Most consider Disney’s Snow White to be the first animated feature-length film. It was released in 1937, just ten years after the first feature film with sound. Having existed almost as long as films as we know them, it’s fair to say they form a whole category worth discussing. I like animation, but there are some trends that irritate me which were epitomised by Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur.
I want to note that I’m mainly going to discuss modern Western animated feature films in this article. I’d love to talk anime and discuss the excellent Studio Ghibli, but that’s for another time.
The CGI era began with Pixar’s Toy Story, the first computer animated feature. Not only did it slap Pixar on the animation map, it also set a high standard for the genre. Other studios struggled to make their mark, including Disney Animation themselves with forgettable releases like Valiant and Chicken Little, while Pixar had a stellar period of inventive and hilarious films including Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles.
For a time, no other studio matched Pixar in graphical quality. But that didn’t last, with lower budget features like Despicable Me and DreamWorks flagship series How To Train Your Dragon all holding their own against the champion, that’d fallen into that Cars 2 lull. The point is though, that we’re living in a time when it’s expected that all animated features at least look great.
It’s here that two schools of thought form. One says that we shouldn’t consider animated films to be in a separate category. They’re still films, after all, so why treat them differently because of how they’re made? The alternative says that animated films are inherently different to their live action counterparts. Nothing in them is real – there are no actors, no real sets, and they take us to places not constrained by our world.
I’m sympathetic to both ideas. I no longer think an animated film should receive praise just because it’s animated well. This is how I feel about CGI in general. I thought the CGI in Jurassic World was great. But praiseworthy? Not so much – we’ve seen dinosaurs before, and feed enough money into a studio and they’ll produce decent-looking stuff. But doing something creative or adventurous with CGI, for example the pinpoint-accurate modelling of zero-G explosions in Gravity or the space-distorting wormhole seen in Interstellar, is deserving of merit.
And this is how I feel about animated features today. I don’t care if it looks good, but I do care that it looks interesting. I do think animated films are different to live action – something that should be embraced. With the potential to create so many unique, imaginative worlds and atmospheres, it’s a crime if an animated film fails to take us anywhere memorable.
The best animated features do this. Toy Story gave us the universe of toys, a world we feel is well lived-in by our characters with its own set of quirks and rules. Monsters Inc showed us Monstropolis, filled with life and awesome bits of sci-fi brilliance like scream-fuel and portals. Wall-E, for goodness sake I love Wall-E, took us to a beautiful yet harrowing post-apocalyptic Earth before yanking the rug out from beneath us and sending us into space.
This is no longer unique to Pixar, either. The most stylistically creative animated features of the last few years have come from other studios. Big Hero 6 showed us a fresh world of collaboration by blending Eastern and Western cultures in its city of San Fransokyo. The Lego Movie surprised us all by showing us what we all thought would be a ninety minute advertisement for a toy and instead gave us a stop motion inspired world filled with commentaries on creativity and conformity.
Not all recent animated films satisfy me in this way, however. I loved Frozen as much as anyone but I didn’t think much for the world it built. The Nordic-inspired kingdom wound up looking fairly generic to me. And yeah her ice powers looked cool but that could have been accomplished in a live action film. Similarly, I enjoyed How To Train Your Dragon but again, I found the world-building a little lacking. It’s also set in a Nordic-looking city, and sure the characters look exaggerated and there are a lot of cool dragons, but did it need to be animated?
I think the best animated films are those that could only have existed as an animation. Yes, you can say that given the power of modern CGI, any animated feature could feasibly have been a live action film. However the amount of it you’d have to use to recreate something like Wall-E means that you may as well go one step further and animate the whole thing.
But what is my biggest gripe in modern animated films? At some point, it was decided that every animated film has to make the audience cry.
Now I know what you’re thinking: Oh Magoo, you just have no soul. You might be right. But I counter that by saying that I watched Up, cried like everyone does, and didn’t hate it. I just hate the trend. Why was Up so emotionally resonant? Because it featured a character who felt real, and through some ingenious storytelling showed us how his life has passed by with heartbreak, failed ambitions, and loss. But most of all, it caught us off guard.
I get why animators want to make us cry. They want their work to be taken seriously, and nothing does that better than emotional investment. If we can empathise with cartoons it means their characters have more meaning to us. That’s a worthy endeavour and I respect it. But these moments are so obvious and telegraphed that I cannot sit down to watch an animated film without knowing that at some stage it’s going to try to squeeze some tears out of me. Emotional response comes from surprise and heartfelt character moments, not manipulation.
