The Watershed is Coming

The Watershed Is Coming
(Continued from page 1)

Punished...
Each of these films, in different ways, strayed from the Disney formula more radically than Disney's own 1999 releases. Each was penalized at the box office either for being different or for the simple transgression of not being distributed by Disney.

The latter two in particular represented attempts at targeting a relatively adult audience. The MPAA gave Mononoke a well-deserved PG-13 rating. South Park received an R and was, by usual MPAA standards, lucky not to have gotten stuck with the NC-17 it received on its first submission. Jack Valenti, the power behind the MPAA rating system, who never publicly challenges specific ratings, later said that the board had screwed up by not rating the movie NC-17. The film's attack on that very system obviously ruffled the usually dignified Valenti, who also referred to creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone as "those two hairballs." (Parker and Stone almost certainly would have had grounds for a restraint-of-trade lawsuit if the MPAA had slapped an NC-17 on a film that was essentially a critique of the MPAA.)

Indeed the MPAA may well be right that most parents would be appalled at their younger children seeing the obscenity-laden film. But would most parents really see much point in keeping their already obscenity-laden teenaged kids away from South Park? If so, then most parents should probably wisen the fuck up; as the film makes abundantly clear, a) it's too late, and b) potty mouth is not the worst sin in the world.

Both films were just the latest examples of the age-old difficulty in marketing non-children's animation. Paramount's relative pleasure over South Park's box office reflected a resigned attitude: given the history and conventional wisdom surrounding such films, $50 million seemed like quite an accomplishment.

All of this would reflect a crisis in the marketing of adult animation if it weren't such a familiar old story. It's been nearly three decades since Ralph Bakshi released the X-rated Fritz the Cat; but not all that much seems to have changed.

Antz is another film that was aimed at a more adult audience while walking a tedious child appealing line. © DreamWorks LLC.

A Closer Look
The notion that animation is (for better or worse) almost entirely for kids is such a given that one is forced to stop and ask the simple question: Why?

There is nothing in the form that should be inherently more appealing or more acceptable to kids than to adults. No one has ever suggested that still photography is inherently adult while non-photographic art is basically for kids. So why, in the realm of motion pictures, is the equivalent such a foregone conclusion?

The answer, I think, lies in a historical fluke of animation marketing. Within the popular consciousness, Disney in the Thirties and Forties so defined what an animated feature is supposed to be that animation became regarded more as a genre (which it really isn't) than as a medium (which it is). Certainly, in the eyes of the trades and of the studio marketing people, the word "animation" represents a genre. It is put on a plane with other content-determined genres such as mysteries, westerns, comedies, sci-fi films, even though an animated feature can also fit any one of those categories. Somehow "animation" has become synonymous with "animated children's film" or (in recent years) "animated children's film with show tunes, anthropomorphic animals and cute sidekicks."

Within studio marketing departments -- and perhaps in the public's eyes as well, though that is more open for debate -- animation so thoroughly equals children's film that any breach of that convention is considered a challenge -- a challenge at which the studios regularly fail.