One of the things you tend to hear about these days is that Hollywood is incredibly risk-averse, putting more money into safe products rather than spreading the money around a variety of original-but-untested ideas. Obviously the problem with this trend is that the variety of Hollywood movies is much smaller than it used to be, but the upside is that the movies we ARE getting are polished to a shine. There is so much good film-making talent concentrated on tried-and-true character arcs and story beats that even movies that would have been considered impossible to do well years ago, like Captain America Civil War, are finding critical and commercial success.
And if anyone embodies that transition in Hollywood, it's John Lasseter. With regards to themes, characters and humour, Toy Story is still the model for almost every movie that has come out of Pixar in the twenty years since. And the moment that John Lasseter started overseeing Disney Animation Studios, their films also began adopting those same traits. I've lost count of the number of films that are about two mismatched characters going on a journey where they encounter a string of whimsical places and characters. But that all said, the formula has lasted this long because it works very well. While not every Disney/Pixar film is a success, they're still putting out a fairly reliable string of commercial and critical hits.
Still, it's nice to see Dreamworks and Illumination offering some alternatives to the John Lasseter formula. Watching the How To Train Your Dragon films, I miss the days when Disney would regularly adapt novels because they were a good source of original ideas and different character dynamics. And while I'm not particularly impressed by the idea of an animated singing contest movie (reality TV has made the contest formulas way too obvious at this point), I still appreciate that it's something different. But I think what Hollywood animation is sorely lacking now is animated drama. I can't recall a single CGI animated movie that wasn't a comedy (Wall-E is less jokey but still not really a drama). Thankfully we still have foreign films to fill the gap, such as Song of the Sea, but I would like to see the Hollywood animators take a stab at drama again. It feels like a lost art.
One of the things you tend to hear about these days is that Hollywood is incredibly risk-averse, putting more money into safe products rather than spreading the money around a variety of original-but-untested ideas. Obviously the problem with this trend is that the variety of Hollywood movies is much smaller than it used to be, but the upside is that the movies we ARE getting are polished to a shine. There is so much good film-making talent concentrated on tried-and-true character arcs and story beats that even movies that would have been considered impossible to do well years ago, like Captain America Civil War, are finding critical and commercial success.
And if anyone embodies that transition in Hollywood, it's John Lasseter. With regards to themes, characters and humour, Toy Story is still the model for almost every movie that has come out of Pixar in the twenty years since. And the moment that John Lasseter started overseeing Disney Animation Studios, their films also began adopting those same traits. I've lost count of the number of films that are about two mismatched characters going on a journey where they encounter a string of whimsical places and characters. But that all said, the formula has lasted this long because it works very well. While not every Disney/Pixar film is a success, they're still putting out a fairly reliable string of commercial and critical hits.
Still, it's nice to see Dreamworks and Illumination offering some alternatives to the John Lasseter formula. Watching the How To Train Your Dragon films, I miss the days when Disney would regularly adapt novels because they were a good source of original ideas and different character dynamics. And while I'm not particularly impressed by the idea of an animated singing contest movie (reality TV has made the contest formulas way too obvious at this point), I still appreciate that it's something different. But I think what Hollywood animation is sorely lacking now is animated drama. I can't recall a single CGI animated movie that wasn't a comedy (Wall-E is less jokey but still not really a drama). Thankfully we still have foreign films to fill the gap, such as Song of the Sea, but I would like to see the Hollywood animators take a stab at drama again. It feels like a lost art.