I love animation.

Out of any art form I find animation is the one I love more than any other, even more than video games which I do consider an artform. That said I’m aware of the bleed over between those two which helps that I like both.

I can’t remember when I saw my first cartoon. Perhaps it was a stop motion animation for small children, perhaps it was indeed that Transformers episode Call of the Primitives. Regardless as I grew up my love of the art form never left. To this day Fantasia is one of my all time favourite movies and I consider it a masterpiece that has never been topped, though mostly because outside of one attempt at a modern revival back in 1999 by Disney, no one has tried to do such a piece. You get some absolutely amazing song numbers in films… or at least used to.

I always consider myself lucky for when I grew up. I saw the start of Power Rangers, anime, the internet and many things we now see as very universal. But it was also a time animation was often at its peak. Shows like the Simpsons made a mainstream family animated sitcom that lasts to this day. We can point to the Flintstones coming earlier but the modern landscape of cartoons that are for the whole family is due to the Simpsons. We would watch that when it was on in the early evenings.

I was also there for the start of Nicktoons with shows like Rugrats. I was there to enjoy cartoons like X-Men and the other marvel cartoons of the 90s,  X-Men becoming so legendary it got a modern continuation, and that animated series is the only time they did the Dark Phoenix saga well, just look at the 2 times they tried to do it in movie form. Also the rise of the DCAU thanks to Batman the animated series another show considered one of the best of all time.

So why am I gushing about animation right now? Well, because it’s constantly looked down on and it’s getting harder and harder to enjoy new shows of my favourite medium.

There’s this snobbery I keep sensing that’s been made worse by the soullessness of Disney’s live action remakes. These films that are made due to creative bankruptcy to make money off a recognizable name, that at best are just an inferior copy of something that was often transformative.

The original works, which had style, you at a glance could see what they were by different kinds of brushstrokes or how they were brought to life, talked down as inferior while a soulless remake that looks the same as all the other soulless remakes is being shoved down people’s throats and applauded by a choir of.. I don’t have a kind word. I was sickened when the Lion King remake on the lead up was being described as “like nothing we ever saw” but I had, in the 90s it was called The Lion King. It won awards. It’s worth noting that the so-called live action Lion King movie is not live action, but that’s just shows the disdain they have for my beloved medium of animation. And that’s just the snobbery. Long beloved franchises like the Looney Tunes and many others are being struck off by David Zaslav, a man who somehow managed to become more hated in nerd culture than Bobby Cottick of Activision Blizzard. Zaslav since becoming head of Warner due to its merger with Discovery has struck down completed works with the Looney Tunes and Scooby Doo for tax write offs, yet the works he did let through cause my eyebrow to raise in confusion. 

The current age of streaming has made it harder, not easier to legitimately watch the medium. While different franchises are held to ransom on a single streaming service with no plans to ever bring them out on home media. And even there they are not safe, as the Looney Tunes were struck off theirs. I tried to find a legal way to watch the cartoon Jellystone having seen clips on YouTube only for my search result to answer “get a VPN” which instantly told me there was no legal way to ever watch this show where I lived and I don’t see any Blu-rays or DVDs ever being announced. It’s rather hard to support a medium or work when I’m not given a way to do that.

If it wasn’t for anime I would find it very hard to see any new animation these days. Most we do get are also all just CGI now and many all start homogenizing with art styles that get very samey. Once, Dreamworks released “The Prince of Egypt”, possibly the best iteration of the story of Moses shown in film, but over time they started to only produce CGI films, and now they too are doing a live action remake.

There is however one show of late, one animated show that I have easy access to, and is truly heart warming and beloved to watch. That show is Bluey.  Just this show about a family of dogs from Australia. The animation has its own style to it. It’s well written. Good morals and characters. It’s become a bit of a comfort food in bad times, something I’ve needed more of of late.

Animation is beautiful, it’s been around as long as cinema has. Its evolution is something people should look into as it covers the early days of cinema, how it developed, how it got through hard times, how it changed for good and bad. It created moments that last to this day. Be it a musical number through an area in Africa, or the first time Superman flew. It takes different forms from all over the world. Here we have a bumbling professor and his silent, more intelligent dog blasting off to the moon in claymation, while in Japan robots are flying through space in a tale about the horror of war.

It’s most notable in my observation of the snobbery against animation, that so many so-called live action works are doing their hardest to copy it. Mountains of animation thrown into the film in the form of CG to come just an ounce closer to what skilled artists were doing for years.

I’m sorry if I don’t feel I’ve been focused on my point. But that point should be clear to those that read this, that I love this art form, and the snobbery and disdain I see against it sickens me greatly.