Animation: A World History

Volume III: Contemporary Times

Giannalberto Bendazzi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317519874
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Programming Games

A continuation of 1994's groundbreaking Cartoons, Giannalberto Bendazzi's Animation: A World History is the largest, deepest, most comprehensive text of its kind, based on the idea that animation is an art form that deserves its own place in scholarship. Bendazzi delves beyond just Disney, offering readers glimpses into the animation of Russia, Africa, Latin America, and other often-neglected areas and introducing over fifty previously undiscovered artists. Full of first-hand, never before investigated, and elsewhere unavailable information, Animation: A World History encompasses the history of animation production on every continent over the span of three centuries.

Volume III catches you up to speed on the state of animation from 1991 to present. Although characterized by such trends as economic globalization, the expansion of television series, emerging markets in countries like China and India, and the consolidation of elitist auteur animation, the story of contemporary animation is still open to interpretation. With an abundance of first-hand research and topics ranging from Nickelodeon and Pixar to modern Estonian animation, this book is the most complete record of modern animation on the market and is essential reading for all serious students of animation history.

Key Features:

• Over 200 high quality head shots and film stills to add visual reference to your research
• Detailed information on hundreds of never-before researched animators and films
• Coverage of animation from more than 90 countries and every major region of the world
• Chronological and geographical organization for quick access to the information you're looking for

1 Contemporary Times

DOI: 10.4324/9781315720746-2

The Last Days of the Wall

• ‘This Government has decided to grant its citizens the permanent right to travel abroad,’ said Günter Schabowski, spokesman of the new government of the German Democratic Republic.
• ‘And how?’ asked Riccardo Ehrmann, an Italian journalist.
• ‘Permanent expatriation can be done via any frontier station between the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany.’
• ‘Is this decree in force for West Berlin, too?’
• ‘… Yes, yes.’
• ‘Since when?’
• ‘Uh … as far as I know, it comes into force, well … ab sofort.’

It was the beginning of the end. Ab sofort means ‘straightaway’ in German. The live broadcast press conference ended with these words at 7:01 p.m. Straightaway, tens of thousands of East Berliners rushed to the crossings to go west and massed there until the East border guards, who had watched TV in their turn and hadn’t received any official instruction, opened the gates wide and restricted themselves to directing traffic.

It was 9 November 1989. The border was actually supposed to open the next day, but nobody had briefed Schabowski. A blunder by the over-efficient Communist Party triggered the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Between 1989 and 1991, the Eastern European satellite countries abandoned Communist rule and the Soviet protectorate. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania broke from the Soviet Union itself, which had included them since the Second World War. On 24 August 1991 the Ukraine left the Soviet Union and declared its independence. Moldova, Tajikistan, Armenia, Turkmenistan, Byelorussia (later Belarus), Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan followed. By the end of the year the Cold War was definitely over. Only the division between North and South Korea remained.

Western leaders experienced various feelings during those years. Bliss was not among them. The status quo had pleased everyone, and after 1980, when the Soviets became bogged down in Afghanistan and the Poles openly and steadily started opposing the regime, the chancelleries of the entire Northern hemisphere embarked more or less secretly – and more and more frantically, after the rise to power of reformist Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 – in a piloted strategy to let the Soviet Union lose the Cold War without losing face.

The West Germans were exhilarated by the reunion with their Eastern brothers, but the French had a joke: ‘We love Germany that much that we are happy to have two of them’. Russians, Poles, the British, Czechs, and Americans all agreed. After more than forty years of Communist rule, Eastern European countries had to face, all at once, an embarrassingly difficult commodity: the free market. Poverty arose and many people migrated to the US, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Spain, causing serious social problems that those countries had wished to avoid.

The map of Europe was redrawn for the third time in little more than seventy years. Germany was unified, the Czech Republic and Slovakia split amicably, and Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan left the USSR. Yugoslavia became a battlefield. Twenty years of fratricidal atrocities and ambiguous international military interventions followed. By 2010, the former Yugoslav territory was occupied by the independent states of Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia (officially called the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia), and Kosovo (partially recognized).

