Bambi is dead - smh.com.au: Hollywood is turning its back on hand-drawn animation in favour of big-selling digital movies. But is this the end for the beautifully painted features of our childhood? Sheila Johnston thinks not.
JAWS dropped in Hollywood recently when Jeffrey Katzenberg announced that he would be producing no more hand-drawn animated movies. 'I think the idea of a traditional story being told using traditional animation is likely a thing of the past,' Katzenberg said.
It was a spectacular U-turn - and perhaps a humiliation - for the man who had made his name at Disney with The Lion King and had set up a studio, DreamWorks, with a mission to reinvent classical animation.
The decision was prompted by the flop of DreamWorks's latest and - it now turns out - final stab at 2D animation, Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas. But it had been preceded by a long line of failures such as Treasure Planet, Atlantis and Spirit of the Cimarron.
Meanwhile, computer-generated films thrive. Finding Nemo, a comedy about a clown fish, has been this northern summer's hottest ticket in America where it is already among the top 10 highest-grossing films of all time (it took $8.1 million at the Australian box office last weekend - a record opening for an animated film).
DreamWorks is now focusing exclusively on computer-generated animation, with a Shrek sequel and Sharkslayer, a gangster spoof set under the sea.
So, the new Hollywood truism is that Bambi is dead. That kids, hooked on the wizardry of 3D computer games, no longer want to watch quaint, old-fashioned characters against painted backdrops. Yet the film that won this year's Academy Award for best animated feature does not, like the three unsuccessful candidates, come from Hollywood. It is Spirited Away, directed by Japan's 62-year-old master animator, Hayao
Conceived for - and inspired by - a friend's 10-year-old daughter, Spirited Away depicts a sulky little girl's trip to a marvellous world of ghosts and monsters. Miyazaki has a vast cult following among adults.
But kids love his movies, too, even though they are startlingly different from Hollywood's idea of family entertainment. "People at Disney are very, very cautious. They feel children shouldn't be exposed to certain things," says Steve Alpert, an executive at Disney before moving to Ghibli, the Japanese studio where Miyazaki is based.
"Miyazaki feels very strongly that children aren't dumb and that things happening in the world shouldn't be kept from them. There's more respect for what they are able to understand." It seems a paradox that Disney should be distributing all Ghibli's productions in the US.
A chorus of leading American critics has accused Disney of burying Spirited Away with a small-scale arthouse campaign. "There are things we are not satisfied with, certainly," Alpert says. "But we don't think it was a conspiracy to do a bad job." In any case, Disney's dominance is unlikely to continue: Spirited Away is just one example of a remarkable international renaissance in animation.
Told almost entirely without dialogue, Belleville Rendez-Vous, a richly inventive, grotesque but affectionate comedy, was one of the biggest crowd-pleasers in Cannes this year. In the field of model animation, Britain's Nick Park has performed miracles with low-tech Plasticine: a new Wallace and Gromit feature starts filming next month.
None of these films looks (or sounds) anything like a Hollywood movie; but then why should they?
"For a long time, there was just one thing you could see, coming from mainly Disney, and they had a lot of money. It was difficult for European producers to think they could compete," says Belleville's director Sylvain Chomet.
"It's sad DreamWorks didn't try something original before shutting the 2D unit down. But they just did Disney-style stuff. Sometimes not even as good."
At Warner Bros, Joe Dante is the latest to come under pressure. Experienced in all forms of animation (Gremlins 1 and 2; Small Soldiers), he is completing Looney Tunes: Back in Action, which mixes live actors and 2D animation ala Roger Rabbit. Warner Bros hopes to revive interest in Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and the other regulars. However, these oddballs come loaded with controversy.
"The difficulty has been just getting the studio to approve of what we are doing," says Dante.
"Because of the child audience, animated features are subject to a great deal more scrutiny than other films. Porky Pig stutters, and that is considered a negative stereotype. Speedy [Gonzalez] was on moratorium for a while, because some groups objected until research showed that in Mexico he's an extremely popular character. Elmer Fudd is a hunter and shoots rabbits. We can't have that after Columbine."
Practitioners blame the obsession with eradicating anything contentious for the crisis in US animation: Dante believes it is responsible for the long delays on Universal's film of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are.
Sinbad notoriously whitewashed its Arabian hero into a dude from Sicily with Brad Pitt's voice.
Computer animation has (so far) been bolder because star artists such as Pixar's John Lassiter have held on to creative control and because these projects attract top writers, drawn by the novelty of the medium and the financial resources available to it.
But, Dante maintains, 2D animation will eventually stage a comeback in Hollywood.
"People have been somewhat spoiled by the high production values of computer-generated films, but the enchantment of watching drawings move on a screen is undiminished. As long as a child can hold a pencil in his hand, there will always be a future for it."
