to get arguably the first animated feature film out there, believing that he could make a feature length cartoon into theaters and draw (no pun intended) an audience. And he was right. The movie is still considered one of the most important in film history and garners many fans. This flies in the face of the Hollywood ego who thinks it only matters if we see them playing the roles.

Today’s Disney seems to be right along with them, but that doesn’t include the fans. Look at the scene above from the 1937 film. Lucille La Verne gives a vocal performance between transformations few celebs would match and too many of today’s celebs would hate finishing the movie in the makeup required because it meant you wouldn’t see them, you’d see the character. The cinematography is amazing not only for the time but for what you can get away with in animation versus live-action, even with today’s effects. So many of the minor details work because of the unreality of the setting that animation allows for, something I’ve gone over before. To achieve the same effects the production company has to try to make all of that believable in a real world setting despite being things that can’t happen in a real world and can’t be achieved practically. That transformation works because the effect is done the same way as the rest of the cartoon, making it feel more like it’s happening in the world rather than something outside of it. The minor details are things most directors wouldn’t think of, like the crows reactions that would look weird in a “real” bird. In short there is no @#$%#$% way you could fully recreate this sequence in live-action and have give the same feeling of fear and excitement in it’s audience.

You can see that in the most recent Little Mermaid movie. There’s something called the “uncanny valley”, where something may look realistic on the surface but the details are picked up even subconsciously by our brains because there are details we don’t think of. Seeing a realistic crab singing and dancing is weird and doesn’t have the expression of his animated counterpart, and many fans of the original can’t wrap their heads around Flounder looking like a real fish. You can make a cartoon animal do things that photorealistic animals can’t so the more “real” you make it the less real our brain takes it, ruining the illusion and just coming off as silly. The best example is the remake of The Lion King.

The original animation looks more lively because making the photorealistic animals they’re trying to pass off as the real thing doing the same moves would just be too jarring and break the immersion they’re going for. It just wouldn’t work and the end result by nature is something that just doesn’t have the same life as the original. The obsession with “realism” doesn’t work if the original was created with unreality in mind. It’s why whenever they have Looney Tunes interacting with humans they’re still 2D cartoons or 3D animation trying to replicate the 2D style rather than having Bugs Bunny be an actual rabbit. I mean, what breed is he? He’s too tall to be a normal bunny and while not full humanoid (the reason I don’t get off on Lola) it’s still human enough to not be real.

Throwing away their animated legacy is tossing out all the hard work of animators who went out of their way to study animals in action, create backgrounds and characters that feel real to their world while not being real in our world, the voice actors who give better vocal performances than most live-action actors trying to act with only their voice instead of body language and facial expressions (not everyone can be Jack Black, Malcom McDowell, or Mark Hamill), and everyone else who makes these animated worlds come alive. Instead you have snobs who think live-action is better because they can’t conceive of a world outside their own, which is also where some of the race swaps occur, but that’s a whole other discussion. It isn’t supposed to reflect our reality but stand on it’s own, with only enough elements for us to understand what’s going on and relate to these characters. Animation is amazing to those whose egos can handle it not being about their performance. There’s a reason directors used to try to hire unknowns in adaptations, so the audience would see the character rather than the actor playing that character. That worked for Superman in both the old serials and the 1978 movie.

So now Universal is following Disney in denying the success of even more recent animated productions by doing a live-action remake of a franchise that already has a huge number of fans young and old in animated form between the movies and TV series. This feels like a huge mistake and fans of animation both casually and die-hard “toon heads” are starting to get sick of it, regardless of whatever “message” is attached to it. Then you have Netflix doing live-action “de-makes” of Japanese animated works that really don’t connect with the regular audience. The changes made to Death Note and especially Cowboy Bebop have irked fans and now One Piece fans are concerned about what will happen, but instead of trashing animation they should be promoting it. Cowboy Bebop and Ghost In The Shell were so much better in animation because they embraced the strength of the format. You CAN make a decent translation. Alita: Battle Angel is a fair example though to me Speed Racer wasn’t, trying to use the flashy nature of animation that wasn’t even used that often in the Mach Go Go Go anime. There are still fans who swear by it, and that’s fine. My point isn’t to shame anyone who prefers the live-action version, but while the live-action Rurouni Kenshin looks interesting and I would love to check it out sometime what I have seen isn’t as cool to me as the original anime because the story and visuals were built around that medium.

I heard on some stream earlier this week that Japan has no problem with animation, though like anywhere else there are those who don’t care for it according to videos I’ve seen. That’s fine. However, when the live version doesn’t match the drawn version and is clearly inferior, maybe you should try to understand the media format you’re swiping from and see why it has fans in the first place, which they won’t do any of the other “lesser media” like comics and video games, which get far better adaptations in Japan (most of the time) into other media because they have respect for what they’re adapting whether they’re fans or not. It’s a lesson Hollywood should look at if they want to get people interested in their “prefered” format, or they should just get their heads unstuck and see the beauty in animation, which they won’t because their egos get in the way.

Walt Disney once said that they should always remember it was all started by a mouse. Today’s Disney hasn’t just forgotten their animation roots, they’re outright hostile to it. Even on TV most of their shows are animated by other studios and they just distribute it, and they’re only made for preschoolers. Today that mouse would be photorealistic CG and wouldn’t win people’s hearts the same way Mickey did. It’s another reason Walt’s legacy and hard work seems to be ending with a squeak nobody can hear.