COMMENTARY : ARE ANIMATED FILMS DRAWN INTO A CORNER?

Unlikely as it may seem, the Good Old Days of movie animation were 1980-81. There were more animated features in production in America than ever.

Producers and directors talked about a dawning renaissance in the medium: Talented animators would work year-round making films whose winning scripts and bold new visuals would delight enormous audiences.

But then--disaster at the box office, an ill-timed strike by the Screen Cartoonists Guild in 1982, escalating production costs and lousy scripts. . . .

The renaissance arrived stillborn.

The features that made the poorest showings, like “Twice Upon a Time” and “Hey Good Lookin’,” were simply bad films, with poorly told stories and unimpressive animation, that drew poor reviews. It’s unlikely that they would have been hits under any circumstances.

The enormous success of Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” in 1938 established the animated feature as a worthy box-office competitor. Although fewer than 50 animated features have been made in this country, 22 turn up on Variety’s list of 100 all-time rental champs and continue to earn impressive dollars in re-release. (Disney’s “Pinnochio” actually lost money during its initial run in 1940 (due to its high production costs), but had grossed about $40 million through five reissues before its recent holiday opening Dec. 28. In its first 12 days at 1,309 theaters, the feature has grossed more than $15 million, breaking a number of Disney box-office records for animation, and will continue to be shown through February, according to the studio.)

But because there have been no major new successes to balance recent fiscal disasters, animation these days looks like a bad investment: The medium desperately needs a new box-office smash to re-establish it as a bankable commodity--and there are some major films in production that animators hope will do just that.

Don Bluth, the head of the studio that produced “The Secret of NIMH” as well as the “Dragon’s Lair” and “Space Ace” laser disc games, summed up the consensus among animators: “People told us teen-agers wouldn’t watch animation. The success of ‘Dragon’s Lair’ proved them wrong: It’s a question of presenting animation in the right format. What we need now is an animated feature that’s a comparable success. If one made $80 million, what it would do for the industry.”

It’s easy to dismiss quality animation, like Faberge eggs, as the product of another time--when skilled labor was cheap--that can’t be duplicated today. But even during the ‘30s, when an assistant animator might earn $22 per week, few films earned their production costs back in initial release.

“As in live-action, there are no miracles in animation,” comments Joe Barbera of Hanna-Barbera. “You get what you pay for. If you want to do ‘Star Wars’ with all those opticals, or ‘Silkwood’ with big stars, you have to spend money. If you want top-quality animation, you have to spend about $8 million; if you want fair quality, you may spend only $4 million.”

The brouhaha surrounding the recent takeover attempts and changes in management at Walt Disney Productions has obscured the fact that under founder Walt, the studio didn’t show sizable profits until the ‘50s, despite the success of the films. The money from TV and Disneyland made the difference. Throughout the ‘30s and ‘40s, Disney plowed his profits into more and better animation.

The income from toys, watches and other character merchandise helped to make up the cost of the often extremely expensive “Silly Symphonies.” “The Three Little Pigs” (1933) cartoon short cost $60,000, an extraordinary sum at a time when a live-action feature could be made for well under $1 million. “Fantasia’s” $2.27-million budget was considered staggering in 1940.

Currently, the generally accepted minimum for a top-quality animated feature film is $8 million. But animated features take longer to make and, often, longer to earn back their production costs. To make the genre commercially viable, a system of financing may have to be devised that will allow the profits to accrue over a period of years rather than weeks. Such a system would require a willingness to take risks, and continuity in studio management--both of which are hard to come by in Hollywood these days.

Although a look at Saturday-morning TV might suggest the contrary, quality animation is not a lost art. Most of the animators from the heyday of the Hollywood studios have either retired or died, but a lot of talented young people are waiting for a chance to do good animation. Unlike the previous generation (most of whom were painters or illustrators who turned to animation when they couldn’t find work during the Depression), these artists grew up wanting to be animators. Unfortunately, they rarely get challenges equal to their talents.

“The animated feature doesn’t seem to be alive and well anywhere outside of this studio,” remarks Disney animator Hendel Butoy. “Some of the recent films haven’t been well animated, but I think the main reason they’ve done badly is that they haven’t involved the audience the way they should. I don’t think anyone has succeeded in that area since the early Disney features.”

One of the main reasons so many of those features failed to involve an audience was bad writing: Writing for animation--rather than animating--seems to be a truly lost art. No one understood the importance of the story in an animated film better than Walt Disney. The Disney classics are beautifully animated, but much of their appeal derives from their carefully paced, solidly constructed stories.

During the making of “Snow White,” when his studio was mortgaged to the hilt, Disney discarded a scene in which the Dwarfs eat the soup Snow White has prepared. The sequence was beautifully animated and contained some excellent gags. It represented an investment of months of work and tens of thousands of borrowed dollars. But Disney excised the scene because he realized that it slowed the development of the story.

Today, a director would not only allow the Dwarfs to eat their soup, he’d serve them the gooseberry pies as well.

One of the most entertaining sequences in “Heidi’s Song” was an elaborate production number about the sleazy joys of being a rat. The sequence featured some bold graphics and an upbeat vocal performance by Sammy Davis Jr. Jazzy as it was, the scene should have been deleted because it brought the story to a screeching halt for several minutes and destroyed what little tension had been created when the villains locked Heidi in a rat-infested cellar.

Not one of the unsuccessful features had a well-constructed story. The plot of “Twice Upon a Time” was a string of gimmicks and jokes--many of them borrowed from other films--that never quite formed a coherent story. Two or three sequences, including an attack on the main characters by scissors, staplers, ink and other office supplies, would have made good short films by themselves.

