There has been something really nagging at me as of late, and if you've read some of my previous First Impressions posts this year, you'd know what it is. The animated line-up of 2024 has been, in my opinion anyway, severely mediocre at best... at least for the first half or so of the year. Something about the releases has just made me question, "Am I becoming a jaded snob?", like there really is nothing I can get really upset about with movies like Saving Bikini Bottom or The Garfield Movie, I haven't really watched anything that I felt was an insult to animation, to be fair that notion is a bit of hyperbole, but you get the idea right? To me, the majority of the "Bad" animated films this year have been more on the "Mediocre" side of bad, which wouldn't be an issue, except that until recently, similar could be said about the good movies too. Ultraman: Rising and Thelma the Unicorn are not bad movies in and of themselves, but are they really that good?
I think I know what the ultimate problem is, 2022 absolutely spoiled me. There was just something magical about that year, the good movies were really good, and even the bad movies were interesting to talk about. Off the top of my head, 2022 was just filled with releases like Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, The Bad Guys, The Sea Beast, Apollo 10½, Wendell & Wild, and honestly I'll even throw a bone to stuff like Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, Paws of Fury, even Luck. 2022 was not a dull or empty year for animation fans, but why? Well, I think it's partly for two main reasons, firstly, this was 2022. In 2020, there was a global pandemic that basically shut everything down, and in that time, people got to do something they almost never did in this hustle and bustle work culture we've created, they got to relax for a couple days. Being a creative type, I know just how good the power of relaxing can be for your creativity, so finally getting that chance to properly relax must have been so relieving to a lot of these writers and directors, so throughout 2020 and 2021 they got to work and polish up these ideas of theirs and then voila, 2022 came around.
I think the other big thing to keep in mind is, this is the 2020s. I write for a living, I'm really good at this! Okay, so the 2010s were a big game changing decade for animation, there was a new movie studio coming in that was gonna rival Disney and DreamWorks, Cartoon Network released two major cartoons that changed the landscape, Adventure Time and Regular Show, there was this itty bitty minor show that completely blew up called Friendship is Magic, and through the 2010s it was very clear that the animation landscape was changing. Shows like Steven Universe, Gravity Falls, The Amazing World of Gumball, Over the Garden Wall, Sonic Boom, Teen Titans Go!, Rick and Morty, BoJack Horseman, Bob's Burgers, Dan Vs., OK K.O.!, Ultimate Spider-Man, DuckTales, this was a new era of animation, and it began with the new decade. On top of that, internet animation was becoming bigger, streaming was becoming bigger, and there was this little movie that released at towards tail-end of the decade, a movie that would become one of the most influential pieces of animation of all time; Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. So it would make absolute sense that the influence of the animation from the 2010s would seep into the projects of the 2020s.
The 2020s has the potential to be an amazing decade for animation, and as of now we're still pretty early in the decade so it still does, so... why aren't we reaching that potential? I think a lot of people will make the same arguments, "We're gonna get peaks and valleys", "It takes time to make a movie", "Not every year is gonna be golden", and I understand those points, I do, but they explain nothing. Yes, it does take plenty of time to make an animated movie, but as we have learned with The Thief and the Cobbler, time does not make a good movie automatically, so what is ultimately the reason? Why aren't films like Thelma the Unicorn or Orion and the Dark really reaching those heights? Again, it is easy for me to say "2022 was a big year and it gave me a lot of expectations", but I think there is a little bit more to it than that.
There has been a massive problem that goes beyond animation. When Technology becomes better, more possibilities are open, meaning more trends are started, the problem is that it is easy in the moment to call something a "Trend Setter", something that is wholly different and unique, but art trends and business trends are not the same thing, when something like Into the Spider-Verse comes out, artists see it as something grand, the way the stylization brings the characters and world to life, thus breathing new life into the story. Businessmen however, they tend to view it differently, they see that this popular character got a movie that is making big bucks and getting a lot of attention, so they want to see how far this trend will go, why do you think The Minecraft Movie is live action? are we really shocked they decided to do that after all the attention that the Sonic the Hedgehog movie got?
Simply put, I believe we're in something of a transitionary period, 2022 was kind of an outlier of perfect, and not so perfect, ideas that were being thought at the perfect time, looking back, I should not have been surprised that the best movies were coming from Netflix of all places. I think the big problem is that nobody is quite sure where exactly to go from here, the world of stylized animation is a great place to explore, but it might be emptier than we'd like it to be. I remember watching Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and noting that the action scenes were definitely influenced by the stylized look of movies like Spider-Verse or The Bad Guys, but I wouldn't say that Puss in Boots is a heavily stylized movie, it looks like any other DreamWorks production. I do think we'll be seeing a lot more movies with stylized CG animation in the future, but I think a lot more of them will be Puss in Boots instead of Spider-Verse, and it's because we're at a point where the artists have to figure out the "how" of it, and that is always the difficult part.
To be absolutely fair, Transformers One, The Wild Robot and Piece by Piece, that Lego Pharrell Williams documentary, have been pretty good, so I think we are getting back on track. We are seeing the influence of the 2010s and of 2022 starting to really take form. Piece by Piece, a documentary told via Lego animation is a unique idea, we don't see many animated documentaries out there. The Wild Robot was a stylized movie, and Transformers One, well it was just really good, and that's great too. I'm really hoping that 2024 is the last really dry spell of animated features, I hope 2025 begins to really shape a new era of animation in theatres. We can argue about whether the 2020s have been a good decade for animation, but I hope it will be as interesting as the 2010s.