Rear Admiral Obvious

From the interwebs:

... We’ll see if Seth Rogen’s raunchy, CG-animated “Sausage Party” (opening August 12) has a better chance of commercial success.

“One of the biggest reasons I wanted to do this was for the industry itself, just to be able to knock down the door and prove that R-rated animation has an audience,” admitted director Conrad Vernon, who first met Rogen as a voice actor on DreamWorks’ “Monsters vs. Aliens. “It just depends on how you tell the story and we think animation’s not just for families and kids and that it’s a medium and not a genre.” ...

Mr. Vernon, being young and wet behind the ears, has probably never heard of Ralph Bakshi's cartoon:



Fritz the Cat had a worldwide box office of $90,000,000. This on a budget of under a million bucks.

Let's think about this for a long minute. The gross was more than 90 times the production costs. Which is a certified hit in almost anyone's ledger book.

And it was X-rated as well as animated.

So Mr. Vernon's statement above? Well, yeah.

Animation is definitely "a medium and not a genre". But that's been true since about 1937. All kinds of animated features get made, many that aren't easily categorized. Unfortunately, American audiences don't see many of them, since most high profit animated features, as is most high-profit live-action product, turn out to be movies controlled and manufactured by our fine, entertainment conglomerates.