A New Animation Paradigm

We know what it is, don't we?

... Mr. Meledandri will tell you, his is not a typical animation operation. He wants to prove that strict cost controls and hit animated films are not mutually exclusive, that these pictures do not have to cost $150 million, which is about what Paramount Pictures and its partners spent on “Rango.” They can cost $69 million, the budget for “Despicable Me.” ...

As the New York Times reports, Illumination Entertainment has a small headquarters in Santa Monica, with thirty employees. Bureaucracy is lean. Production is subbed out to France's MacGuff, California's Rhythm and Hues, and other places.

Which helps production budgets stay in the $60-$70 million range.

Many Hollywood power brokers are amazed at this, but here's my take: Almost every studio that I waltz through has a bloated bureaucracy. Most have more production assistants, accountants, production managers, executive vice-presidents, coordinators, than they do artists. Empire building is the order of the day, 365 days per year.

Some time back, a producer/ show runner of an animated series told me how eight executives sat in his office one Monday, each giving notes. By the time the last two execs got to their reams of suggestions, the first one decided he needed to add a few talking points to his first go-round so that he could, you know, keep up with the competition.

This isn't a real fine way to keep costs down on animated product. In fact, it's kind of ludicrous, but it's the way a lot of business gets done in Tinsel Town: When a nice, productive little division has some success, pile on the bureaucracy and self-important egos. It's a great way to run that division into the ground fast*.

After rambling around animation for thirty-odd years, I've come to the conclusion that doubling and then quintupling the size of administrative staff and attendant managers is a bigger threat to a studio's well-being than unions, rampant nepotism or storyboard artists coming in late. Because once a lot of coordinators and production assistants are in place, they become self-perpetuating, creating non-essential paper-flow and new rules attached to lengthy meetings that clog production pipelines and bog down the creative process. As C. Northcote Parkinson warned decades ago about bureaucracies:

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

"The smaller the function, the greater the management."

"A committee is organic rather than mechanical in its nature: it is not a structure but a plant. It takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts, and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom in their turn."

"Delay is the deadliest form of denial."

"Expenditures rise to meet income."

"When any organizational entity expands beyond 21 members, the real power will be in some smaller body." ...

Here's hoping that Mr. Meledandri avoids all that, but as the Times notes:

... Universal has urged Illumination to hire more executives and double output to two pictures a year by 2013. ...

More executives, I'm afraid, aren't the point. More high-quality creators are.

* Case in point: Disney's feature animation division. In its small, quiet period, it had four production people. By the late 1990s, it had 23 corporate vice-presidents, a swollen bureaucracy that held lots of lengthy meetings, and pictures that weren't making much money.