Transcription
Abandon this futile mission. Moses, that was no accident. A baby. Now you're going to stay here forever.
Why did these movies disappear? Cast your eyes over the last few years of Hollywood animation. Hoppers, Wish, Elio, Elemental, Goat, every single one of them a family movie, a comedy lacking any real maturity. How long has it been since we've gotten a movie like The Hunchback of Notream or The Prince of Egypt for that matter? Dark and mature animation has all but disappeared from major Hollywood studios. And I think we all feel it. That sense that animation used to hit different, used to take more tonal risks. That change wasn't because of one decision, though. It was death by a thousand safe choices made over decades by studios that forgot what the medium is actually capable of.
But how did we get here? And is there a way back? Or will anime and indie animation just continue to grow in popularity to the detriment of legacy studios? Honestly, the answer is way more complicated and frustrated than I thought it would be.
So, there's this scene in The Hunchback of Notream where Froolo, a supposed man of God, sings about his lust for a woman and how if she won't be his, he'll see her burn. It's one of the darkest villains having one of the most psychologically complex moments in cinema. Not just animation, all of cinema. A Disney movie that was rated G for all ages, released in 1996, exploring obsessive lust, religious guilt, and the capacity for evil in people who believe they're righteous. That was a kids movie. A kids movie that made more than Hercules, The Little Mermaid, and Mulan. Yet, for some nonsensical reason, studios decided not to make anything like it again. I'll get to exactly why later in the video, but first we have to turn back the clock.
Because the history of dark animation is wild and was way more common than you'd probably realize because animation's first few decades weren't always a safe, childish space. Disney's earlier movies went to places modern studios wouldn't touch with a 10-ft pole. I haven't watched Bambi in a long time, but when I rewatched the scene where Bambi's mother gets shot, it surprised me how insanely dark and somber it is. Mother. Pinocchio is also disturbingly dark, especially when the kids start turning into donkeys. The Fox and the Hound is heartbreaking with how best friends get turned into enemies. Dumbo is also pretty dark in some scenes.
And then there's The Black Cauldron, a movie that got released in 1985. Disney's most ambitious, darkest film of all time, arguably with one of the scariest villain designs in all of Disney history. Genuine horror and disturbing scenes. It was the first Disney movie to be rated PG instead of G, and could have even been given an R rating had they not cut around 50 minutes worth of intense scenes. It cost $44 million to make, the most expensive animated movie ever made up to that point. Yet, it completely flopped, making only $21 million. It failed despite being one of the most interesting Disney movies artistically and stylistically because the story just fell flat. But that failure planted a seed of fear in Hollywood that never fully died.
But here's what most people don't talk about. Six years before The Black Cauldron even released, someone inside Disney had already seen this coming. Don Bluth was one of Disney's most talented animators. But in 1979, he walked out of the studio, taking 11 colleagues with him because he believed Disney had lost its creative soul and had become too corporately calcified. He wasn't wrong. Disney struggled for like a whole decade after that. Yet, Don Bluth made some of the most respected animated movies of the time. The Secret of Nim, An American Tale, The Land Before Time, movies with adult level storytelling that didn't talk down to their audience and had some brutal sequences and scenes. Bluth proved repeatedly that the audience for more mature and dark animation existed.
Moving forward to the '90s, The Hunchback of Notream wasn't the only dark Hollywood animated movie. DreamWorks came out of nowhere with an absolute gem in The Prince of Egypt. for 1998. It was a pretty rare movie. A mainstream animated movie that took its subject matter with complete seriousness. Depicting the plagues, the drowning of an army, the river of blood, two brothers becoming enemies. The movie is as adult as they get. The way it depicts moral weight and impossible choices, the brutality of the 10 plagues, and it's animated. Plus, it made a ton of money, grossing more than 200 million on a budget of 70. Genuinely blows my mind. Like where are the movies like that today? DreamWorks made that. The same studio that 3 years later would make a 180 with Shrek, which would become the template for a totally different kind of animated movie.
Tim Burton also deserves a shout out. Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride are both dark, gothic, weird, and both were box office hits. They proved that you could build an entire visual and tonal world around darkness, and people would love it.
And then there's Leica, the only big Hollywood studio making darker animated movies more recently that are successful. Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings being the standouts. Movies that have consistently been willing to go to genuinely dark places. Coraline is one of the most frightening movies made for children in the last 20 years. Not frightening in the jump scare way, although it's got some good jump scares. More so terrifying in the psychological and creepy way. Although Kubo was less successful, Coraline was super successful. And those types of movies have the potential to do so well with today's audience.