An Animation Notebook

1. What implications did all of this have for animation? The fall of the Soviet Empire brought with it the end of the State-based economy. As far as cinema was concerned, it was the end of the State-funded film industry. Films continued to be made sporadically and states continued to be the films’ patrons, but only in a disorderly and casual way. In effect, what was known as ‘animation from the Eastern countries’ ceased to exist.
2. Around 1990, in Western Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, and other countries, there was a sudden, unexpected demand from the public and from new television stations for cartoons. In the European Union between 1989 and 1992, the consumption and production of TV animation increased by 15 to 30 percent each year. France, the largest European producer of cartoons, went from creating 61 hours a year in 1988 to 237 hours a year in 1994. Between 1985 and 1996, the US market increased from 810 million to 4,000 million dollars. In 1995 in Japan, 80 weekly animated TV series lit up the domestic screens. In Taiwan, Wang Film Productions had more than a thousand people on the payroll, and most of the time worked for Warner Brothers. There were many booms in what had been traditionally a field of subsistence.
3. The global spread of personal computers, the Internet, and easy-to-use software for animation (such as Flash) opened the way for an entirely new network – animation on the Web. Production was cheap. Creating an Internet site presented no obstacles, so the filters of production, distribution, theatrical exhibition (the last ring of the goods chain, from production to consumption), and broadcast were wholly eliminated. Making an animated film became an accessible art, like writing poetry. (After the initial enthusiasm, spurred by a sense of freedom of expression without limits, the disappointments came. Despite the many new artists using the medium, works worth remembering on the Web were rare).
4. From the late 1980s onwards, there was a marked growth in animation schools, both in the number of institutions and in their quality. First in the United States, and then gradually throughout the rest of the world, universities, academies of art, and film schools offered courses for aspiring animators. At international festivals, graduation films often were presented as a separate category, with separate awards; frequently these débuts were of high quality. All this coexisted with fads, some filmmakers were adopted as models for imitation (the most exploited of these in the decade from 1990 to 2000 was Jan Švankmajer), and the unfortunate belief persisted that computer software would perform the creative tasks of animation.
5. In 1995, the great success of the feature Toy Story, directed by John Lasseter, put an end to the experimental era of computer-generated and animated images. Algorithms and pixels were no longer called ‘new technology’; they became everyday ‘digital technology’. It was here to stay, and cels and ink and paint departments became outmoded.
6. Hybridization became the rule in film production – at least in blockbusters. Techniques and technologies that had been experimented with in animation, or that already belonged to animation, were absorbed by Hollywood film producers. Live-action shooting combined with postproduction computer special effects became standard. Many people thought live-action was becoming artificial-action. Cinema was going back to its origins, when animation and live-action worked together.
7. The road forked, and forked, and forked again. Animation entered the new markets of the Web, special effects proliferated, and then mobile phones arrived, and music videos, video games, and so on.

What happened after the early 1990s in animation is still too recent for us to have a historically clear perspective on the events and movements. The following pages document, as far as is possible at the present time, and in no way exhaustively, the films and movements that seem to have significance for the larger history of animation.

2 North America

DOI: 10.4324/9781315720746-3

Is TV an Art Too?¹

¹ By Stefania Carini.

In the 1980s, American TV changed definitively. The monopoly of the three major channels (ABC, NBC, and CBS) was broken by a new network, Fox, and by the growth and spread of cable TV. From then on, there was a differentiation of supply and demand, with programmes oriented to different audiences. TV series had to cater to these new and diverse audiences in order to catch their attention.

The late 1980s, called the beginning of the Second Golden Age² of TV, represented the turning point. It marked the birth of Quality TV, a new style of American fiction. Quality TV consisted of an open serial format, multiple plots, controversial subjects, and a large ensemble cast. It created a new genre by mixing old ones, using quotations and self-referential elements. The visual element became a fundamental aspect of these series.³

² The first Golden Age was the period between the late 1940s and the 1950s. ³ See J. T. Caldwell, Televisuality. Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1994.

The most important examples of Quality TV in the 1980s included Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, Moonlighting, Miami Vice, China Beach, L.A. Law, and Thirtysomething. During the 1990s, differentiation was of paramount importance, as was seen in Twin Peaks, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dawson’s Creek, ER, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, The West Wing, and so on. By the turn of the century, Quality TV was a stylistic trend.

The first phase of Quality TV referred to the network era, but cable and satellite TV were developing too. For instance, HBO made its own Quality TV series, without the previous restrictions on content, including: Sex and the City, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and The Wire. Networks made 24, Lost, Desperate Housewives, CSI, Ugly Betty, and House M.D. New cable TV channels presented Dexter, Weeds, and Mad Men.⁴

⁴ See also Stefania Carini , Il testo espanso, Vita e Pensiero, Milan, 2009.

