State of the Art

Seeing is believing: Jenny, DJ and Chowder, the principal characters in Sony's latest cartoon film, Monster House. Courtesy Columbia Pictures.

Don’t let all the chatty critters and loquacious contraptions distract you: Cartoons are a serious business and a serious art. Animation has been the dominant mode for children’s entertainment since Walt Disney’s first feature success, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), enchanted audiences with its hand-drawn Technicolor imagery, elegant songs and deft storytelling. Countless innovations later, the form now represents the highest level of technical achievement in contemporary American filmmaking, often requiring more ingenuity — and computing power — than the most elaborate live-action blockbuster. As for sophistication in storytelling, animated kids’ flicks frequently best releases intended for grown-ups. There may not be a wittier or better-constructed Hollywood comedy in the past decade than Monsters Inc. or this summer’s Over the Hedge.

Animation has given the film business some of its biggest hits: Shrek 2, Finding Nemo and The Lion King are among the 20 highest-grossing films of all time. Competitors arrive on a weekly basis — like this weekend’s Barnyard (Paramount/Nickelodeon) — carting in yet more talking creatures and fanciful digital worlds to dazzle kiddies.

Nowadays, most cartoon films feature the same basic components: cheeky humour, celebrity voiceovers, a few life lessons and digitally generated hijinks. The template is proof of the dominance of Pixar, the studio that revolutionized animation in the ’90s. The elegant and more tradition-minded musical formula that Disney invented with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio (1940) and Dumbo (1941), and revitalized in the late ’80s with The Little Mermaid, is nowhere to be found. Even Aardman Animation, famed for the stop-motion techniques used in the Oscar-winning Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, is vulnerable to Pixar’s influence. This fall, the British company will unveil Flushed Away, a high-spirited CGI (computer-generated imagery) feature full of cute rodents who sound suspiciously like Hugh Jackman and Kate Winslet.

While Pixar set the standard, recent films like Warner Brothers’ The Ant Bully and Sony Pictures’ Monster House are pushing big-league Hollywood animation into promising new territory. The Ant Bully, which debuted on July 28, is the story of a shrunken boy’s encounters with intrepid insects voiced by Julia Roberts and Nicolas Cage. Grossing almost $50 million since it was released on July 21, Monster House is an effectively creepy kids’ flick that bears the imprimatur of executive producers Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis.

Both films come on the heels of Pixar’s latest, Cars. The animation studio has been at the vanguard since 1995, when Toy Story became both the first completely computer-animated feature film and the year’s highest-grossing release. Pixar was founded as an offshoot of Lucasfilm and steered to success by Apple majordomo Steve Jobs. In 1991, the studio signed a deal to make computer-animated films for Disney, which would market and distribute the releases. Whereas big studios like Disney and Warner continued to rely on decades-old departments trained in traditional cel-animation techniques — in which each frame is drawn by hand — Pixar exploited the new possibilities offered by digital technology. Teams of animators were replaced by mouse-wielding artists in front of computer screens.

A monster hit: James P. Sullivan (left, voiced by John Goodman) and his scare assistant, Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal), the stars of Pixar's 2001 film Monsters, Inc. Courtesy Walt Disney Pictures.

Pixar has been both profitable and disastrous for Disney. Pixar’s first five features — Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo — grossed $2.5 billion US worldwide. Meanwhile, Disney’s own status as animation’s major player eroded. Though Disney itself continued to produce such animated films as Mulan and Hercules, it began to phase out traditional animation techniques and song-heavy stories and follow its partner’s lead with releases like the Pixar-esque Chicken Little and The Wild. In 2004, Home on the Range became the last Disney feature to use cel animation.

Two years ago, one of the movie industry’s most successful partnerships began to sour over contractual disputes, causing stock prices for both companies to fluctuate. Such was Disney’s need for Pixar-style product that it made plans to spin out sequels for Pixar properties through Circle 7, an animation shop staffed largely with Pixar veterans. The matter was settled earlier this year when Disney arranged to purchase Pixar for $7.4 billion. Circle 7 was quietly scrapped.

