Cartoon Movies: Acting Their Age?

Cartoon Movies: Acting Their Age?
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It's easy to extend McCarthy's criticisms to other films. Hunchback, for example, had its talking gargoyles, seen by many commentators as a crass insult to Hugo. Pocahontas and Anastasia both 'Disneyfied' history: Anastasia through its fairy-tale treatment of the Russian revolution (brought about, we're told, by Rasputin's sorcery), and Pocahontas through an account which bordered on inverted racism against the British. Prince, meanwhile, drew fire for its over-truncated story and reliance on big-show numbers. As Toby Bluth pointed out in this journal, Prince's problems exacerbated each other. "One particularly shocking story point is when the Angel of Death kills all the Egyptian first born. This means that there are dead babies and weeping mothers all over Egypt. But at this point the character of Miriam leads her people in a song of rejoicing. Such an act of insensitivity to the suffering all around her renders her character and her people callous and unlikable." Similar brickbats were thrown at the gargoyles' zany show-tune in Hunchback as Paris burns.

Brickbats were thrown at Hunchback's gargoyles' zany show-tune set against Paris burning. © The Walt Disney Co.

Live Options or Dead End?
Taking the argument to a deeper level, the defenders of Prince, Pocahontas, Anastasia et. al. often argue the films' failings arose from their halfheartedness -- that if the animators had been bold enough to cut the cute animals, song-numbers and other detritus from animation's past, the result would have been better films. Possibly, but would they have sold? Many people see a fundamental perversity in the whole notion of animation mimicking live-action.

The Prince of Egypt's dream sequence which features moving hieroglyphs stands out. Photo courtesy of DreamWorks Pictures. TM &
© 1998 DreamWorks LLC.

The issue was articulated in a The Prince of Egypt review in the British journal Sight and Sound, written by Simon Louvish. "But this is a cartoon, remember? Oh, for Mickey himself to lead the barn animals out of the stockyards and towards green pastures... Where animation excels is in opening the frontiers of the imagination, stimulating our exploration of the fantastic, making the impossible live. This is why the short sequence of Moses' dream of the running hieroglyphs stands out, bringing to mind immortal cartoon riffs like the Pink Elephants in Dumbo or the `Dance of the Hours' in Fantasia. Humans will always be second best to animals in the cartoon world, since we know the humans are flattened, while animals are never more real. The whole point of animation is expressed in the crazy characters who turn to the audience in Tex Avery's classics and chortle: `You can do anything in a cartoon.'" ["The Bible from God to DreamWorks," Simon Louvish, Sight and Sound, January '99, p24-5.]

The increased blurring of live-action and animated media in pics like The Phantom Menace (above) suggest the likes of Disney's upcoming Atlantis may be redundant by the time they appear. Courtesy of and © LucasFilm Ltd.

Louvish, it can be seen, reverses Todd McCarthy's argument that new animation is too hidebound by cartoon conventions. Between them, the writers suggest that the current breed of pseudo-live-action can't satisfy either side: it's either too cartoony, or betrays everything which made animation worthwhile. One way out of the conundrum is to make 'live-action type' cartoons that can't actually be done in live-action. This seems to be the thinking behind next year's Dinosaurs, promising new revolutions in CGI, as well as three upcoming sci-fi animations: Atlantis and Treasure Planet (the latter reworking Treasure Island), both from Disney, and Titan A.E. ('After Earth' -- the project was previously Planet Ice) from Fox Animation. All three appear targeted at an older core audience than the Snow White crowd, with Atlantis reportedly in line for a PG rating.

The question, though, is whether these new films can go 'beyond' live-action. The increasing blurring of live-action/animated media in pics like The Matrix and The Phantom Menace suggest the likes of Atlantis may be redundant by the time they appear. If the 'more like live-action' route proves to be unworkable, what other options are there? Two spring to mind; the 'subversion' route and the 'retro' route. Each will be discussed in turn.