The Sad Decline of Animation....

I would put forth a very profound claim that animation while not invented in America was indeed nearly perfected here. We owe this largely to the Walt Disney Company of old, certainly not the new. Over decades they built up what was to become the finest study of hand drawn and traditional animation to be found in the world. Yes I'm a fan of Ghibli as well, but they admittedly came much later and were influenced heavily by Disney. Then one day a new train came to town. Pixar. Love em, hate em, they were what people were looking for at the time and something new and fun, so they thrived. I for one thought that the cg animation world could happily coexist alongside the long standing tradition of 2d animation. Back then my goal was to indeed become a 2d animator. In a short time, shorter than I would have ever expected me and a lot of other 2d animation hopefuls would see Disney and others gut their 2d houses in favor of cheaper, faster and easier to produce cg. I have nothing against CG animation-other than it is a severely limited tool, and is lacking in expression compared to hand drawn animation. I enjoy some of it, but for it to have replaced 2d outright in my mind is simply awful. I know most cg animators will tell you that cg is only a tool and the process is still the same. In ways they are quite correct, but I've yet to see a cg animated feature achieve the same brilliance and richness or their 2d counterparts. Plus to see possibly the most perfected and deep knowledge of 2d animation, a legacy of the original Disney studio just be thrown away in favor of pose to pose cg animation should really raise eyebrows, and I'm sure it does for a lot of people. Unfortunately the move towards cg was mainly to appease the stock market cats that are funding our glorious cinematic enterprise these days. They want profit and will only invest in sure things or at least things they think will be surely make them some money. Long gone are the days of Walt financing movies at the bank and staying true to his vision. It's why in cinema as a whole we are bombarded with sequels, pop movies, and the same old thing over and over again. This is especially true for animation. We just keep seeing everyone's movies starting to look the same. Overloaded with useless and jittery secondary movement and packed with stupid cliches and fad one liners. It is becoming very homogeneous out there and we are seeing another alarming trend. Our animation jobs for the sake of profit are being shipped overseas. I know these days everything is made in China, but not animation too? It's not because they are better at it. We have the best lot of animators in the world, rivaled only by the Japanese, right here at home. Instead of paying them a living wage and making a little less profit, our talented people have been replaced by computers or sweatshop animation studios run out of ghetto apartments overseas. The craft is suffering as any does when the focus becomes pure profit rather than great people working collectively to tell great stories, where profit is a welcome bi-product allowing them to do it again. It is sad to me that Disney has become so focused on profit and media mongering that it has actually forgotten how it became what it is today. I have to have faith that 2D will come back. I think people are already souring on the the fact that there is no real Disney anymore, and that they just keep seeing the same old things out of the other big animation houses(I wholeheartedly exclude the stop motion houses like Aardman-I love what they do!). Hopefully sooner than later someone will get their shot at making a truly great animated feature in 2d and show the world at large what they've been missing. For now we'll just have to wait, but thanks to Hayao Miyazaki for coming out of retirement and making his latest film, due out in June of this year. I know I'll be watching it in Japanese with or without subs because I can't wait for it! All the best. IIId