But cutting a bunch of shorts together does not constitute a feature, any more than piling up wristwatches will make Big Ben. Warner Bros. has repeatedly proven this with their compilation features and TV specials. These lame efforts are produced by cutting up classic Bugs Bunny cartoons and stringing the pieces together--which destroys the timing, pacing and structure of the gags.

A number of potentially important features are in various stages of production and pre-production. Don Bluth is working with screenwriter Robert Towne on an original story tentatively titled “The Little Blue Whale.” Bluth is also developing a feature based on his laser-disc video game “Dragon’s Lair.”

Several years ago, Hanna-Barbera announced that it was beginning a series of fully animated features. The first installment, “Heidi’s Song,” was both a financial and artistic disappointment. The studio has several projects in development, but no features in production at this time. Paramount is preparing a live-action feature based on the firm’s popular series “The Jetsons,” an interesting reversal of the old Saturday-morning practice of making cartoons out of live-action properties.

Three major projects represent the key to the future of the animated feature in America: “Little Nemo,” “The Black Cauldron” and a series of films by Filmation Studios.

“Little Nemo,” based on Winsor McCay’s celebrated comic strip “Little Nemo in Slumberland” (1905), is in production at TMS (Tokyo Movie Shinsa). A number of highly respected American animators are at work on “Nemo” in Japan, both teaching and animating. The script is by longtime animation fan Ray Bradbury.

Recent Japanese animated films, such as the “Lupin III” adventures from TMS, have featured extremely sophisticated writing, direction and editing--but poor animation. A combination of polished American-style animation and Japanese cinematic techniques could provide powerful, exciting entertainment.

But “Nemo” has a hard act to follow: McCay himself animated the characters from his strip in 1911 in one of the seminal films in the history of the medium. (Many animators regard the idea of anyone else working with McCay’s characters as bordering on blasphemy.) Budgeted at $15 million, “Nemo” is scheduled for release in early ’86.

No animated feature film is the subject of more speculation than “The Black Cauldron,” Disney’s sword-and-sorcery epic based on the fantasy novels of Lloyd Alexander and scheduled for a Christmas, 1986, release. The film has been in production since 1980 (with an additional six years of research and development), and its $25-million price tag makes it the most expensive feature in the history of animation. The young animators at Disney hope the film will be their “Snow White.”

“My fantasy has always been to do a picture that’s as good as anything Walt ever did,” says producer Joe Hale. “We’re doing things in this picture that go beyond what can be done in live action. We’ve tried to stay ahead of Lucas et al., as in some of their films they’ve gone beyond what we did in ‘The Aristocats,’ ‘The Rescuers’ and some of our other pictures.”

Previewed footage from “Cauldron” contained some of the finest animation produced at the studio since Walt’s death. The hideous but superbly drawn ghoul-warriors of the evil Horned King are expected to earn the film a PG rating, the first for a Disney cartoon. At this point, it’s not clear whether the film will tell Alexander’s dark, powerful story effectively, or if the many cute little characters will get in the way.

Do the new animators feel the ghost of Walt--whom they never knew--peering over their shoulders?

“To be a good Disney animator, you have to be pretty enthused about the past,” replies Andreas Deja, “but you also have to take an interest in what’s going on around you today. You have to take an interest in modern acting. You have to watch how people move in films and real life now. You have to see what contemporary cartoonists and illustrators are drawing. You can’t just look at old films.”

Lou Scheimer, the president of Filmation, recently announced that his studio will produce 13 animated features over the next five years to be distributed through cassette, cable, syndication and foreign theatrical release. The first, “The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus,” based on a book by L. Frank Baum, is scheduled for release at Christmas of 1985. The budgets of $6 million per film should allow for adequate--though not full “Disney style”--animation.

“You won’t see any dewdrops glistening on cobwebs,” comments Scheimer, “but I’m not sure that kind of effect really helps to tell a story. What I think is important is the fact that these films will be done entirely in the United States. So much work has been going out of the country that it’s become impossible to train young people to do full animation.”

Although some recent American features and a number of older foreign ones have turned up on various cable networks, cable TV has not provided the market animators had envisioned. The eight minutes of cartoon inserts Kurtz and Friends did for “The Illustrated George Carlin,” a recent HBO special, represents the largest amount of animation commissioned for cable to date.

Cassette sales of animated films have been encouraging: “The Secret of NIMH” has sold 32,000 cassettes at $79.95. During the two-and-a-half months they were available this summer, the seven “limited edition” cassettes of classic Disney shorts sold more than 610,000 units to earn more than $18 million.

Syndication is already having a substantial effect on TV animation. Last fall, Filmation introduced the first made-for-syndication series, “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe,” on more than 150 stations. New installments of “He-Man” and “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids” are in production. Hanna-Barbera will release 41 new episodes of “The Jetsons” to syndication next spring.

“Although cable, cassettes, syndication and foreign distribution are important markets for animation individually,” explains Scheimer, “no one of them represents enough revenue to support feature production. But, together, they offer a substantial market that will enable us to undertake a series of productions that will constitute an important body of work.”

Barring the emergence of a new Walt Disney with money, dedication and marketing skills, the future of large-scale production of quality animation in America rests on “Nemo,” “Cauldron” and the Filmation package. If all three prove box-office successes, the profits could spark that long-awaited renaissance. If one or two of them fail, animation will continue as it has for the last several years, teetering on the edge of oblivion.

If all three fail, full animation will probably cease to exist in this country outside of television commercial houses, schools and the Disney studio.

The Hollywood cartoon, a unique American contribution to comedy and film, died an ignoble, languishing death. It would be a grievous loss if the animated feature, to which Americans have also made enormous contributions, were to follow it into extinction.