THE ALTERNATIVE SIDE OF ANIMATION

Ive been thinking about this the last couple of days and was wondering whether or not we're ever going to go back to the days of 2D animation and then i realised that my favourite animated films are not exactly one considered mainstream but more alternative to the stuff that is churned out each year by studio after studio in Hollyood. With that i bring you a look at the 'history' of alternative animated films from the perspective of a fan. 

THE ALTERNATIVE SIDE OF ANIMATION

This site was created to give people a glimpse into the world of genre cinema, anything from horror and exploitation to sci-fi and animation, so it's a bit sad that we only have two animation reviews. However, having recently been thinking about the state of western animation at the moment and how this CGI dominated world churns out a mixture of great and awful films, I got to wondering about what alternatives us movie fans had to the usual Disney, Pixar and other major studio animated features and whether or not we'll ever get back into the realm of 2D animation again. 

Disney's last 2D feature, The Princess And The Frog, was kind of a hit but I don't think it made anywhere near what the suits at Disney wanted to see. Sure the animation was great, although it did look very much like a mid 90s Disney Feature and like almost all Films from that company, contained a certain amount of songs, do movie goers still want to watch animated Disney musicals? Now I can't say I was a fan of this film, but I am a fan of Disney's other work, I think they're work in the latter half of the 90s and early 2000's (excluding Home on The Range) were some of their better features, Lilo And Stitch is a favourite and so is Atlantis: The Lost Empire, but this is just an opinion, I feel that Disney will never reach the level they obtained with The Lion King and this is a shame as that was 16 years ago. But this isn't all about what has happened to Disney, this is about the alternatives to these big budget features.

What do I mean alternative?

Well alternative could cover anything from expressionist animation, Arthouse animation or even Japanese anime, but what im going to take a look at are the features not entirely aimed at children.

So where to start? Well how about 1968 and The Beatles' animated brain fuck, Yellow Submarine, a film that looks a bit like a cross between Mr Ben and the animation work of Terry Gilliam's Python Animation. The Story it's self is almost nonsensical and seems to have been made with participation of a lot of LSD. But while Yellow Submarine was more a subversive showcase for The Beatle Music, The film to gain the most notoriety in the early 70s was Ralph Bakshi's X-rated Fritz The Cat in 1973. Bakshi, (who will appear through out this post) took animation, a medium mainly squarely aimed at children, and gave it to an adult audience. Fritz The Cat became a cult success due to it's taboo subject matter, an area Bakshi would revist again with Heavy Traffic and CoonSkin, and paved the way for other X-rated animated features to come to the fore. Jungle Burger from 1975 took the idea of Tarzan and gave it a very adult spin. The film was made by Belgian animators Picha and Boris Szulzinger who would continue with Adult animation with 1987's The Big Bang.

So with X-rated, almost pornographic animation, was this all we were going to get?

Ralph Bakshi (see told ya) left behind the taboo subjects he previously embraced and brought us Wizards, a post apocalyptic animated feature that utilized Rotorscoping, a technique in which some thing shot live action then animated over, this same style was used by Richard Linklater for Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. Bakshi would then go on to, ambitiously, adapt J.R.R Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings, again using the rotorscoping technique. While actually getting a release the film was never entirely finished. Bakshi would continue with rotorscoping with his beautifully made ode to American music, American Pop, a film that traces U.S music through the decades including swing music all the way up to the early days of Punk. It's a phenomenal film. For me as an animation fan and a big supporter of Bakshi, my favourite of his features is the one he made with renowned fantasy artist Frank Frazetta entitled Fire And Ice, it's a master class in fantasy animation and the art of Rotorscoping. The final animated film from Bakshi was the live action/animation cross over, Cool World, where gone was the use of rotoscoped characters and in came a more traditional style of animation. Cool World looked like something from the mind of Chuck Jones. Bakshi's style (non Rotorscoped) along with that of Chuck Jones were an obvious influence on the style of John K, creator of Ren and Stimpy and this really shows in almost every episode of that show.

But it wasn't just Bakshi bringing alternative animation to audiences, French animator Rene Laloux gave the world Fantastic Planet, a sort of arthouse sci-fi movie with again, a strange Gilliam-esq style of animation. His next film, Les Maîtres du temps aka Time Masters, had a very different style of animation as it was based on the work and designs of French comic book artist Moebius, the look of both this and the later Laloux film, Gandahar , leaned more in the direction of japanese anime, the latter closer in style to the Studio Ghibli film Naussicca: Vally Of The Wind, but the look was even closer in tone to the work in French comic book Heavy Metal of which Moebius had worked.

Heavy Metal was one of the key alternative animated features of the 80s anti-Disney renaissance, made by Canadian film makers and comprised of 8 short stories connected only by a glowing orb known as the Loknar. Each story had a different style of animation, there is the traditional comic book style to most and one of the storys, Captain Sternn, relied more on a cartoonish style. The film was set to a soundtrack of various rock bands from Ozzy to Devo and paved the way for another Canadian film, 1983's Rock & Rule, a more straight forward narrative and that encompassed the music into its storyline.

1985 brought us an animated spin on the whole Star Wars phenomenon with the film Starchaser: The Legend Of Orin, but StarChaser wasn't just a cash-in on George Lucas' Famous trilogy, it was actually one of the first animated features to use a mixture of traditional 2D animation and computer animation, the same way almost all animation is done today. But Sci-fi animation wasn't the only alternative to Disney.

Former Disney animator Don Bluth blessed the world with his dark family adventure The Secret Of NIHM, a film that you would never see made at Disney. Bluth continued with his style of giving animation a darker edge with films such as An American Tale and The Land Before Time. These films did become successful and spawned many sequels. However Bluth's films afterwards couldn't compete with the mega budget family classics that Disney were producing during the early 90s and after a spate of mediocre releases Bluth finally hung up his pencil with the Theatrical release of his final film, a Sci-fi saga called Titan A.E.

So what did we have to look forward to in the new millennium when it came to 2D animation?

The biggest releases were mainly Japanese Anime films such as the fantastic Ghibli releases like Spirited Away and Ponyo, and of course we had the last of Disney's 2D features but the most successful 2D movie of the last 10 years was the release of the long awaited big screen outing for The Simpsons, that's right folks, the most successful

2D animated feature of the new millennium was a film starring Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie, a family of characters we have been watching for over 20 years. Sure it's an alternative to Disney but there was nothing new.

So with the major studios all putting their animated features out in CGI and in 3D are we ever going to get another chance to put pencil to paper to see what the imagination tells the hand. And will we ever get an alternative to the vast amount of mediocre to best CGI films without turning to Japan? I hope so because Animation is nearly 100 years old and it's a shame we don't get to see what can happen in this new technically advanced era of animation.

So in short, I hope you've all learned something about the alternatives to major studio animation and that this feature will broaden your tastes and help you seek out an alternative (man this has been used to much) to the mainstream stuff we get year after year after year...