In the U.S. there's this common notion that animation is 'kids stuff'. Of course there have
always been outliers that are becoming more common, for example there are a slew of adult animated TV
shows. From The Simpsons to Bob's Burgers to Archer to Bojack Horseman to Rick and Morty
to Harley Quinn and more. And even an animated Van Gogh movie entitled Loving Vincent, which
was entirely hand-painted frame for frame, was for adults. And of course there was Food Fight, which
parents took their kids to simply because it was an animated movie and they thought it was for them.
Like boy were they in for a surprise. But still most animated feature films tend to be marketed as
for the whole family, as a family picture, and therefore the movies tend to be more
for kids and less for adults. Most times studios create characters that are solely in the movie
to sell toys and move merchandise. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is annoying when
not done well. But in the end I don't really have beef with the fact that animated movies in the U.S.
are made for a wider demographic. And honestly some of my favorite movies are animated movies for this
exact reason, because animated movies tend to balance out the whimsy of childhood with the
serious reality of adulthood and that's why I like them so much. Ratatouille is definitely one
that always comes to mind, but still, I wish there was more appreciation for animation as an art form
and that's what I'm here to talk about today. Animation as art and why I still love watching
animated movies as an adult. Hey everyone and welcome back to my channel my name's
Cheyenne and I'm an Asian American adoptee and expat living in Brazil. I post new videos every
Tuesday and Friday about race, feminism, and pop culture, so if you're into that please subscribe
and ring the bell! So part one, a very brief and limited history of animation in the United States.
Basically this part is going to answer why in the U.S. we see animation as kids stuff.
Arguably the first and most famous cartoon character during the early days of Hollywood was
Felix the cat who ruled during the 1920s. There were others of course, but Felix seemed to be
like the top dog, forgive the pun. He was so famous that there was even a merch made of him
for parents to buy for their children. And of course adults could also enjoy Felix the cat as he
wasn't just for kids, but also for adults to enjoy. The shorts would satirize contemporary happenings
and also make jokes that only adults would get, kind of similar to today honestly. "Look, doubloons!
Don't drop them." But overall they were still seen as comedic bits that would play before you know
the real feature. Animated shorts at the time were made for laughs basically and they rarely ever
dabbled in adult genres like drama. So in all these early animated shorts were fun, but they weren't
taken seriously as an art form, even though a lot of work went into them. Not only with Felix the cat,
but with all animations, including Walt Disney's. Walt saw the popularity of Felix the cat during
the 1920s and made it his mission during the beginning of the 1930s to replace Felix
with his own creation. After Oswald the lucky rabbit was stolen from him, he created Mickey
Mouse and marketed the hell out of him. If he was going to replace Felix the cat he needed that
kid demographic, and in the end he got it. Mickey Mouse clubs soon popped up all over the country
to gather every saturday to watch a matinee of Mickey shorts and Silly Symphony cartoons.
And after a few years Walt was finally able to replace Felix with Mickey Mouse in the public
consciousness. Walt was able to do this by adding synchronized sound to his cartoons, which had never
been done before and was an arduous task and really hard, but it proved to pay off in the end.
He also hired the best of the best, even hiring some of the Felix the cat animators and
convincing them to move to his Hyperion studio in California from New York City, which was still the
film capital at the time in the United States. Walt being a perfectionist never cut costs or corners
and therefore the animation in his shorts really stood out. He sometimes had animators animate the
same sequence nine times just to make sure that it was perfect. Even though Disney marketed his Mickey
Mouse cartoons and Silly Symphonies as kid stuff in order to make them popular, didn't mean that
he saw them as any lesser than a high drama live action film. Despite the intense task in art form
which is animation, which includes painting, inking, baking cells, mixing paints, adding sound, and more,
most people just saw the cartoons as silly gags. It didn't really help that Walt called
them silly symphonies, either but it was Disney's dream and goal to make people see and understand
that animation is an art form and is high art. And it honestly baffles me that some people don't see
it that way. So part two - animation is hard work and also high art. Animation has so many moving pieces
and some of it, if not most of it, never even makes it to the screen in the final film. When
starting an animated TV show or feature film tons, if not dozens upon dozens, of character iterations
and prop iterations are made before finally being chosen to be rendered out. While working on Frozen
Victoria Ying, a visual development artist, was working hard for months on Elsa's music box
that in the end didn't make it into the final cut of the movie. "This box that was in the Frozen, um
like one of the original iterations of Frozen, and it's in the art of books so like I know that it's
okay to talk about, but there was like a story moment when Elsa gives Anna like a music box for-
I don't know. I think it was Hans gives Anna a music box, and I got to design
that, which is really fun because music boxes are so pretty and there's like so much stuff
going on in them. So you know I got to really explore the world of Frozen kind of on this like
small scale, um that felt really like low risk, but still at the same time was able to
encapsulate like the story and the characters." But her added work, though not present in the film, did
help find the feel of Frozen as a movie. The color team then needs to decide what color everything
will be, which was extremely hard back in the day of hand-drawn animation where paint mixers needed
to literally mix every color and take stock of what they had each day to make sure everything
was in order for the painters, not to mention the color mixers and technicians need to make sure all
the colors are the same in order for the movie and the animation in the movie to be consistent. In one
scene in Roger Rabbit there were 75 colors used on the darts alone. 75 colors just for a few props!
