Ellen Besen

What do audiences want? And why should we care?

There seems to be a consensus that the American public doesn’t particularly like adult animation and that they don’t take easily to anything new. Because of this, studios keep making the same pictures over and over again and won’t look twice at anything innovative. This, in turn, is a source of helpless frustration among animators.

If you accept that this perception of the audience is true, then the studios’ position seems quite logical. After all, they are about profits and this seems to be their best guarantee of financial success. But is this the whole truth? And true or not, as animators, it is our only choice to suck it up?

There is a dance that goes on between audience and film. In fact, to me, a film doesn’t really feel finished until it has been seen several times by an audience. So what is the true nature of this interaction and how much room does it have for variation? The status quo puts the audience’s perceived expectations at the top of the list. But is that really what the relationship between the filmmaker and the audience should be? After all, it is one thing to be aware of the audience, quite another to be their slave.

Popeye grabbed the hearts and minds of audiences during the Great Depression. © King Features Syndicate Division.

Now the studios will say that they are just giving the audience what they say they want, as proven by box office and market research. But that is precisely where I have a problem because this fails to take into account that most audiences don’t actually know what they want, they only know what they’ve seen.

Real want is usually under the surface, often only revealed when an audience responds to the film in front of them. And the belief the studios are banking on that what the audience wanted yesterday is always what they want today doesn’t take into account that audience response is affected by circumstance and circumstance is always changing. Is it a coincidence that an Everyman hero like Popeye was so popular during the Great Depression or that The Simpsons were so quickly embraced after a decade of sickly sweet family comedies?

There is also the fact that, while audiences may know when they don’t like something, their ability to say why they don’t like it is limited. This reminds me of some students who complained that their teacher needed to wear more make up, when what was really bothering them was the lack of color in her teaching style. Comprehending the audience at this level demands a leap of understanding. But before we can make that leap, there are other things we should understand first.

Things like how audiences receive information: what part of the screen they tend to look at, how quickly they absorb information, how well they understand animated film language.

And we need to know what they know: which references are a given and which won’t be understood without further explanation.

We need to consider how subject matter marries with animation and how that interacts with audience expectations, as well. Animation is well suited to fantasy, which lets us make the audience’s dreams and nightmares, mythical past and projected future almost real.