Toy Story 3 is now the highest grossing animated film of all time. Box Office Mojo calculates the film’s current worldwide earnings at over $980 million and it tops the domestic charts for the year thus far. This kind of success in the entertainment industry is bound to spawn imitators. My hope is that filmmakers will take inspiration from the quality of animation and attention to detail found in Pixar’s films or the idea that kids can and will watch films containing harsh truths and bittersweet endings. But I know that somebody somewhere is going to come away with the idea that animation is the path to guaranteed success and that nothing could be easier than gathering up a couple of creative types and having them make the next big hit animated movie.
Of course, we know better. We’ve read the books, watched the documentaries, and poured over the DVD bonus features. We know that even the most creative people in the world don’t wake up one morning with the idea for an animated film and have the whole thing done in a month. Animation has its own challenges, from trying again and again to get a particular pose right to having to scrap a finished scene because of story changes to plain old artist’s block. It’s hard work and it isn’t always hard work that pays off. For every Toy Story 3, there are any number of animated films that enjoy only modest success, more that fail outright, and still more that have trouble even getting into theaters.
Take, for example, the unfortunate tale of Tugger: The Jeep 4×4 Who Wanted To Fly. The Orlando Sentinel first detailedthe film’s troubled history back in 2006 and revisited the story when the film’s director was arrested and charged with fraud. (Both articles came to my attention via Cartoon Brew.) Tugger might have been just one more forgotten animated film were it not for the allegations that director Jeffrey Varab lured in investors with assurances of deals for distribution that hadn’t actually been signed, failed to pay animators, and never repaid money he was loaned for production expenses. Varab claims that Tugger writer and storyboard supervisor Woody Woodman and one of the investors in the film are trying to ruin him and that Tugger‘s extremely brief flight through theaters was not an actual release, but a test screening. In the comments section on just about any article on Varab’s arrest, you’ll find people citing Tugger‘s woes as part of a long history of underhanded behavior by Varab, people defending Varab as a good and trustworthy person, and a couple of people who think that Varab’s methods may have been shady, but they’re pretty much business as usual in Hollywood. The facts of Tugger‘s production may not be clear until the court cases surrounding it are resolved. But what is clear is that is clear is that simply being a computer animated film for children did not save Tugger from crashing and leaving a lot of unhappy people in its wake.
This is not the only way an animated film can crash and burn. Comb through the history of animation and you’re bound to come across projects and whole studios that came and went without much notice or never got even one production off the ground. Some are true tragedies, tales of enthusiastic artists with big, ambitious ideas who just couldn’t get the business end of the equation to work out. There are also ill-concieved studios and ideas based around the most, bland, safe, uninspired projects and business deals shadier than those e-mails requesting your help in getting money out of a foreign country. And everything in between: idealistic young animators who entered into terrible financial deals to fund their projects, artists so obsessed with making their work perfect that the film goes horribly over budget and never gets finished, studios that get all the money lined up in the most legitimate, above the board ways but comes out with films that never catch on, terrific films that are horribly marketed or barely released, and companies that are so focused on potential merchandising and fast food premiums and theme parks that the actual film is almost an afterthought.
Why am I telling you all of this? Because the risky, business side of studio animation is so often overlooked. The movie industry has long been associated with dreams; think of the fantasy of Hollywood as a place where anyone can become a star. The process of animation seems so inherently magical – making drawings, polygons, puppets, and the like come to life – that it’s even easier to coat the entire process in a sparkling veil of pixie dust. Even the tendency of American theatrical animation to tell stories for children plays a role in how the industry is viewed. We see so many animated movies about characters who pursue their dreams and find happiness in spite of all odds that we sometimes want to believe that the animation industry works on the same principle, that anyone with a dream and the will to make it happen can succeed. It is, as Jiminy Cricket puts it in Pinocchio, “a very lovely thought, but not at all practical.”
You might think that knowing about all the obstacles lying between an animated film and success would give me a dim view of studio animation. But that isn’t true. Everything I’ve learned about it over the years has made me appreciate the animation I love more, not less. Knowing how much works goes into crafting a good story, designing an appealing characters, making that character seem to think and feel, creating a convincing environment, and making the result seem natural and effortless has given me a greater respect for movies that are able to accomplish such a daunting task. The same is true of knowing what the business of studio animation is like. I don’t think it’s a perfect system and it still frustrates me when I see a good movie or a good studio fall prey to financial troubles. But knowing all the pressures facing animated films makes it all the more impressive when a movie does succeed, when a film feels like it was made in that nonexistent world where everyone is happy to throw unlimited amounts of money into production just so the movie can be as good as it can possibly be, or when a young artist looks at everything he or she must overcome to even a film into theaters and still has the courage to try to make the next great animated movie.
