Animation Overload

Critter movies reach point of diminishing returns at box office
Saturday, November 25, 2006
David Germain
ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOS ANGELES — Prancing penguins, rascally rodents, sociable squirrels and sabertoothed tigers — the Hollywood hills have been alive with talking critters in 2006, possibly the biggest year in history for movie animation.

The cute, fuzzy wildlife and other cartoon creations are being introduced so rapidly these days, audiences might well struggle to tell them apart.

"There’s definitely an overload, and I think everyone recognizes that," said George Miller, director of the latest animated adventure, the Warner Bros. penguin romp Happy Feet — which opened last week.

Toy Story, from Disney and Pixar, revolutionized the industry with computergenerated images instead of hand-drawn cartoons; in the decade since, first DreamWorks (Shrek) and then other major studios took leaps into the animation business.

As with the initial novelty of talking pictures almost 80 years ago, the early appeal of computer animation resulted partly from its fresh look.

Films with computer-generated images have since become the standard, so commonplace that the story — not the style — is considered ever more crucial to success or failure.

"What’s happened is, no longer will people go see computer-generated animation simply because it’s CGanimated, as they did when they first saw Toy Story. ," Miller said. "Everything will have to work on its own merits.

"Sure, when The Jazz Singer came out, people turned up to see sound pictures. In a handful of years, people no longer turned up to hear movies. They just turned up to see a movie they thought was good."

Ten years ago, Hollywood released as few as three or four animated movies a year, with Disney the only steady player. This year, 16 films are expected to be eligible for the Academy Award for feature-length animation, only the second time in the six-year history of the animated Oscar that there were enough movies for a full field of five nominees, rather than the usual three.

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