Completed shot from the possibly shelved Coyote vs. Acme. | Photo credit / Warner Bros.
In 1988, Buena Vista Pictures released Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a groundbreaking film that seamlessly mixed live-action and traditional animation.
Based on the novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit? by Gary K. Wolf, the film follows human detective Eddie Valiant (played by Bob Hoskins), who abhors cartoon characters, trying to clear the name of cartoon star Roger Rabbit (played by Charles Fleischer) after he was framed for the murders of cartoon studio head R.K. Maroon (played by Alan Tilvern) and Toontown’s owner Marvin Acme (played by Stubby Kaye).
Throughout the whole ordeal, Eddie and Roger are hounded by henchmen working under the cartoonishly evil Judge Doom (played by Christopher Lloyd) who aims to wash away all of the Toons with a substance known as Dip.
Certainly someone who hates cartoons this much could only be relegated to fiction, right?
I wish I could say it was true.
In recent years, multiple animated projects – both series and films – have been cancelled or scrapped at numerous major studios across the country. The animated Netflix Original Inside Job was supposed to have a second season, and Netflix even announced a renewal in June 2022 before revoking it in Jan. 2023 and ending the series on a cliffhanger. Disney forced the animated series, The Owl House, to shorten its third season into three extended episodes meant to wrap up the story sooner than expected. That doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of everything Warner Bros. Discovery has written off for tax purposes, including Scoob: Holiday Haunt, Final Space, Driftwood and the currently in-limbo Coyote vs. ACME, while actively choosing to release the controversial film The Flash.
Though it feels like animation doesn’t matter to the studios who can attribute at least part of their successes to animation, it really should.
First and foremost, animation has long been a creative outlet that can take many forms from many creators across the globe.
Whether it be here in the U.S., up north in Canada, across the pond in Europe or even all the way out in Asia, plenty of creators have emerged across time from all corners of the world. Films and shows from Japanese studios such as Studio Ghibli, Studio Trigger and Toei Animation such as Spirited Away, Kill la Kill and Dragon Ball Z have struck a chord with audiences and critics alike with Spirited Away being one of few foreign animated films to win a Best Animated Feature Oscar. Kilkenny-based studio Cartoon Saloon’s Irish folklore trilogy – The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea and Wolfwalkers – have been similarly acclaimed by critics and appealed to a niche audience. To downplay animation would be to downplay the importance and impact of something that appeals to people of all walks of life.
Another important reason why animation should matter is that it transcends not only international borders but temporal borders as well.
Animated media produced in one year may still remain relevant and popular – even if a bit more niche – later in time, especially with the rise of the Internet allowing for more old media to be rediscovered by a new generation. For instance, My Little Pony, Transformers, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles dominated televisions in the 80s and more modern iterations such as My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Transformers EarthSpark and Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have found an audience of both returning fans and new ones. Even disregarding the merchandise-driven series, MTV animated series Clone High and Daria found new audiences in the mid 2010s with the former receiving a reboot last year and Daria having new projects currently in the works. International media has also received some newfound attention with one notable example being a 90s Russian animated adaptation of Treasure Island having clips from it paired with music in the phonk genre. Animation will find a way back to the surface one way or the other, even if it involves remix culture.
Animation can also tell stories with imagery that only it can craft.
The Iron Giant, the Warner Bros. produced and Brad Bird directed 1999 adaptation of Ted Hughes’ 1968 novel The Iron Man, took plenty of liberties with the source material including an explicitly Cold War era setting and a strong anti-gun message. This was not unintentional as Bird wrote the movie not long after his sister fell victim to an act of gun violence and, per a 1999 interview, asked “What if a gun had a soul?” at the start of production and chose to develop the storyline further. Though The Iron Giant ended up as a box office bomb, it still left quite an impact as it was regularly broadcast on Cartoon Network near Thanksgiving for several years and even received an extended edition in 2015. Similarly, Dreamworks’ The Prince of Egypt, released only a year prior to Iron Giant, told the Biblical story of Moses leading the enslaved Hebrews out of Egypt and free from the pharaoh’s reign. The traditionally animated film has many striking sequences, but one of the most notable sequences regards the plagues God casts upon Egypt. Much of the scene features imagery ripped straight from Biblical texts and brought to life in grim detail. The film was a resounding hit with religious and non-religious audiences alike, even scoring Dreamworks a few awards in the process.
Finally, animation can inspire others to do more and create their own works.
One of the films I reviewed last year was Dreamworks’ The Bad Guys, which had plenty of inspirations from other films such as Ocean’s Eleven and the works of Quentin Tarantino. The film’s creators have also cited another large source of inspiration: the long running animated franchise Lupin the Third. It isn’t hard to see how the cartoonish, globe-trotting misadventures of Lupin and his crew inspired the grand heists Mr. Wolf and his team pull off in the film. This can also extend to creators as Genndy Tartakovsky, creator of shows like Samurai Jack and Primal as well as the Hotel Transylvania franchise, took inspiration for his unique art style from earlier cartoons by Disney and Fleischer alongside many foreign sources such as the aforementioned Ghibli. As all of these above examples have shown, animation can do amazing things and one of those just happens being inspiring others to create.
At the end of the day, animation matters for a reason. It has shaped popular culture, lasted throughout generations, crafted imagery no other medium can truly capture and inspired hundreds of people to create beautiful sequences of moving pictures.
…and no corrupt judge nor corporate executive can ever take that away.
