Illustration by Andreas Hykade. Courtesy of Chris J. Robinson.

So you’ve decided to quit something. All you had to do was wait for the magic clock on the wall to hit midnight and then everything would be well again. If you say it, it will come true. Right? Well… if that was the case… you wouldn’t be making this promise for the 11th consecutive year.

My cynical side loathes New Year’s (hell… we’re just guessing that it’s really a New Year anyway) along with its litter of year in reviews. They’re naïve and fanciful, filled with that Hollywood/Christian wishy wishy pixie fairy dust befitting three-year-olds’, not adults’, notion that we can just scrub the slate clean and start again. Years in Review wrongly suggest that the past can be easily compressed into readily definable categories, categories which we have developed based, in this case, on days, months and years (and from there, decades). These categories lead us to believe that we can pinpoint with ease the beginning and end points of various streams, trends or more precisely, moments. Within this mindset, there are no overlaps, inconsistencies or broken links. Everything wraps up real nice like a Rugrats flick. We might for example look back on 2003 and say… this was the year animation hit rock bottom, that 2D animation died, Disney is falling apart, or that evil-doing was brought to an end with the capturing of a single Iraqi. Nonsense, of course (and OK… yeah… sure… Johnny Cash and Jules Engel did in fact die… but they were dying BEFORE the moment they actually died).

I was afraid to ask questions in class because it would reveal my stupidity. I saw other kids laugh at kids who asked questions. I didn’t want to be laughed at. So I stayed quiet and just took everything in whether I understood it or not. I passed classes, but barely.

The problem with year in reviews or even resolutions is they do not ask questions. Reviews make statements that are so clear and concise that you’d have to be an idiot not to understand it. There is little room for questioning. They are just summaries but summaries of the seemingly FINAL moment. They don’t bother with the other moments and actually very wrongly assume that this moment is the FINAL moment. We read these summaries, take them for granted and move on. Why? Cause they appear so obvious that we’d feel stupid if we doubted them. And secondly… life’s a hell of a lot easier when it’s easily categorized. So we almost never ever question the validity of these summaries. We never ask, for example, WHO is saying this, from whose perspective are we getting this “take.”

Let’s take animation hitting rock bottom. Says who? Finding Nemo was #1 at the box office, Triplets of Belleville is achieving critical success beyond animation circles, more features are being made than ever before, more animation short films are being made than ever before (just look at festival entry numbers). OK… so Klasky Csupo, Warners, and a few others are slicing staff… C.O.R.E. Digital, for example, was hiring as were an assortment of other small studios. It’s like that every year. The pendulum swings, baby.

Outside of here, Korea’s animation scene is flourishing and the Estonians had a huge domestic box office hit with Ladybird’s Christmas. Plympton finished yet another feature. Anne Marie Fleming made a first animated feature. They’re all probably feeling pretty darn good about animation right now. Animation continues to dominate television images. Internet animation continues to expand and grow. If all this is happening, how can animation be in a terrible slump? Whose slump is it? So to turn around and summarize 2003, as the year of the slump in animation would be quite misleading, offering a rather one-sided perspective on what we call animation. Not everyone in animation gives a shit about Roy Disney.