Into infinity

Technology’s impact on animation is more complicated than recent celebrations of Pixar suggest.  By Jonathan Murray

In 1995 cinema animation took the advice of Buzz Lightyear and launched itself into infinity - and beyond. Released that year, John Lasseter’s Toy Story was the first feature-length animated film made entirely with computer-generated image (CGI) technology. A subsequent slew of CGI features from Lasseter’s Pixar studios and others - including Antz, A Bug’s Life, The Prince of Egypt (all 1998), Shrek (2001), Ice Age (2002), The Incredibles (2004) and Cars (2006) - allowed film animation to reassume the prominent place within the commercial mainstream which it had been forced to relinquish in the early ‘50s when the major Hollywood studios culled their dedicated animation production units. Many onlookers see Toy Story and John Lasseter as torchbearers of a total revolution within animation culture matched in scale and impact only by Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Walt Disney in the 1930s. The National Museums of Scotland’s recent major exhibition Pixar: 20 Years of Animation is a symptom of such widespread, unqualified esteem. The show offered an amazing opportunity to view hundreds of drawings, sculptures and paintings, both digital and hand-made, from what the organisers remind us are ‘some of the most popular films ever made’, animated or otherwise. 

Yet there are signs that not everyone accedes to the idea we are in a digitally enabled golden era of film animation. It’s notable, for instance, that the less hand-drawn skills and technologies are used to produce film animation, the more hand-drawn cel animation traditions and aesthetics are fetishised as the very essence of cartoons. Recent years have witnessed the rise of the ‘Animation Art’ phenomenon, whereby individual celluloid frames from classic Hollywood studio cartoons are sold online and in galleries, in much the same way as original paintings, photographs and limited edition prints. In the age of CGI, frames from traditionally-produced cartoons have acquired the status of precious relics. As I write, one specialist website retails an individual frame from the Chuck Jones-authored Roadrunner cartoon Chariots of Fur (1994) for a four-figure sum. More perplexing still, one can also buy extremely expensive, limited-edition cel-style prints for CGI films like Pixar’s Cars.

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