The wheeling and dealing stole some thunder from the release of Cars. Directed by John Lasseter, the film exposes both the strengths and vulnerabilities in the Pixar way of making ’toons. In terms of design, Cars is a consistent marvel that trumps the studio’s past achievements. Lasseter and his animators reconfigure the world to suit their characters — sentient automobiles that may have four wheels and front grilles for mouths but are otherwise a lot like us. The photorealistic backgrounds and environments work in playful contrast with the obviously exaggerated design of the characters. Given its bid to appeal to the sons and daughters of NASCAR-loving families, it’s no surprise the movie’s race sequences have such zip.

It’s a shame that the story and characters are so rote. Whereas Toy Story and Monsters Inc. matched the level of visual invention with a sure hand for storytelling, here, the formula feels played out; the moments of sentimentality get too soggy and the humour is too cute. Talking hunks of metal have less visual appeal than the anthropomorphized creatures and toys of Pixar’s past hits. (When was the last time you wanted to hug a pickup truck?)

Though Cars has been a box-office leader this summer — second only to Disney’s live-action phenomenon Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest — Over the Hedge, The Ant Bully and Monster House strike a far better balance between form and content, tweaking the Pixar formula and moving beyond its limitations.

DreamWorks, which has become Pixar’s main competition thanks to megahits like the Shrek franchise, has established a formula of its own. It involves a more freewheeling style of humour that’s big on adult-pleasing pop-culture references and celebs making light of their star personas. (A Shark’s Tale is a particularly irritating example: Robert De Niro, Will Smith and Angelina Jolie ladle on the shtick in a manner that reeks of self-satisfaction.) Over the Hedge benefits from the best-utilized lineup of talent of any recent ’toon. Eschewing marquee players, the cast includes SCTV vets Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy, the ever-laconic Garry Shandling, newly minted comedy hero Steve Carell and, in the year’s most canny (and Canuck) piece of casting, William Shatner and Avril Lavigne as a father-daughter pair of possums. The story — about a set of woodland creatures confronted with the encroachment of suburbia — is straightforward enough to allow for moments of comic invention and well-choreographed set pieces of escalating intensity.

Critter colony: The cuddly cast of DreamWorks' recent feature, Over the Hedge. Courtesy DreamWorks Productions.

Much the same can be said of The Ant Bully, the second feature by John A. Davis for Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman’s Playtone production company (which also made The Polar Express). Based on a book by John Nickle, the story is about a boy named Lucas who routinely torments little creatures until one day he is shrunk down to their size. Since Lucas is dwarfed by his many-legged co-stars, The Ant Bully fits into a tradition of incredible shrinking people, like the English folktale of Tom Thumb. As a result, the movie delights in disruptions of scale. A lawn, a bed and a kitchen counter are all transformed into treacherous new terrains as rich with detail as the cavernous spaces of the ant colony. Particularly impressive is the use of light and shade as sunbeams poke between blades of glass or through the ceiling of the colony to reveal vivid colours. Compared to the technology that enabled Toy Story, newer generations of computer animation allow for a much more textured, more plausibly three-dimensional space on screen.

Sony’s Monster House exploits that potential further. While The Ant Bully has also been released in an IMAX 3-D format, Monster House takes advantage of a superior system called Real D, currently only available in four Canadian theatres (three in suburban Toronto, one in Montreal). On a conventional screen, the movie is a fairly run-of-the-mill feature cartoon about three tweens terrorized by a creepy home with windows for eyes and a carpet for a tongue. It does, however, have the best-rendered cast of CGI Homo sapiens to date; the figures are a big step forward from the glassy-eyed zombie children that made The Polar Express unexpectedly disturbing.

When viewed in Real D, however, Monster House becomes the most astonishing movie you’ll see this year. The time-tested tactics of 3-D filmmaking — using extreme depths of field, and of course, propelling stuff in the viewer’s direction — yield consistently amazing results. Far from the blurriness of the red-and-green glasses of yesteryear or even the spatial weirdness that afflicts IMAX 3-D, the Real D clarity creates an unusually immersive film experience.

A scary one, too: At the screening I attended, the children in my row frequently seemed to be on the edge of tears. Sure, they might require psychotherapy in later life, but they’re getting a taste of the future technologies that will someday make Pixar’s classics seem as quaint as Dumbo.

The Ant Bully and Monster House are in theatres now.

Jason Anderson is a writer based in Toronto.

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