"There were 75 colors just on the darts alone. We have just finished a seven minute film Roller
Coaster Rabbit, which approximately had 23,000 cels. Roger was quite difficult he had 14 colors.
Most people could average about 16 cels a day, although painting looks easy, it takes
time to get consistent quality from an artist." In-betweeners need to hand draw every movement
from one keyframe to another, which means there are dozens upon dozens of pages and later cels
to each animated movie you've ever watched, before the move to CGI. In one shot in Snow White that
Brandon Kouri recreated and posted here on youtube, there were 334 frames in one little scene with
birch chirping and flowers moving, each on their own independent layer and loop. And that's honestly
what interests me the most about animation. How just a little sequence can be broken down into
so many different layers and so many moving parts. It's just so intense how it all comes perfectly
together in the end. Environments are laid out storyboards mounted, and an important thing to know
is that anything can change at a drop of a hat, so you have to kind of be ready for anything. And
sometimes it's thankless work, as most people don't stay for the ending credits and most people don't
know who the people are in the credits to begin with, unless they're in the animation industry.
For example Ub Iwerks, one of Disney's long time partners and animators, actually left the studio
for a while because he felt as though he wasn't getting enough credit for Mickey. In one anecdote
I read in Neal Gabler's biography entitled Triumph of the American Imagination, when a fan asked Walt
to draw him a doodle of Mickey, Walt passed it on to Iwerks because he couldn't draw Mickey.
Animation is sometimes very thankless work, but it is really rewarding for people who make it their
living obviously, because there's only a few positions open and the people in the
industry truly do love what they do. Animation is also definitely more of a team effort anyway,
rather than any one individual's effort, so I think that can also be really fulfilling if you're you
know into doing work with a team. Of course in the field of animation and in the animation industry
and bubble people probably do know who you are and do recognize your individual talents, but it just
kind of sucks that the larger public also doesn't recognize individual artists that work so hard
on the movies that we know and love. I personally suggest following Bobby Pontillas on instagram,
as he is a visual development artist at Disney and work on Tangled and Frozen. I also suggest
following LuluSketches here on youtube. She works in the animation industry both in feature
and tv and she's just really knowledgeable and always making videos about the animation industry.
Lastly go follow and look at some of the artists who worked on Carmen Sandiego - two of them Wei Li,
a storyboard artist, and Sylvia Liu, the art director, were nominated for daytime Emmys
this year. And of course I suggest doing your own research and looking up artists who have worked on
your favorite movies and TV shows. It's really easy to find people who work in animation online and
on Instagram. And there you'll be able to support their work and also see what they do in their free
time, in their very limited free time away from the studio. So part three post Snow White. After Disney
made Snow White, which though was a huge success, animation still wasn't seen by the public as high
art. It also probably didn't help that Disney was telling a fairy tale, so after that he decided to
move on to more adult themes and made Fantasia, but that didn't do well financially, and neither did
Pinocchio or Bambi. Dumbo found success financially, and though as trippy and heartfelt as it is, it is
still generally seen as fluff for kids. Therefore Disney movies started to become synonymous
with kids movies, and Disney movies, though Walt did dabble in a lot of live-action films and TV shows,
are remembered today as primarily animated movies. So the correlation between the two isn't really
too difficult to understand, and animation studios ever since have been trying to replicate Disney's
success and sticking to the kids movie formula to a T, rather than trying to branch out and make
any animated movies for adults, or at least high budget animated movies for adults. But I
think that the fact that Disney movies are made for the whole family is kind of awesome because
family entertainment does matter and can be really good, and when done right lends itself really well
to drama and comedy. Another reason why i really like animated movies is because everything is
made from scratch. Everything exists in its own world and therefore you can bend the laws of
reality it doesn't need to be realistic, you don't need to adhere to the laws of physics or anatomy,
and you can create colors that aren't necessarily found in nature. And actually it's important to
remember that animation is a style of its own. I mean Disney animation has their style,
Studio Ghibli has their style, and each of them do adhere to their own laws of physics and anatomy.