Where did this begin? The culprit, of course, is Toy Story 2, in the scene where we learn how Jesse was abandoned. It’s heartbreaking for sure, but I never felt like it belonged in the film. Toy Story is about Woody and Buzz. That scene is only there to make us sympathetic towards a character we’d only just met, and give her some motivation behind her actions. And ever since then the moments have become worse. There’s the classic “are they really dead?” moment, as seen in Frozen, and the “have they forgotten everything?” moment, as seen in Big Hero 6 and Wall-E. The answer to both is obviously: No.
But hold a moment, this is nothing new, right? Bambi and The Lion King are famous examples of cartoons that make us wail. The point is that those moments are relevant to the story. Now, we have scenes tacked on that make us feel terribly sad just before everything is wrapped up. The best example of the difference might be Toy Story 3. It would have been the same film without the desperate incinerator scene, but not without the touching final moments when the toys are passed on. The former feels artificial, the latter is a genuine, heartfelt moment relevant to the themes and story.
It’s such a staple that all over the place people rank Pixar films based on nothing more than how much they cried. This is actually damaging to criticism because we’re falling into a trap of neglecting the film as a whole and focusing on the one effective tear-jerking scene.
Let’s get to it then: The Good Dinosaur. Don’t worry, if you haven’t seen it there won’t be any spoilers that aren’t clearly signposted, so keep reading.
The Good Dinosaur is set in an alternate history where the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs misses Earth entirely. Having survived, the dinosaurs have become intelligent. The story follows Arlo, the youngest member of a dinosaur family, and his quest to find courage.
Let me say that I don’t think it’s a terrible film. I like its evolutionary message. The dinosaurs use language and tools, the herbivores farm, the carnivores herd animals, and it drives home the point that fear is a necessary part of life. These were all milestones for human development of course, and it was nice to see these ideas explored. The raptors had feathers too – very cool. And yes, it contains the best-rendered animation I’ve ever seen, where at times I even thought the film must have mixed CGI with live action footage. It looked that real.
But there’s the problem. I don’t want an animated film to look real. I want it to make stylistic choices that can only exist in animation. I’ve already seen grassy hills, lush forests, and realistic water before. It’s all in a place called the real world. Why on Earth would we want to replicate it with animation instead of using our imaginations to create something unique and spectacular? And the dinosaurs themselves still looked bland and cartoony.
Not only was it extremely ordinary looking, it was also eerily devoid of life. Finding Nemo gave us the world of the ocean, buzzing with all kinds of life, societies, culture, and dangers. The Good Dinosaur gave us some countryside, with supporting characters wandering in and out of scenes like a bizarre slideshow of Arlo’s journey. Seriously, it’s like he walks from room to room, as if the land is invisibly partitioned like a video game. This is a world where dinosaurs survived, so where the heck are they?
The story itself – the latest incarnation of Hamlet – was also flatter than the average effort. By now we all know the formula. Even the critically worshipped Inside Out adhered to it stronger than most. But at least it explored an interesting theme. We almost had the “fear is healthy” message, but the film never did it justice.
And finally, let’s talk about crying. I hated Arlo. His appearance and voice grated on me so much because he was engineered deliberately to manipulate us into feeling sorry for him. So much so that we almost forgot that he had no personality except for being terrified of everything. In Up, Carl Fredrickson is a grumpy old man, but we care about him because of what happens to him and who he is, not how he looks.
And who didn’t see oh, I don’t know, everything coming.
(Spoiler warning. Highlight to read.) His father says: “I’m going to live to see each of you make your mark” and immediately we know he isn’t lasting another five minutes. We see a small child suspiciously absent of parents, so of course his parents turn out to be dead. And I did like the scene where this is revealed and how they communicate it to each other, but it was obvious what was going to happen. Did it add anything to the story? No. Not at all. At least The Lion King has a death that triggers the rest of the story, and is about fulfilling your destiny. Bambi is about how our parents won’t always be there for us. The Good Dinosaur is about overcoming and accepting fear, but also features an orphan child and whatever the fuck this was:
So in the end its emotional scenes didn’t have any lasting impact because we saw them coming and they were completely artificial. And it commits a sin of animation by setting the story in a universe utterly generic and unmemorable.
We can have emotional investment without being forced to cry. I feel like this is the 21st century superlative trend creeping into our films – everything has to be the worst or the saddest or we won’t buy into it. But films aren’t buzzfeed articles. It’d be nice if audiences were treated with a little more maturity.
Finally, you might say that I’ve just complained for two thousand words about films intended for children. To which I say: Wall-E is a satire on consumerism and about how we need a machine to teach us how to be human again – it’s clear that they’re not exclusively for kids. As adults we can appreciate the aesthetics and creativity of the design behind fictional worlds, and the themes that the films choose to explore. My hope is that animation continues to take us to exciting places and explore fresh ideas, and that not everything boils down to a walk through a marvel of CGI just to get to the next tear-jerking scene.
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