Best and Worst of Times

Not to go all Dickensian on you, but there are a few reasons why this is both the best and worst of times in animation. Let's start with the happy side first.

Thumbing through a recent issue of The Hollywood Reporter, I come across this:

Paramount Pictures International took top summer honors with $1.1 billion, projected through August.

The victory is traceable to three May-through-August blockbusters: Steven Spielberg's "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" ($466 million), DreamWorks Animation's "Kung Fu Panda" ($383 million) and Marvel-produced "Iron Man" ($214 million) ...

Fifth place went to Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures International, which signed in with an estimated $490 million with key contributions from two family entries, "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian" ($275 million), and the Pixar-animated "WALL-E," which completed its summer run with $178 million and has about 50% of the foreign market still to go as part of the film's gradual rollout.

Animated features, friends and neighbors, is contributing to two entertainment congloms' bottom lines in a major way this season. In the recent past, News Corp and Time-Warner have seen heavy coin flow into their coffers because of cartoon features they've released. ( Horton Hears a Who, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Happy Feet, Ice Age, etc. and etc.)

This happy phenomenon results in still more animated features being made, which results in a goodly number of folks being employed. And the production occurs stateside because that's the successful formula. Every time a feature goes offshore to be made, anemic box office results. And the one thing few execs -- intent on self-preservation and the retention of their hefty salaries -- want to do is mess with the golden goose.

Maybe it seems dumb and obvious to point this out, but it's been true since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Successful animation begets more animation begets high levels of employment.

Conversely, unsuccessful product ultimately drives employment down. Anybody hear from Turner Feature Animation lately? Warner Bros. Feature Animation? Fox Animation? (Okay, Blue Sky is the News Corp.'s heir apparent in the long-form 'toon department, but that big studio in Phoenix? Kaput.)

The same thing applies on the television side, but lately not in a pretty way. Last week I received a phone call from a studio saying that one of its bigger television series was being shut down ... and the staff laid off. The specifics of why this show is being terminated after a few successful seasons is a mystery to me, but the overall reality of television production (the one exception being prime time) is obvious to anybody who pays attention: it ain't doing too good. As a recent e-mail from a veteran teevee producer noted:

Network executives have messed up developing hits the last few years, and its hurt the industry. And I'm afraid the bad employment situation is going to continue awhile ...

Since long before I got into the business, it's been axiomatic that animation is almost completely market driven. When a segment of it's profitable, then a flood of companies come into the marketplace to try and spear the brass ring of Big Profits. And when disaster results, they retreat out of it again, leaving unemployed artists in their wake. It's why Disney had the feature animation market almost completely to itself for sixty years. It's why there were only a few studios in television for decades. Few saw big money in Cartoonland, so few got their passports stamped and came in.

Today, of course, the old cliche of "It's Disney for features, Hanna-Berbera for television," is dead and long buried. But the other cliche that animation only gets made when its profitable, still holds true.