So clearly, darker, more mature animation has worked countless times. Yet, when you actually look at what Hollywood's biggest studios have been putting out recently, it's worse than you probably think. I mean, look at the last three years alone. Sequels, safe originals with maximum family appeal. Wish was so aggressively inoffensive that it became one of the most irrelevant Disney movies almost immediately. Elio was god awfully unoriginal. Yes, of course there are exceptions like The Wild Robot, but they're few and far between. Just look at the last few months. Hoppers and Goat are both familyfriendly comedic movies from two of the biggest Hollywood studios. All major Hollywood studios can put out is the same type of and it's exhausting.
Yeah, of course I could just watch animation from other studios and other countries. Yes, but at the end of the day, these are some of the biggest studios with some of the biggest budgets and legacies. Can you imagine? Can you imagine what they could do if they gave us more mature storytelling, darker movies, a bit of variety tonally? It's frustrating to not get more Prince of Egypt type movies to get zero risk. And the thing is these studios risk becoming obsolete because the audience for mature emotionally complex dark animation is not small or niche and the ultra safe broad appeal entertainment with no originality gets old real quick. The irony is that it doesn't even make business sense because if you just look at what people are actually watching, the demand for exactly what these studios refuse to make has never been more obvious.
It's embarrassing for Hollywood execs because people are simply tuning in elsewhere to get the type of animation they want in obvious places, but also in not so obvious places. Spiderverse, for example, has been a huge revelation and revolution for animation, not just visually, which a lot of people have talked about, but tonally, too. Although they are still familyfriendly for the most part, they're significantly more mature and unique than the other movies we're getting, especially across the Spider-Verse, which pushes further into dark storytelling. Miles's conflict, Miguel's entire character, the spots evolution. The final 20 minutes of the movie is anxietyinducing in a way that I haven't seen in a modern Hollywood animated movie in a long time. That movie didn't come across tonally as a movie for kids, but rather teens and young adults, which is already a step forward in the right direction.
The indie animation space is also filling that gap, which is quietly having its most exciting moment in years. There's a reason shows like The Amazing Digital Circus have hundreds of millions of views. Apart from it being incredibly unique, it takes risks tonally, and although it's comedic, that doesn't stop the maturity and complexity from shining through. The final episode of this YouTube animated show is going to release in cinemas. Do you realize how insane that is? As of the most recent news, it's going to be airing on more than 1,800 screens across the US, plus 51 other countries across the world. This is literally a monumental moment for animation. If this goes well, it opens the door for other indie animated shows to get theatrical distribution, which potentially could mean less cinema revenue for big animation studios.
Anime is another obvious place where people get their fill of more mature dark storytelling. Most of Studio Ghibli, Perfect Blue, Akira, movies that operate at a register of emotional complexity, Hollywood animated movies almost never attempt. And the western appetite for anime has been growing every year like we all know. Demon Slayer, Jiujutsu Kaizen, Your Name, Devil Mind, Crybaby, Attack on Titan, people are consuming these stories voraciously. The Boy in the Heron, a mature movie with dark tones that just came out a few years ago, did great and won the Oscar. Two anime movies grossed nearly $1 billion worldwide last year, one of them being R-rated. These aren't niche movies that found a cult following.
Streaming platforms have also been cautiously pushing into darker animated territory, too. Arcane and Invincible being the most significant examples, but Primal is another great example on Prime. Scavengers Reign, too. Gorgeous, complex, and deeply unafraid of letting its characters suffer real consequences. Streaming platforms know people want these stories, and they're delivering in bunches. The gap Hollywood left is being filled enthusiastically by everyone except Hollywood.
Despite getting so many good, dark animated movies from Hollywood in the history of animation, and there clearly being an audience for good, dark, and mature animated storytelling, we've gotten none of that in the past decade. Why? Well, it's more complicated than it seems. There are three main factors that have been in play for decades. So, let me explain.
The first is the oldest and most obvious, something we've all heard before, that animation is for kids. But the root of this surprised me when I really looked into it. Just as an aside though, I feel like it would be normal for an animation fan to say, "Oh, no one actually believes that anymore." With all the great mature animation that's coming out, there's no way. And I've thought that, too. But I still get comments from family members that disparage animation. Even my parents sometimes assume that just because a movie is animated, it's childish. The notion that animation is just for kids is still very much ingrained in older generations. I mean, even the former CEO of Disney basically implied that animation is just for children in an interview in 2022. I always say that when fans and our audiences put their kids to bed at night after watching Pinocchio, they're probably not going to tune into another animated movie. If he thinks that, I'm sure a lot of executives at these studios think the same damn thing. And it applies to animation directors inside Hollywood, too, that are forced to face this conversation constantly in a way liveaction directors simply never do. A liveaction director never has to justify why their movie is too adult. An animation director has to fight that assumption constantly. They have to fight the entire industry's preconceived notions about what animation is supposed to be.
