The Oscars Controv (Not That One)
Aside from the very obvious controversies of last night’s 94th Academy Awards, the Animation Twitter world has some thoughts and feelings about how the evening handles the animation industry.
As ever, the wide gamut of what animation can be is often boxed up as a genre - as though squeaky-clean CGI kids’ films are all that make up what is a huge industry working across a wide range of mediums and sub-mediums. Not only this, but it was alluded to that these films designed to give you 90 minutes of quiet from your children, are to be endured by adults, never enjoyed.
We know that this is not the case - The Mitchells Vs The Machines in my eyes was a Best Picture runner, not only for its humour reaching all ages - but moments like this minimise the broad, multi-faceted and exciting possibilities of what animated films can be when they aren’t folded into an easy sales pitch for a four quadrant Sunday afternoon please-all.
The Academy are gatekeepers of the film industry and their narrow-sighted view of animation keeps it this way in the consciousness of the consumer, particularly in the US and the UK. In Japan and some of Europe animation is much broader and widely consumed, it being treated rightly as an expressive medium, not one all-encompassing genre.
As a studio, we are currently in development of several internal projects across film and TV. We have been looking to push the expectations of animation and are working on stories for adult and young adult audiences. Touching on fantasy, philosophy, history, feminism, action and more, these stories don’t immediatly fit into the “expected” tropes of what animation is considered to be, which to us is exactly what makes them exciting. This however does make it a hard sell and many times we have been asked to “age down” or “family-ify” our stories.
The likes of Netflix are starting to see the audience for more adult animation with projects such as Arcane, Love, Death and Robots and The House. At an Indie level, directors and producers are creating new innovative animated stories that range in theme, tone and style as much as live action does, but sales and distribution is still nervous of moving on from tried and tested formulas, leaving what could be the most revolutionary part of cinema currently stilted.
I’ll leave with this, the (of course, untelevised) speech from Alberto Mieglo and Leo Sanchez creators of Windshield Wiper, winner of Best Animated Short.
“Animation for adults is a fact. It’s happening. Let’s call it cinema.”