65: On Watching Cartoons

Sometime this summer, I realized I was having fun watching cartoons again.

It's been an animation-heavy season at House Welch-Larson. We've been mainlining a lot of anime; I wrote about my Trigun bender a few weeks ago, but before that, my husband and I watched Cowboy Bebop together, and now he's making his way through Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. I've caught up with Paprika and rewatched Akira, and I'm hoping to catch up with some unseen Studio Ghibli movies before Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron hits stateside.

Anime, as a medium, has different conventions than Western animation, and I think that watching anime has made me appreciate the craft a little more in general. Western computer animation takes its cues from the voice actors; to grossly oversimplify a complicated process, Western animation tends to be finalized after dialogue has been recorded, allowing the animators to match the voice actors' delivery. With anime, the process is reversed: animation is generally completed before the actors record their lines. Each method emphasizes different priorities. American animation tends to be dialogue and joke-heavy, with technological advancements built around realistic textures and movement. Anime prioritizes character and atmosphere, with long stretches of stillness punctuated by fluid action.

Both methods are good, but I'd been feeling burnt out on American animation for a while. Pixar (and Disney, Dreamworks, and Illumination Studios after it) turns out good work, but the formula's fairly transparent: set up a premise, then subvert it in a way that plays on the audience's emotional response to the main characters getting what they need, but not what they want. With Pixar movies especially, the style all looks the same: remarkably photorealistic surroundings populated by softly rounded characters, the blobitecture of animation. Most of the stylistic improvements for "traditional" CGI animation have been a tightening-up of technique: the ability to animate photorealistic water, the development of engines that can animate huge masses of hair and fur.

Which is why I flipped so hard for Phil Tippett's stop-motion masterpiece Mad God last year. Tippett takes no prisoners, and he isn't interested in photorealism; Mad God is a story about the pain of a cycle of destruction and rebirth that would not work in any other version of the medium. I didn't love Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, but I was gratified to see another piece of stop-motion work in the same year. Both films have a heft and a gravity to them, and both revel in the movement of the human form.

It's been gratifying to see other American animation studios take their cues from 2018's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse as well. This year's Across the Spider-Verse leans into its predecessor's anarchic approach to art styles. Nimona (streaming on Netflix) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (in theaters now) each owe a lot to the Spider-Verse movies, as well as the 2021 movie The Mitchell vs. The Machines and, to a lesser extent, the LEGO movie franchise. Part of that legacy is thanks to the rapid-fire scripting and creative input of Chris Miller and Phil Lord, but a lot of it also comes from the fresh approach to animation. Each of these movies wants you to know that they're animated. They show off their techniques instead of smoothing them over or trying to make them more realistic. And again, Pixar's house style isn't bad. The animation techniques behind Elemental were far and away the best parts about that movie. But it's refreshing to see movies that are giddy about being animated, rather than trying to hide the fact that they were animated in the first place. I know I'm having fun with them again.

What I talked about:

For Seeing & Believing podcast, Kevin and I reviewed They Cloned Tyrone (out now on Netflix), which I had a lot of fun with. Kevin chose to pair our review with the 1960 French horror film Eyes Without a Face.

What I'm reading:

Infinite Jest procrastination watch: I brought this book with me to the beach last weekend in the hopes that I'd be able to buckle down and actually read it, and the change of scene definitely helped. I powered through 400 pages in 3 days, and while I can't maintain that pace and also my job, I'm glad for the additional momentum. My goal was to finish the book by the end of the year; at this point, I think I'll be able to manage it by the end of the summer. More to come on that front later.