But it wasn't always like that. Animation actually started as a niche adult medium with cartoons like Betty Boob, Popey, and even early Mickey Mouse that all gained mass popularity in the 20s and 30s in the US. But with Disney's successes coming from their more fairy tale kidfriendly movies like Snow White, Cinderella, Peter Pan, and also the Haze Code censoring mature animation content. Multiple generations were conditioned to view animation as children's entertainment. Add to that the continued success of Disney, especially in the Renaissance, and the millions of kids that sat in front of the TV with a bowl of cereal every weekend and watch TV cartoons like Scooby-Doo, The Flintstones, Tom and Jerry, and the perception became self-reinforcing. Animation and cartoons are for kids. Decades of positioning animated movies as children's entertainment created a belief so ingrained that nobody inside the industry stops to question it anymore. Which means every decision downstream of it follows automatically.
In parallel, shows like The Simpsons and South Park were gaining enormous popularity in the early '90s. So by the time the Renaissance was in full swing, animation could only be two things. childish family entertainment or adult runchy comedy. That's it. Anything that didn't fit neatly into one of those two buckets was extremely hard to get green lit.
But that's just one piece of the puzzle. Money is an even bigger part of it. See, a sequel to a known property comes with a built-in audience. Marketing merchandise. An original mature animated movie comes with risk and a metric ton of uncertainty. From a purely financial standpoint, Toy Story 5 is a safer bet than anything new. The studios aren't dumb. The odds of an original animated movie making more in the short term than Toy Story 5 or any of these sequels is tiny. I mean, 13 out of the top 15 are either sequels or established IP. And the budgets make it even more complicated. A modern Hollywood animated film costs between hundred and $350 million to make in market. At that scale, you can't really afford to make something that only some people want to see. You're forced to capture as many people as possible. Parents, grandparents, children, international markets. You need a movie that translates universally. Mature, dark, tonally specific storytelling is by definition a way narrower proposition than broad family entertainment. And at $200 million a movie, which is where Disney, DreamWorks, and Pixar operate, speaking precisely to fewer people, is a financial catastrophe waiting to happen. So, as the budgets have gone up over the past 20 years, the movies had to get safer because mathematically that's the only choice they have. apart from obviously lowering the budgets which is also why a lot of the more mature darker animation has been going to streaming because the economics work way better.
And then there's the third force. See, darkness is unquantifiable. You can't test it cleanly. You can't put it in a formula. You can't point to a guaranteed blueprint for making it work. It's inherently risky. And in a test screening with a room full of families, the dark scene almost always tests badly. So, it gets cut. The ambiguous ending tests badly so it gets resolved. The morally complicated villain tests badly so he becomes like just a bad guy. Hundred small decisions made by rational people protecting their jobs. And the movie that comes out at the other end is unrecognizable from the one that got green lit. Executives don't get fired for making an expensive mediocrity. They get fired for making an expensive failure obviously. So the rational personal incentive is always the same. Green light the safe idea. Soften those dark scenes. Individual decisions that are each completely logical producing a collective outcome that is ridiculously creatively bankrupt.
Here's the real problem, though. When studios baby us, we lose the art form's greatest advantage. Animation can go places live action can't. It can make the internal visible. The visual language of animation is uniquely, extraordinarily equipped to handle emotional complexity. And Hollywood has decided to use that language primarily to make talking animals say funny things. This this isn't a criticism of family movies, though. Some of them are amazing, obviously. But when an entire medium gets reduced to one register, us animation fans lose a lot because at the end of the day, Hollywood is still Hollywood. And although it isn't the end all be all, it's one of the largest and most influential cinematic spaces in the world with some of the biggest studios and the window for Hollywood to course correct is getting pretty small.
People are no longer forced to watch whatever is on TV and in the cinemas. We have options that did not exist 20 years ago. We can find ambitious animation anywhere. If the major studios don't adapt in the next couple of years, they risk becoming something depressing, legacy brands coasting on the nostalgia of 20 years ago, while the actual future of animation gets built elsewhere. And that's already happening with all the sequels being made. The Hunchback of Notream is almost 30 years old. The Prince of Egypt is 27. The Iron Giant is 26. We've been waiting a long time for Hollywood to make something that trusts us with more maturity and boldness the way those movies did.
Because here's the thing, you don't forget what it feels like to sit in a cinema and have an animated movie treat you like an adult. Like someone capable of sitting with something complicated, something unresolved, something that requires a little bit of interpretation and thought. It's a feeling most of us crave and we just haven't gotten any of that from some of our favorite childhood studios. So, I'm hoping that in the future that changes.