“Wildwood” and the art of animation

So I went and saw the movie “Wildwood” with my family last night. It was a breathtaking experience. I'm just generally a fan of claymation, but that movie took the art to a whole other level that I've never seen or even imagined. If you like animation, you should definitely check it out.

I didn't want to talk about “Wildwood” just in itself, however. I wanted to talk about animation as an art form. I've always been someone who loves animation, but there’s something about it that I think has gotten somehow diminished with the advent of computer animation.

Back in 1995, Pixar came out with “Toy Story” which was the first feature-length computer animated movie. Now at that time, making a computer animated movie was not an easy thing because the tools available were much more limited. Pixar really had to put a massive amount of work and computing power into making “Toy Story” that by many different metrics was unprecedented. The thing that has changed since then in that computing power has become much cheaper and the tools to make animation are more advanced so that the same methods that were difficult and expensive for for Pixar in 1995 are now easy and cheap. Probably anyone could make a movie with the technical level of “Toy Story” with a laptop today, but would it be as good? That’s the real question.

(I think the original “Toy Story” still holds up as a great movie 30 years later. Furthermore, the sequels have all been pretty good as well. Just a few days ago I had the chance to see “Toy Story 5” which not only was a great piece of entertainment, but the plot centers around the same sort of thing I’m exploring here: with the advent of all this new technology, are kids losing the ability to engage in creative play? I would also recommend “Toy Story 5”.)

The problem with all these technologies for making cheap and easy animation is that in many ways making an animated feature film is now a lot easier to churn out. It seems like there are a lot of these sorts of films that that are less a labor of love than simply a product. Before the movie last night, there was a trailer for a new “Ice Age" movie. The “Ice Age” series of movies have been fairly entertaining, but I don’t feel like they measure up to the quality of work coming out of Pixar. The plots are decent, I laugh at most of the jokes, but I don’t feel like I'm watching art, I feel like I'm consuming a product. I don't know, there’s certainly an argument to be made that this is simply how Hollywood operates in general and not just in the field of animation. It just seems like technology has made animation in particular easier to mass produce.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some great films in the animation genre that are being produced. “Shrek” and all its sequels and spin-offs have been pretty darn good. “Puss in Boots: the Last Wish” was the most recent one I had the chance to see, and it was amazing what the studio had done to make the animation style something new and refreshing. This is actually something that has been exciting about computer animation: the way new styles of animation have been developed by some of the studios to make things we simply haven’t seen before. The Marvel franchise from Disney has dome some interesting things on this front.

(Actually, on the subject of animation styles, if anyone reading this has not seen the Cartoon Network series “The Amazing World of Gumball”, I would say it’s definitely something worth looking into. It’s more than just a kids' cartoon; it’s an amazing experience of all sorts of different animation styles all rolled up into one cartoon. Many episodes are on YouTube.)

Anyway, I suppose substandard animated movies aren’t really something new with the new technologies. Disney went through a phase back in the ’90s when it was churning out a bunch of crappy straight to video sequels as a cheap moneymaking scheme. I don’t know if that worked for them, as I have a hard time believing that market was worth the effort. Of course today, not only has making computer animation become cheap, but so many AI chatbots also have the ability to create movies in just minutes. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before we get the first AI-generated feature film. Will it be worth watching? It seems doubtful, but who knows?

I guess I take some comfort in the fact that studios like Laika (the production company behind “Wildwood” and many earlier films nearly as impressive) are still making these works of art by hand. Apparently they have the ability to put in the effort to make films that sometimes don’t succeed at the box office because they are largely funded by Phil Knight, one of the founders of Nike, who just loves to see these films and is willing to lose money to see them realized. It was a debate that I recently engaged in on Substack that art is worthwhile even if it doesn’t produce money, although I do hope that “Wildwood” is commercially successful and wins some awards, because it certainly deserves it. There’s something profoundly beautiful about making a movie because you have a story worth telling, and you’ve put in a real labor of love to tell it. I think that’s what art is really about, and not about making money.