Fuck yeah! That should be a rant on your blog!

My email reply in response to this link(good article too btw):
http://mag.awn.com/index.php?ltype=pageone&article_no=3649&page=1

"You know, I get kind of tired of people using the word formula to describe crappy animated movies. If the crappy movies were using a successful formula they wouldn’t be crappy! Pixar films are every bit as formulaic as the good Disney movies. What people don’t seem to get is that a good movie stems from a good solid story. All the formula is an illusion. People naturally enjoy songs and animals, but they still won’t care if the story sucks, because they can’t believe the characters, and since songs are character driven descriptions of how that character feels, people won’t care about the songs either. Of course if you have a catchy song, the song may stand on its own…but how often does that happen, especially in an environment where you hire song writers who don’t care about the story they are writing it for.

I like family geared animated musicals. I could watch the same story reinvented time after time, which is all that ever happens in all stories because there are only a few story types, as long as the writing is solid.

While I do wait around and get excited about the promise of different animation, things that stray from the norm, I’m tired of people who write about animation making me feel bad for liking Disney style films. They are fucking awesome!!! I wish Pixar would actually do a musical for once.

Also, there are tons of amazing things happening in animation all the time. Sure it isn’t a high percentage of the things coming out, but its there dammit. Avatar, Paprika, Fosters, Tekkon Kinkreet, for a few.

Guys who think animation is dead are not looking hard enough.

People also complain that there isn’t much diversity in style. I would say that most styles don’t communicate clearly and that people are drawn to Disney films and many Anime because the characters are clear and easy to understand visually. Again, I’d love to see more diversity, but it’s a hard sell because people don’t agree on style and it’s hard to attract people to work for you if it’s a style they don’t get, and then that probably means an audience would be even less willing to give the film a chance to let the story shine through.

Probably the biggest thing in animation that bugs me is the writing. A huge percent of the projects out there are for kids. Which means the people working on it don’t care, or the people hiring for it won’t hire good talent. Then the stories that are written are dumbed down, because for some reason people dumb everything down for kids, when kids are actually pretty smart and can understand complicated situations. Yes, write simply for say, four year olds, but don’t write it like they are stupid.

AND!!! I get tired of people looking for change in animation thinking that it’s going to be movies with more sex and violence in them. I think there are plenty of those now.

……..sigh……..

Rant rant rant…"