The best thing to happen to American animation in the last few decades has been the industry’s realization that cartoons should be allowed to look like cartoons.
I grew up during a modern golden age of Disney animation - THE LITTLE MERMAID, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, ALADDIN and THE LION KING all hit theaters while I was in grade school. These movies were all gorgeously animated and, as such, spoiled me completely rotten. It got to the point where, as American animated films started to shift towards computer graphics and all my friends were getting into imported anime like DRAGON BALL Z, I found myself unable to get past just how ugly everything looked.
The first few Pixar movies won me over with their novelty but as soon as that newness wore off, I just met the movies with a sense of indifference. MONSTERS, INC? More like MONSTERS, STINK. Ditto SHREK, ICE AGE and the ugly-as-sin animated television programs like REBOOT and BEAST WARS that were clogging up my Saturday mornings.
I know, I know - I’ve probably already lost some of you by this point. If you’re a fan of the films or television shows being churned out via computer in the late ‘90s or early ‘00s, I’m just going to sound like an angry old man yelling at a cloud and nothing I can say or do will convince you of the fact that you weren’t watching a PS1 cut scene come to life and calling it “cutting edge.”
It got so bad that I actually checked out of most animated films from 2001 to 2008. It wasn’t until BOLT of all movies that I decided to give American animation another shake. A Jenny Lewis soundtrack is responsible for getting me over my prejudice but I had also just come to the point in my life where I learned to chill out and not take everything so seriously. In other words, I learned how to settle. Specifically, I settled for the fact that computer animation was here to stay. The good news was that some movies - the HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON movies, WALL-E and RANGO to name a few - actually looked quite beautiful.
By this point, studios were starting to develop their house styles and you could tell just by looking at a still of the film whether a movie was made by Pixar, Dreamworks, Blue Sky or - shudder - Illumination. Europe and Asia were still making more visually and thematically interesting animated films, but every now and then I’d find an American animated film that caught my eye and imagination.
More so, I slowly started to notice that the industry - previously obsessed with dancing on the edge of the Uncanny Valley in its pursuit of utter realism - was starting to birth outliers. Genndy Tartakovsky, previously a master of 2D animated television shows like SAMURAI JACK and DEXTER’S LABORATORY, was given the reigns to a big-budget studio CGI franchise (the HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA films) and the result was a stretchy, exaggerated ode to physicality that would make Chuck Jones proud. SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE and THE MITCHELLS VS. THE MACHINES were kinetic collages of multiple animation styles, layered thick on top of each other like a Grand Slam breakfast platter of art and expression. Most recently, PUSS IN BOOTS: THE LAST WISH appeared in theaters and decimated the visual aesthetic previously established in that most hated of franchises - the visually boring pool of puerile mediocrity that is the SHREK films.
PUSS IN BOOTS: THE LAST WISH combines the soft brush strokes of a fairy tale illustration with the vivid colors and hard edges of a comic book or eastern animated film. The result features vibrant aesthetics that perfectly match the film’s kinetic direction. See also Dreamworks’ recent THE BAD GUYS -a film that utilized a similar approach. In fact, Dreamworks has been nailing it as of late - making some truly outstanding animated films that really push the format forward in exciting ways.
Are these movies aping the approach of the Oscar-winning SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE? Chasing innovation? Maybe - but who cares? I am completely on board with this newfound willingness the American animation industry has to produce films and television shows that aren’t afraid to stretch the rules of reality.
It’s the same with the kind of comic book art I like - I can appreciate a good Alex Ross-painted book as much as the next guy, but give me the stylized artwork of Darwyn Cooke, Mike Mignola, Mike Allred, Michael Cho, Doc Shaner and Elsa Charretier and I’m in hog heaven.
Reality is reality - I can watch a live-action movie if I want a movie that lives by the dogmatic rules of the known universe. Animation gives audiences the chance to see something that doesn’t exist move in ways that shouldn’t be possible. Things are allowed to get weird and - in a world where the truly weird is a luxury - this is exciting to me.
If PUSS IN BOOTS: THE LAST WISH is a clue to the direction mainstream American animation is headed, I’m down for whatever comes next. Yes, even (chokes back vomit) a SHREK sequel.