THE AGE OF MIRACLES

QUESTION

WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF ANIMATION?

At the beginning of 2018, the field of movie animation appears to be in rude health, from the financial viability of the biggest blockbusters to the creative spark behind the most innovative of independent, home-brewed creations. Seven fully-animated films made it into the top 30 highest box office grossers of 2017, including family-friendly studio hits like Despicable Me 3, Coco and The Boss Baby.

Taking a broader view, many of the highest grossing live-action films featured significant, cutting-edge digital animation wielded by visual effects professionals. This was most explicit in the creation of motion-captured characters in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Beauty and the Beast, Kong: Skull Island and War for the Planet of the Apes. Where visual effects are concerned, we’re deep in the age of miracles: animation can turn back time and resurrect the dead, (cf Peter Cushing in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story).

Dig beneath the surface of feature animation, beyond big budget offerings by studio behemoths such as Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks and Illumination, and you’ll find independent, international projects that are leading the way in developing new perspectives, repurposing analogue techniques and redefining how animated films are created and consumed. Following on from 2009’s Fantastic Mr Fox, Wes Anderson has returned to animation for the canine comedy, Isle of Dogs, which adds to the growing canon of contemprary stop-motion gems which include Claude Baras’ My Life as a Courgette, Aardman’s Early Man and LAIKA’s Kubo and the Two Strings. Awards darling Loving Vincent has courted adult audiences with its animated biography of van Gogh, while also breaking new ground with a feature made up of thousands of oil-painted frames.

New technologies and streamlined workflows have enabled filmmakers to dodge the daunting budgets and render farms required of studio animation to make fresh, idiosyncratic features. This include works like Dash Shaw’s mumblecore disaster movie , Liu Jian’s Chinese crime comedy and , a feature-length fairy tale reportedly animated entirely by director Sébastien Laudenbach. And with new avenues available, projects can succeed outside of the traditional system of distribution. One of the most hotly, was released on the director’s own Vimeo page.