Animation Followed

The new trend also involved animation. In 1989 The Simpsons broke with TV tradition, opening a new ‘TV Animation Golden Age’.⁵ Thanks to The Simpsons, aired in prime time, animated series gained visibility and prestige in networks. Meanwhile, cartoons were also promoted by cable channels in their programme schedules, and their production increased.

⁵ See Carol A. Stabile and Mark Harrison, eds, Prime Time Animation. Television Animation and American Culture, Routledge, New York, 2003.

Animated series were no longer just for children. They were programmed on prime time and aimed at people aged between 18 and 49, the most valuable target audience. Cable channels differentiated programmes according to various targets: preteens, tweens (between middle childhood and adolescence), teenagers, and young adults. Programmes for the youngest age groups represented mainly pedagogic experiments. The middle category aimed at creating a narrative and stylistic mix, hoping to attract a more adult audience as well. The last category took a visually and verbally irreverent approach.

The Simpsons and King of the Hill were two of Fox’s highest-rated programmes; South Park was cable TV station Comedy Central’s highest-rated programme.⁶ Cartoons became valuable commodities. Animation represented the core business for media conglomerates, which worked across different connected fields. Cartoons soon became a multiplatform service (TV, DVD, Internet, video games, etc.), and their characters turned out to be great icons, generating huge levels of merchandising.

⁶ D. Leonard, ‘“South Park” creators haven’t lost their edge’, last modified 2010, http://money.cnn.com/.

Animated series became the way to differentiate, both for cable TV and the networks. Furthermore, thanks to their international circulation, they also became an important part of global pop culture. As for their narratives, the most important difference from the past was the better quality of the screenplays.

The new animated series used different comic forms, from satire to the grotesque, and parody with quotations, self-referentiality, and postmodern irony. The multifaceted comedies often had surreal elements and fast, frenetic timing. Thanks to animated series, the comic genre was renewed: The Simpson transformed the live sitcom.

Limited animation became a conscious stylistic choice. Moreover, cartoons showed graphic research: the style was characterized by grotesque deformity or by personal approaches that echoed UPA. Stylized geometric shapes and strong colours were among these cartoons’ main features.

Sub-Period 1: The Beginning, 1989–1998⁷

⁷ By Stefania Carini.

The Simpsons by Matt Groening represented the first successful cartoon example of Quality TV. It marked a big change, both in the history of animation and in the history of the sitcom. The decade witnessed other important changes, such as the increased role of cable channels and new brands, including the Cartoon Network.

The Simpsons ⁸ was created in 1989 by Matt Groening (b. Portland, Oregon, 15 February 1954). Groening was a comic artist and writer whose first success was Life in Hell,⁹ published in the innovative Wet Magazine. It attracted the attention of James L. Brooks (b. North Bergen, New Jersey, 9 May 1940), creator of the TV series Mary Tyler Moore (1970–1977) and Lou Grant (1977–1982), who was at that time working at Fox. The new network needed something to break the oligopoly of CBS, ABC, and NBC – something new and unexpected. Brooks was working on the sitcom The Tracey Ullman Show and asked Groening to adapt Life in Hell for that programme.

⁸ The production companies behind The Simpson s were 20th Century Fox Television and Gracie Films (created by James L. Brooks). ⁹ The strip features the anthropomorphic rabbit Binky , who is bitter, depressed, and thus ‘normal’. Groening used these characters to explore a wide range of topics with an alienated, angsty style.

Groening created a short film series with a dysfunctional family; these were the first Simpsons cartoons. Brooks loved them and convinced the network to create a complete series for prime time, which hadn’t happened since The Flintstones. The sitcom scriptwriter Sam Simon (b. California, 6 June 1955, who had worked on Taxi, Cin Cin, and The Tracey Ullman Show) joined the crew. The Simpsons soon became one of the most watched shows in America, quickly spreading round the world and becoming a classic. The target audience was young adults; for this reason, taboo subjects were allowed. The visual style was complex, using a language close to live-action cinema.

The Simpsons are yellow characters with big eyes. The family is composed of the stupid father Homer, the careful mother Marge, the smar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• The Sixth Period