Ask John: Will the American Popularity of CG Animated Movies Generate Interest in Anime?

Question:
Will America’s current ennui for CG animation – or at least the talking animals/objects – help to cultivate more sophisticated tastes in animation, and possibly save anime in the process? Or will this just hurt the animation industry in general? Ratatouille was less profitable than The Simpsons movie. Bolt lost to Twilight. Pixar’s Up got upstaged by The Hangover. Yet A Scanner Darkly did better than the director’s previous rotoscoped work, Waking Life. Persepolis had enough buzz to be nominated for an Oscar. Are these recent trends simply flukes? Or does this mean that some day the next Sword of the Stranger, Girl Who Leapt Through Time,or Appleseed can become a hit?

Answer:
There are two possibilities relevant to this question. The first is that America’s recent plenitude of mainstream CG animated motion pictures has cultivated an increased interest in animation that will encourage viewers to seek out other alternative or more sophisticated animated works. The opposing possibility is that the surfeit of CG animated films over the past several years has been a period of novel fascination which is destined to and may already be beginning to wane and return to a normal state of disinterest in animation. While I’d like to believe in the possibility of the former, experience urges me to put faith in the later. Contemporary 2D animated films for adult audiences that have hit American theaters, including Persepolis, Waltz With Bashir, and Renaissance, have received positive acclaim but minimal exposure. Recent CG animated family films including Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda, and Up have been successful, but there’s no evidence to convince me that interest in these films is rooted in their medium rather than their content. Films like Kung Fu Panda and Ratatouille would have been practically impossible to shoot in live action. Films including Stuart Little, Ratatouille, and The Tale of Desperaeux demonstrate that real rats aren’t appealing on screen. The variety of martial arts practicing animals in Kung Fu Panda wouldn’t have been convincing or as appealing looking with digitally manipulated real animals. While Up could have been shot in live action, I don’t have any sense that it’s the film’s animation, rather than its characters and story, that have made it popular.

Despite the popularity of CG animated films in America having now been at a peak for over a decade, I don’t see any evidence that mainstream American viewers have developed any greater affection for, or demand for alternate animated fare. In the same way that Ghibli’s animated movies are popular in Japan even among viewers that normally don’t watch anime, CG animated family films have become attractive to mainstream American viewers that normally wouldn’t watch animation. The reason is the same in both cases. While animation fans and film critics praise the technical achievements of Ghibli and Pixar movies, mainstream viewers see only enjoyable movies. Japanese viewers perceive Ghibli films as movies, not as anime. Likewise, American film goers perceive movies like Wall-E and Kung Fu Panda as movies and productions including Persepolis and Waltz With Bashir as animated movies.

Disney’s forthcoming release of Ponyo will be getting the biggest American theatrical release ever for a Ghibli film, yet it will still launch in less than half as many screens as an opening weekend Pixar film. Despite its excellent advance reviews, no one expects Ponyo to earn blockbuster returns in America. The Evangelion 1.0 movie will be screening in a mere ten American venues, and two of those are fan conventions. Disney’s upcoming Princess and the Frog is a new attempt at vintage Disney hand drawn animation, but I don’t see it generating significant audience anticipation outside of the hardcore animation fan community. Thanks to the development of 3D CG animation, traditional 2D animation now seems inescapably associated with outdated techniques and productions for cult audiences. 14 years of blockbuster CG Pixar films and a host of similarly successful franchises including Shrek, Ice Age, and Kung Fu Panda haven’t encouraged a significant number of Americans to expand their perspective to include contemporary 2D animation. If America’s interest in 3D CG animated films is slowly declining, I see no reason to believe that this interest will transition to other types of animated film. Rather, if America’s fascination with 3D CG movies wanes, I think we’ll simply look back on the mid 1990s and 2000s as a bubble period when CG animated movies were able to capture the attention of mainstream American movie goers.