Just days after
Variety suggested that, with 14 CGI-animated movies either in theaters or scheduled for release in 2006, the market might be reaching saturation — even though “neither Pixar nor DreamWorks Animation has had a CG toon that grossed less than $360 million in worldwide B.O.” — the
Los Angeles Times ran a piece confidently predicting bigger profits from animated family films to come.
That’s not a terrible thing. Over the four or five years that my mini-critic and I have been faithfully attending studio children’s movies, some of the best and/or most successful have been CGI or part-CGI animated, including
Finding Nemo,
Toy Story,
The Incredibles,
The Iron Giant (inexplicably, a flop),
Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (a huge hit with both sexes at my daughter’s preschool),
Howl’s Moving Castle and that other Miyazaki gem
Spirited Away,
The Chronicles of Narnia,
Wallace & Gromit,
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and, of course, the
Harry Potter franchise. Mind you, we’ve also waded miserably through acres of lazy and derivative (though still lucrative) chaff —
Chicken Little,
Shark Tale,
Robots,
Madagascar and its even cheesier knockoff,
The Wild — to get to the wheat. But at their imaginative best, CGI-animated movies have gone a long way toward rescuing children’s storytelling from the rut of drearily responsible “relevance” (kids learning the hard way how to face life with dead or deadbeat parents, or schoolyard bullies, or poverty) in which it’s been stuck. Children will always love fantasy, and I’m sure that this is why, despite a marketing blitz from Starbucks and a vivacious performance from its young star,
Akeelah and the Bee bombed, and why movies as sharply divergent as
Narnia and
Freaky Friday bloomed into international hits.
Still, aside from a few indelible examples —
The Incredibles, perhaps, and the Miyazaki oeuvre — that connect with fundamental human concerns instead of merely currying favor with audiences, most contemporary computer-animated movies are too well-adjusted and benign to be more than ephemeral blips in the history of children’s cinema. What I worry about is that the vast majority of children see little
but whiz-bang CGI movies these days, and that it’s destroying their taste for anything else, even were it available. It’s dispiriting to contemplate the *****rdly box-office returns for the few beautiful old-fashioned live-action family movies that the studios release from time to time — the magical ?
A Little Princess, a critical favorite and a flop both times it was released; the entire Carroll Ballard oeuvre, from
The Black Stallion through
Fly Away Home to last year’s
Duma (out on DVD this week, and not to be missed). We’ll see how British director’s Charles Sturridge’s lovely
Lassie, which opened Sprockets to muffled weeping from many parents in the audience (me included, though wilted by a venomous stare from my deeply embarrassed child), will fare when it opens here. Some children’s films have an afterlife on DVD, but not for long unless you actually buy them, for outside of specialty video stores like Santa Monica’s Vidiots, you’d be hard-pressed to find a decent selection of vintage kids’ movies beyond
Mary Poppins or
The Sound of Music.
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