Brad Bird: Animation Is Not A Genre

[Rumpelstiltskin]

From a five year old article:

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/ideas-comme ... 09504.html

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“People think of animation only doing things where people are dancing around and doing a lot of histrionics, but animation is not a genre. And people keep saying, ‘The animation genre.’ It’s not a genre! A Western is a genre! Animation is an art form, and it can do any genre. You know, it can do a detective film, a cowboy film, a horror film, an R-rated film or a kids’ fairy tale. But it doesn’t do one thing. And, next time I hear, ‘What’s it like working in the animation genre?’ I’m going to punch that person!”

In principle, he is right. But while animation may be a medium, it is restricted to just a tiny handful of genres. Especially in the West. And there should usually be a reason for doing a movie as animation instead of live action. Can you imagine Kramer vs. Kramer or Brokeback Mountain as animation? Or sitcoms like Friends or Seinfeld? It is of course possible, but I can't see any purpose in animating such shows and films. Sometimes you need effects that's made with CGI, but it's still live action. Even in Avatar, where there is no actual live action in parts of the movie, your mind enters live action modus, not animation modus.

There is also the thing about budget. A live action drama taking place mostly indoors in a modern world is a lot cheaper than a computer animated movie from Pixar. A typical feature from Disney or Pixar can cost 200 million dollars t make. That's a lot of investment, and the studios expects to get their money back. Which is why you will not see an animated slasher horror movie with a huge budget. There are very few genres where you can actually invest lots of money and then see it make a profit. There is always independent projects, so-called indie movies, like Ralph Bakshi's Fritz the Cat, but these have a very limited budget, and both the story and quality can't exceed that limit.

Not that I wouldn't love to see more animated films like Shane Acker's 9 or René Laloux's Fantastic Planet, or Akira, but these days the genres of feature animation is mostly defined by the larger studios like DreamWorks, Pixar, Disney and Sony. Which is probably why some consider it a genre.