By: Adam McLeod
Like Picasso’s decision to paint that woman’s nose in a different place, Walt Disney’s 1937 release of SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS was shocking and entirely game-changing. When people heard the idea—a 90-minute animated film—they scoffed. Many thought that the limits of the form had been reached with the early Mickey Mouse cartoons, which were shorts shown before main features, and that anything longer would not hold people’s attention. When SNOW WHITE’s$1.5 million price tag was revealed, there were those who thought that Disney had doomed itself. Obviously, the opposite was true: the investment paid off many times over, opening the floodgates for all manner of animated fare.
RENAISSANCE
After SNOW WHITE, Disney had a successful run of feature-length animated films into the 1940s, including favourites like PINOCCHIO (1940) and BAMBI (1942). After that though, there was a lull in the production of widely admired animated films.Part of the reason was key personnel changes at Disney. Another part of the reason may have been that Disney had used up many of their staple fairy tales, forcing them to write original material.
THE GOLDEN AGE
In 1989, animation came out of its long slumber in a big way with THE LITTLE MERMAID. This wildly popular film led the way for a handful of other smashes in the years following, including BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (1991), ALADDIN (1992) and THE LION KING (1994). An interesting result of this era was Disney’s strategy in employing well-known actors to voice their characters, like Robin Williams in ALADDIN and James Earl Jones and Jeremy Irons in THE LION KING, in an effort to garner more interest.
BEYOND DISNEY
Of course, it wasn’t just Disney churning out animated hits. Much of the best work was coming out of Japan and was not at all geared toward young people. Through the history of cinema, there have always been directors who wanted to control every aspect of their films. Some Japanese filmmakers, particularly from the 1980s on, discovered that the only way to make the sort of edgy, visual films they wanted with total control over setting and action was through animation.Japanese directors like Hayao Miyazaki (SPIRITED AWAY, 2001) became superstars and led the way in making animated filmmaking more accepted as an art.
RISE OF THE MACHINES
In 1995, 58 years after SNOW WHITE, Pixar released a little movie about a pull-string cowboy and a plastic astronaut, changing the whole animation game once again. TOY STORY was the first feature-length film entirely animated by computer and it would be the first of many. Computer animation had its critics at first, mostly those who lamented that the classics were being left behind. This was a funny point of view, considering the criticism the most classic of classic animated films faced in 1937.Over the next 15 years, though, Woody, Buzz, Mike, Sully, Nemo, Wall-E and countless others would win over most of the doubters. In 2010, UP became the first computer-animated film to be nominated for best picture at the Academy Awards (not to mention a movie that made grown men cry around the world). Whether winning awards, tugging on heartstrings or just doling out silly laughs, animated features have established themselves as a force to be taken seriously, and that’s a very good thing for cinema as a whole.