Despite the increased number of animated projects coming out within the last 20 years and animation’s skyrocketing profitability, animators are still working to have critics and the general public recognize animation as a legitimate art form and not solely children’s entertainment.
There have been three animated films nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards – Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” in 1991 and Pixar’s “Up” and “Toy Story 3″ nearly 20 years later. Since the creation of the “Best Animated Feature” award at the Oscars, 15 out of the 23 films that have won in the category were produced by Disney or Pixar, with both studios having 31 combined nominations for the award.
With Disney owning Pixar since before their two Best Picture nominations – and both being large brand names in kids entertainment – the animation industry has largely been reduced to a genre for kids rather than an artistic medium for creatives to experiment across genres.
Simon Burdick, an animator at Rockstar Games and USC alum, said that the perception of animation being childish can be traced back to how animation was initially used in Hollywood: to create shorts to show in theaters prior to live action features.
“This kind of set the stage for audiences to say, ‘oh, this is something I don’t take seriously. This is something stupid and silly and kids like it’,” Burdick said. “And that immediately created this infantilization of hand-drawn media in America.”
Burdick said that this has affected the way people perceive the work that he and his contemporaries do, and it was something that he was conscious of when he started studying art and animation history.
“I spent a lot of time really studying art from da Vinci and Michelangelo, sketching sculptures, and learning about real anatomy, because that’s what all of the great animators do,” Burdick said. “Richard Williams, the creator of ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’, did a fully pencil drawn short with adult themes and really intense art called ‘Prologue.’ Even if people don’t see Roger Rabbit as high art, it’s impossible to dismiss ‘Prologue’ as kids’ entertainment, and that motivated me to really hone my craft.”
Animation’s ability to tell complex stories in an alternative manner to live action filmmaking is something that creatives in the film industry have built their entire careers off of.
Alex Bulkley is the co-founder of SHADOWMACHINE, an animation and production studio that produced animated television series like “Robot Chicken” and “BoJack Horseman.” Most recently, Bulkley won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2023 for his work on “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.”
When receiving the award, del Toro said that animation was cinema and not a genre for kids, a sentiment that Bulkley echoed when he emphasized animation’s role as a medium.
“Historically, there’s an opinion that live-action as a medium carries more sophistication in its storytelling potential than animation, and I think that’s wrong,” Bulkley said. “If you were to say a painting is more powerful than a photograph, or vice versa, I think that’s a false debate. At the end of the day, both are artistic expressions and the chosen media for an artist.”
Bulkley said that this idea of animation being a medium is even more apparent when looking at the variety of different animation formats creatives have utilized to best tell their stories.
“CG animation and stop-motion animation provide a lot of lighting and textures and camera moves, which creates more of a cinematic effect,” Bulkley said. “In 2D, you have the opportunity for performance in close-ups, because of how nuanced the expressions can be with the pantomime slumps and expressions to show surprise or happiness. Those are all tools within each of the animated formats that really provide vastly different experiences across films.”
Similarly, the role of screenwriters, directors and other creatives in the filmmaking process is something that Bulkley said remains relatively consistent across animated and live-action films. Despite the difference in filmmaking media, he said critics should consider the similar roles when nominating films for award shows.
“The director of photography is doing the exact same thing in an animated film as they are in live-action films, but instead of shooting on one set at a time they have several animated backdrops to work with,” Bulkley said. “From wardrobe to editing and screenplays, all of the artists work just as hard for animated features. I think that the reason these films are not nominated is because of the preexisting optic of animated films being for children, which, again, isn’t true.”
However, the most important difference in the production of animated and live-action films lies in the time it takes to make the film.
Mitchell Block is a documentary filmmaker and a member of the Academy Award committee that determines films selected for the Best Animated Feature award. He said that animation takes significantly longer to produce compared to live-action films.
“My newest documentary film is 15 minutes long, and I shot it in one day. But if it was an animated film, I would be lucky to be able to create a minute or two a day,” Block said. “The process is inherently slow because everything in the frame is created. Just the simple process of some character walking through a location requires multiple drawings, and so it takes longer, and costs more money.”
Block also said the expensive production of animated films and its slower pace affects the number of animated films being produced and financed, and, in turn, the number of serious animated films that are nominated at award shows.
“Ultimately, the film industry is a business first, and it’s not really practical to make indie movies for Sundance that are animated because animation is expensive,” Block said. “It’s not that there isn’t interest at the creative end to make intelligent, thoughtful, animated movies. The problem is that those kinds of films have a hard time at both the box office and streaming platforms compared to the commercialized, children’s animated films. So less of them are financed.”
In spite of the hurdles faced by the animation industry on a commercial and critical level, Bulkley said that he has experienced a cultural shift in the way the public perceives animation. He said that he sees the financial barrier as the last hurdle that animation needs to overcome in order to make Hollywood recognize independent animation as true art like they did with “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.”
“It can be a hard ask to have a lot of the studios and the financiers take a big risk in financing animated projects, but Netflix took that risk with us on ‘Pinocchio’ and it paid off commercially and critically,” Bulkley said. “Audiences are beginning to see the value of animation and the creatives have seen it for a while, and I think studios will start doing the same after seeing our success. I predict that we’re going to see a lot more animation in the years to come, and that will hopefully mean that more animation is recognized because of the unique stories that are being told.”