When DreamWorks Animation started work on its forthcoming film The Wild Robot last year, its artists were granted access to a piece of technology many had never encountered before at a major Hollywood studio – and which was to revolutionise the way this new film would be made.
It was a paintbrush.
“I honestly thought I’d never see painting in a studio animation again,” says The Wild Robot’s director Chris Sanders, a 40-year veteran of the business who last wielded a brush during his time at Disney several decades ago, on films such as Mulan (1998) and Lilo & Stitch (2002). But every last surface in his new film – from the characters to the wild landscapes in which the story unfolds – has been coloured freehand.
It’s taking some getting used to. A few weeks ago, he was looking at a monitor at what he assumed was a concept painting – an industry term for a loose, expressionistic standalone artwork that helps the filmmakers get a sense of palette and mood. “Then someone pushed a button and it started moving, because it was a scene from the film,” he explains.
“It’s weird,” he goes on. “It’s such a free, unrestrained look, but it can evoke reality more effectively than photorealism. I’ll be puzzling it out for years to come.”
He won’t be alone. The Wild Robot is just one of a number of major new studio animations that look like almost nothing produced in the past 30 years. Transformers One, which like The Wild Robot is coming later this year, does Art Deco in a hot fluorescent palette.
Last year’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem looked like it had been scribbled across someone’s homework folder in marker pen. Netflix’s Nimona resembled a living, breathing young-adult graphic novel. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish mashed up Germanic fairy-tale art with Japanese anime. Next to these, Kung Fu Panda 4, Inside Out 2, Despicable Me 4 and The Garfield Movie – all recent or imminent releases – already look positively staid.
Although Hollywood has a habit of treating animation as a faintly embarrassing side hustle, it is big business. Last year, a quarter of the UK’s top 20 releases were animations, taking a combined £140 million at the national box office, while Illumination’s The Super Mario Bros Movie was one of only two films (along with Barbie) to gross more than $1 billion worldwide. According to the US polling firm CinemaScore, only 16 per cent of that film’s opening weekend viewers were under the age of 13. Two months later, PostTrak, another film audience tracker, calculated that 67 per cent of the audience for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse were aged between 18 and 34. These animations are not just for kids.
So the shift currently under way – on a scale that has previously been seen only five or six times in the past hundred years – is of seismic importance. Since the arrival of Toy Story in 1995, western animation has been dominated by what might be called the Pixar Style: cute and clean computer graphics, brought to life in broadly logical three-dimensional space. In films, from various studios, as wide-ranging as WALL-E, Moana and Minions, its strengths have been deployed with great ambition, artistry and wit.
But like other looks that came to define their eras – the bizarre, salacious Fleischer Studios work of the 1930s; the elegance and romance of classical Disney; the wacky modernist whiz-bang of Hanna-Barbera – its shelf life was always finite. And the expiry date may not be far off.
The new style rising up to replace it is easier to recognise than it is to describe. It’s much looser, busier and more pliable, and often moves as if it’s sketched one moment and digitally rendered the next.
December 9 2017 was when the first tremor hit. After premiering at the Comic Con Experience in São Paulo, Brazil, a short trailer for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was released online, and Hollywood’s animators gaped. Like Toy Story or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs before it, they realised they were looking at the first movie of a new age.
“I remember watching that and we all knew that the game had completely changed,” says Josh Cooley, the director of this summer’s Transformers One, who at the time was directing Toy Story 4 at Pixar.
“They had made something that looked like a living, breathing Spider-Man comic,” adds Jeff Rowe, the director of Mutant Mayhem, who would later go on to work with Spider-Verse’s guiding producers, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, on The Mitchells vs the Machines.
“It was always at the heart of our original pitch,” Miller recalls. “This film is going to look nothing like any other animated film ever made.”
It took almost a year to create 10 seconds of footage to illustrate what they meant. “Because CG animation had been built around the same processes as had been used to create visual effects for live-action films, it was all about virtual environments and object physics, rather than brushstrokes and other painterly things,” Miller says. “We had to teach the computer a completely different way of working.”
“It was about letting the audience feel the hand of the artist in the frame,” adds Lord. “In a way it didn’t feel like we were gearing up for the future at all.”
“It felt like the moment fine art as everyone knew it collapsed,” Miller continues. “The dam broke, and abstract expressionism, cubism, fauvism, pointillism suddenly all became possible at once.”
For Rowe, the Spider-Verse revolution could only have happened “thanks to a lot of conditions being just right”. Firstly, he points out, directors Lord and Miller “had carte blanche because of The Lego Movie” – the unexpected global hit of 2014 which they had both written and directed. Secondly, Spider-Man’s studio, Sony Pictures Animation, “was open to trying something different. And the infallibility of superheroes at the time gave them a safety net.”
As for the animators themselves, they were itching for new toys to play with. During Pixar’s early years, the premises for each of the studio’s films embraced whatever advances were being made in the tech suite. So when surfaces could only look plastic, Toy Story gave us plastic characters to love; when rendering software mastered hair, in came the big fuzzy bundles of Monsters, Inc.
