CG Cartoon Glut

Last week, I watched Ice Age 2 with my son and my half-brother. I definitely felt that the movie suffered from "sequelitis," which is the natural tendency of a sequel to be less of a movie than the original. Still, I liked it. Ninety minutes later, however, I left the movie theater feeling a little perturbed, and not because of the movie I had just watched.

Before the movie even began, I saw, or should I say, was subjected to trailers for FIVE computer-generated imagery (CGI) cartoons. In no particular order, they were Cars, The Wild, Happy Feet, The Ant Bully and Open Season. I'm just glad I was spared having to watch the trailer for Over the Hedge, Dreamworks' Animation's latest offering, for the nth time.

Competition is usually a good thing, especially in a creative environment, where lack of any real rivals tends to result in stagnation.

Walt Disney's animation studio was a good example. Back when Disney had a monopoly on quality animated feature-length films (in the days of the hand-drawn cartoon), the company churned out several decades' worth of classics, up until the dawn of the new millenium, when they seemed to lose their touch, around which time their partner Pixar started producing the next wave of animated classics under the Mickey Mouse banner. Disney's last hand-drawn hit, 2002's Lilo and Stitch, played a lot more like an extended Saturday morning cartoon than gems like Aladdin or even Tarzan.

In the days of the hand-drawn cartoon, particularly its renaissance in the 90s, a lot of studios tried to ape the success of Beauty and the Beast by churning out cheaper, shoddier cartoons like Ferngully, The Magic Sword, and similar excrement. The good news is that these turkeys faded quickly into the night, and were few and far between. The bad news is that Disney, with no real competition in sight, ended up producing crappy movies.

But with the dawn of Pixar, it seemed that the decline of Disney's hand-drawn fortunes didn't matter as they seemed to have a new way to monopolize the success of the cartoon feature: make CGI movies!

Sadly for them, this didn't happen as more than one studio was able to offer some pretty stiff competition. In 2001, Dreamworks' Shrek thrashed Pixar's Monsters, Inc., both in terms of box-office and awards, going on to win the first ever Academy Award for an animated feature. In 2002, 20th Century Fox and their partner, Blue Sky studios, came up with the first Ice Age movie, which was the biggest animated film of 2002 in terms of box-office grosses. Granted, Disney/Pixar still came up with rock-solid flicks like Finding Nemo and The Incredibles, but it was clear they were not the rulers of the roost, especially considering that Shrek 2 was the top-grossing film of 2004, outgrossing The Incredibles by nearly $200 million. The myth of Disney's invincibility was shattered. The field was now open, and one would think that with such thriving competition, the players would strive to do their best.

The problem, however, was that suddenly, every idiot with a PC and the appropriate software suddenly believed he could come up with a CGI blockbuster, with no real regard to quality control. While the Shrek movies have been a blast, everything that the Dreamworks Animation studios have produced since (which, incidentally, does not include Wallace and Gromit, which they only distributed) has been quite puerile. Last year's Madagascar was shite, as was A Shark Tale the year before. The idiots seem to think that by stuffing a movie with superstar comedians and peppering their scripts with pop-culture references they automatically have on their hands works of art. Unfortunately, their formula has translated into box-office success.

Even a Pixar-less Disney took a shot at the CGI genre with last year's Chicken Little, which is easily the worst CGI film I have ever seen, and probably one of the worst movies I've ever seen as well. With its cardboard characterizations and its thoroughly irritating soundtrack the movie wasn't even up to par with most Saturday morning cartoons. While they managed a hit, its success was nowhere near that of their Pixar stuff, which should tell them something. Happily, their latest effort without Pixar, a Madagascar ripoff entitled The Wild, looks like it's stalling right out of the gate. At least that looks like it'll be nipped in the bud.

Joining the fray are Warner Bros. and Sony Pictures, which appear to be hastily shoving together animation divisions. WB is producing TWO movies, Happy Feet and The Ant Bully, and while the former shows off some spectacular camerawork and slick animation technique, they both seem pretty flaccid scriptwise, at least if the jokes cracked in their trailers are any indication. Sony Pictures' Open Season just looks putrid, from the amateurish way the digital characters are rendered to the lines they spew out. They should just stick to making Spider-Man movies.

What made hits like the Pixar movies, the Shrek films, and even the first Ice Age movie extra special cinematic outings were, at the very heart, well-crafted scripts with thoroughly fleshed out characters and truly clever jokes. As much as I loved the animation of The Incredibles, it's the lines I find myself going back to again and again. The studios out to ape their success should also take this important fact into consideration: most of these films take two to three years to make, and are as much labors of love as they are commercial enterprises. The latest software and camerawork do not an animated classic make. Robert Zemeckis has the right idea, even though 2004's Polar Express was not terribly well-written; his latest CGI/performance capture opus, Beowulf, is currently in gestation and won't hit cinemas till late 2007 or mid-2008. AND it will feature a script by acclaimed writer Neil Gaiman. THAT'S the kind of quality these people should aspire to invest in their features.

I make an impassioned plea to the general public. Don't take your kids to see animated movies just because they're CGI or because they have some McDonald's tie-in. I, for one, refuse to take my kid to see The Wild, which will be out soon. I'm similarly hesitant about every other movie except for Pixar's Cars. As the paying public, only we can get across to these creeps in their business suits that the only movies we want our kids to see are the GREAT ones.