They create like the body and the skeleton how they want it to look, and it still looks good
and believable because they're so talented that they're able to manipulate the face, manipulate the
body, and still make it look real and make sense. It's just so awesome to me and I wish it got more
appreciation, but I know that there are hardcore animation fans out there that agree with me and
that do know all this stuff, so I know that I'm not alone in like animation is awesome and you
need to appreciate it more! I think that a lot of people do realize that and I'm glad that you know
I am not alone. Another thing that I want to bring up is that even the more poorly funded animation
studios, or the animation studios that spend most of their movies budget on celebrity voice actors
or celebrity actors in general, they also do deserve appreciation and love because the artists
that work behind the scenes of those movies are really talented even though the movies always
or usually come out kind of strange. The artists working behind Trolls, Rio and the Minion movies
do deserve credit and praise where praise is due because they are artists and technicians and you
know no one gets into the world of animation by being bad at storytelling or their craft. As for
Disney it seems to be moving away from animation altogether and kind of giving up on Walt's dream
that animation can be a high art form as they're remaking all of their classic animated films into
live action dark and gritty realistic movies that don't need to exist and that are honestly terrible.
In all I hope that they do something good soon, but we are getting a lot of other great animated 2-D
animated hand-drawn movies and TV shows like Klaus and Carmen Sandiego, but I don't think that
2-D animation will come back into feature films anytime soon, but let me know what you think in
the comments down below! So part 4 representation. Another reason why I love animated movies to this
day is because I always found myself to be more represented in the world of animation. From Avatar
the Last Airbender to Jake Long American Dragon to Jackie Chan Adventures to Sagwa
there were always kids TV shows centered around Asian stuff. Even Pokemon and YuGiOh spoke to me
simply because they didn't take place in the U.S. And you know they were foreign, I was labeled as
foreign and therefore I could relate to them more, or at least felt that I should relate to them more.
And as I got older and got more into the works of Hayao Miyazaki and Makato Shinkai I started
to see myself in the world of anime. Not because I'm Japanese but because I saw myself in these
characters that lived in Asia and had Asian names. Kind of how I really identified with K-pop when
I was in high school simply because they were Asian! There wasn't an Asian-American sitcom
until I got to college and by that time I already felt way more represented by animation than live
action, which is probably why my bar for Asian American-centered media is extremely high,
you can't beat animation! There was of course The Joy Luck Club, but that came out when I was
like a baby, and when I finally watched it I did enjoy it, I do like the movie and the book, but I
really wanted to see Asian people in contemporary times, in the time that I was living and that just
happened to be more animation than it was in live action. Where real world representation was lacking
I made up for it by immersing myself in the world of animation and I'm honestly really happy that I
did it. So the conclusion! Animation is a beautiful art form that deserves to be seen as more than
just kids stuff. It should be seen as an art form that is for all ages, from kids to adults alike, but
that of course doesn't mean that animation can't be made specifically for adults or even be made to
be horrific. I mean just look at Babadook, which was made specifically for adults and to scare adults.
Animated movies in my opinion have yet to reach their full potential, at least in Hollywood,
and I hope that changes sometime soon. I think for animation to ever be taken seriously as high art
it needs to start being in other genres rather than just entertainment for the whole family,
but that's just my opinion, let me know what you think in the comments down below! And also let
me know what your favorite animated movies are in the comments! So that's it for the video thank you
so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed it and if you're new here I post new videos every Tuesday
and Friday and my next video is going to be a 2020 end of the year pop culture commentary wrap up, so
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now