“But that exploratory phase essentially ended 10 years ago,” says Michael Please, the co-director (with Dan Ojari) of Robin Robin, Aardman’s 2021 Christmas film. He recalls seeing Pixar’s 2015 film The Good Dinosaur “and being blown away by the hyperrealism of the natural backdrops – it felt like, ‘Ah, this is what this has all been building towards.’ And today you can turn on Unreal Engine [powerful software that can generate 3D graphics in real time] and achieve those effects in two minutes. So the new challenge the industry had to think its way around was, ‘OK, now we can do all this, but we don’t actually have to.’ ”
Adds Rowe: “The push towards photorealism became the thing. So eventually you had big, round, expressive eyes, but on faces with visible skin texture. And I don’t know if it helps me enjoy Shrek any more when I can see Shrek’s pores.”
This was the problem Joel Crawford faced when he was hired to direct Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, 2022’s belated sequel to the 2011 Shrek spin-off about the series’ silver-tongued swashbuckling cat.
“The thing we had to grapple with was: since all these other Shrek films had been out there for years, how could we make this one feel special? Rather than just expanding the world and adding more characters, we decided to go for the depth and darkness of a classical fairy tale. Our production designer Nate Wragg said, ‘What if every frame looks like a painting from a story book?’ That allowed us to take the audience on a more impressionistic journey, rather than back into a familiar CG world.”
Because elements of it can be drawn by hand, the new style allowed The Last Wish’s artists to use tricks that had all but vanished from the western commercial animated scene. One is animating “on twos” – that is, allowing a drawing to occupy two of the 24 frames per second that make up a moving image, rather than just one. That makes movement choppier – in the Pixar Style, it would look faulty – but it also gives the audience twice as long to savour each of a character’s poses, which makes action scenes wildly dynamic.
Another is making space for the hand-drawn line: arguably the soul of animation itself, but something which had proved hard to accommodate in 3D animation.
“For 100 years of animation, line was king,” says Rowe. “It was how we defined form and volume. And each one represented a human artist making a choice.” As such, when working on Mutant Mayhem – and here is something you wouldn’t have heard in a Nickelodeon boardroom 10 years ago – Rowe encouraged his animators to refer to the work of Stan Brakhage, an experimental director known for painting and scratching directly onto the surface of his films.
Given their histories of innovation, it seems strange that neither Pixar nor Disney have yet caught up with the change. Disney did try last year with Wish, which was made in a hybrid CG watercolour style that nodded to the studio’s mid-century masterpieces such as Sleeping Beauty. But audiences stayed away, and it lost $131 million – in part because, despite the stylistic flourishes, it looked so generic.
Meanwhile, Pixar – which laid off 14 per cent of its workforce this week – has made tonal adjustments on a film-by-film basis (Turning Red’s cute pastels, Lightyear’s extraterrestrial gloom), but has otherwise stuck fast to the method it forged. Can a beloved house style turn from milestone to millstone?
All of the animators above broadly agreed that they were given creative freedom because a) the success of the Spider-Verse films proved there was a mass appetite for more visually experimental work, and b) when it came to, say, another Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, there were essentially no audience expectations to manage. (One of the things audiences cherished about Mutant Mayhem and The Last Wish was that they were surprisingly good.)
“There have been so many treatments of Transformers over the years that one more isn’t going to confuse anyone,” says Cooley. “Would I have wanted to make Toy Story 4 in this new style? No, because it’s not Toy Story.” Then: “But what is Toy Story, really? An engaging, funny, emotional story. That first film would have been just as delightful if they’d done it with sock puppets.”
Perhaps it’s cyclical. Look at Disney’s fall from fashion in the 1970s, then its 1989 Renaissance brought in by The Little Mermaid, then its floundering in the early CG years before 2010’s Tangled cracked the code.
But what about the new spectre of AI? After all, whatever Woody and Buzz had to contend with in the 1990s, there was no emerging technology threatening to make their human creators obsolete. Lord and Miller are bullish.
“One of the cardinal sins in animation is tracing a drawing,” Lord explains. “The minute you do it, you suck the life out of it, even if it’s one of your own. The original thought process that led you to make the mark you made isn’t there.” And that’s what AI does: “by producing images generatively from the work of other artists, 24 times every second, AI is tracing over the collective works of mankind.”
“What we’ve ultimately got to ask is: what does it mean to say that something is the best way of doing what we do?” says Please. He brings up an analogy made by Ojari, his directing partner on Robin Robin: the panic in the chronometry world following the boom in cheap, efficient quartz watches in the 1980s, when the question that haunted traditional manufacturers was: “Who’d want a Swiss watch anymore?”
“And the answer,” says Please, “was: everybody. The function is what it is. The craftsmanship is what people love.”
Transformers One will be released on Oct 11; The Wild Robot follows on Oct 18
