Dear Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,
If there is anything I’d like to see change in my lifetime, please for the love of Brad Bird, Sylvain Chomet, Satoshi Kon, Hayao Miyzaki, Nick Park, Andrew Stanton, Isao Takahata – please change that damn award category “Best Animated Picture” to “Best Animation for a Feature Length Film,” or even “Best Animation” for short.
Why would I implore such a change, you ask? It’s simple really: I’m tired of everyone thinking animation is a genre –
– and want desperately for people to regard it as a medium,
The distinction couldn’t be clearer and more important. To regard animation as a genre implies that any narrative that animators bring to life automatically relinquishes any sense of seriousness or weight for adult sensitivities, instead caters to the attention span of ADD children coked up on glucose with horrendous retrofit 3D and the comic timing and intellect of cow manure. So when the Academy calls an award category “Best Animated Picture,” they are implying that somehow, by virtue of being animated, narratives told via animation rather than live action are diluted and dumbed down, stupid even.
Oh Academy please, if you could look past your long history of Disney fare and see that beyond what an American animator and entrepreneur sold to the mass public there are artists out there frustrated by the restraints of big animation studios turning down quieter, smarter, darker scripts for interest of preserving their business – not creating, mind you, but preserving it. They ask themselves, “why risk it if the public wants cheese for cheese’s sake, packaged as kid-friendly because they’re animated?” There are artists out there outside of Pixar and Dreamworks, creating stories with the magic of animation that live action could never, ever come close to accomplishing. When I hear your presenters saying “Persepolis” is unusual because it’s animated but adult-oriented, a little part of me hits itself against an imaginary wall, hoping that this performance act stunt will shed some light on your own ignorance of what animation can accomplish beyond musical sashays and sassy side characters.
When you say “Best Animated Picture,” you instantly stratify animated narratives into a separate cohort, a subcategory to live action regardless of the narrative’s quality or characteristics. You instantly say films like “Grave of the Fireflies” are the intellectual and narrative equivalent of “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”; you assume the “The Illusionist” is as emotionally acute as “Madagascar”; worst yet, you bring films as politically charged as “Persepolis” or psychological subversive as “Paprika” down as the equivalent of stupidly written films like “Alpha and Omega” or “Shrek 4” – a virtue resultant of these narratives being animated rather filmed live, no doubt.
So tell me, Academy, what’s it going to take for you to realize that animation is a medium and not a genre? How many more animated films are you going to see willingly that run contrary to your expectations of princesses singing about faux feministic independence while they wait on their prince from their domestic royal chamber?
When people see the award category “Best Cinematography,” do they think the lighting is a designate genre? No. So why the same for “Best Animated Picture,” where most Academy voters consider animation as a genre despite animation being a highly, incredibly meticulous technical process? Cinematographers create the illusion of perfect lighting on every star in every shot, are masters of making people and sets look good; animators create the illusion of movement, drawing and redrawing and drawing again primary and secondary motions, facial expressions, and numerous other gestures that the everyday observer takes for granted in their perception of the world. Animation is just as technically important as cinematography, and vice versa – both are necessary components of creating a comprehensive narrative. It just so happens that people tend to notice the narrative contribution of animation more than that of cinematography, and too easily are influenced by Disney precursors into believing all animated narratives lie in the same narrative framework. It all falls back to most moviegoers believing that narratives told via animation has the narrative potential of cheese nips, oblivious to the fact that they are observing astute, detail oriented animators from all departments working tirelessly to create the same illusion cinematographers do in live action film.
So please, Academy, wake up and hear my cries that so many cinephiles and animation enthusiast have been screaming out for years – animation is not a genre, so stop treating it like so and change that damn award category to reflect this understanding. I’m tired of having to explain to people why “Grave of the Fireflies” is one of the greatest anti-war films to date, or why “The Triplets of Belleville” is a worthwhile example of superb animation despite rejecting Disney aesthetics of clean lines and bright colors, or why “Wall-E” was one of the greatest dares in modern narrative when it omitted syntactical dialogue for the first forty minutes, and why it deserved that “Best Picture” nomination over “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” period.
I hope you’ll see that animation lends itself to potential live action could never, ever dream of tapping into, that under the hand of apt technicians like any other film production animation can dive into the deepest cores of our psyche, of hopes and dreams, and everything in between.
Yours,
Realistic films show the physical world; animation shows its essence.
- Roger Ebert, “Princess Mononoke”
“A Town Called Panic,” 2009
“Coraline,” 2009
“Cowboy Bebop: Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” 2001
“Fantastic Mr. Fox,” 2009
“Grave of the Fireflies,” 1988
“Mary & Max,” 2009
“Millennium Actress,” 2001
“My Neighbor Totoro,” 1988
“Perfect Blue,” 1998
“Paprika,” 2006
“Persepolis,” 2007
“Princess Mononoke,” 1997
“Ponyo,” 2008
“Spirited Away,” 2001
“The Cat Returns,” 2002
“The Illusionist,” 2010
“The Iron Giant,” 1999
“The Secret of Kells,” 2009
“The Thief and the Cobbler – Recobbled Edition,” 1993 (Note: I watched the fanmade “Recobbled” cut that was put together in the aftermath of the film being destroyed by its distributing studios, which you can read about here).
“Tokyo Godfathers,” 2003
“The Triplets of Belleville,” 2003
“Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit,” 2005
“Watership Down,” 1978
“Whisper of the Heart,” 1995