Animation Is for Adults
Plus, a chat with Rafael Motamayor.
“Animation is not a genre for kids. It's a medium for art.”
If you watched any awards show this year, you almost assuredly heard Guillermo del Toro get on his soapbox for people to expand their mindset around the art of animation. But how many of us listened?
One person who needed no convincing was my friend Rafael Motamayor, a staff writer at /Film (where I also contribute) and an animation enthusiast whose words on the medium have been published in outlets like The New York Times. He sees some of the snobbery and rejects it. “Everything [animated] is a cartoon, it's not a derogatory term,” he told me earlier this month. “It's just what it is. I love cartoons!”
“There's still a stigma that animation is for kids,” he continued, “and I think the way some people have tried to eliminate that is by gatekeeping.” With The Boy and the Heron winning over the American box office (and the latest Disney cash grab Wish flopping), I thought it made sense to talk to Rafael about the expansive vision he has for the future of animation.
“Animation suffers from the same issue that live action does in a certain way,” he told me. “When you ask people, they will tell you no movies are coming out that aren't Marvel movies.” There’s a much wider world of animation that Rafael frequently champions (more on that in today’s recommendations below). It’s prone to having the biggest, flashiest players dominate the conversation and define the aesthetic.
But ever since the 1988 Japanese cyberpunk animation Akira turned him onto the power of animation, he’s seen more to the medium than the lowest common denominator fare. “Oh, the camera moves and shit!” Rafael described his epiphany. “Someone drew all of this!” To him, character design provides the same fascination as set design or costumes in live-action work. Because animating requires building a world entirely from scratch, everything has intention and purpose in the frame. “The scope of the imagination,” he described, “is doing something so expansive that you cannot imagine it being done in live-action without looking horrendously fake.”
Rafael expressed some discontent with Disney’s full-throated embrace of photorealism in animation, even if it has produced some undeniably breathtaking results like the water in Elemental. “The search for CG photorealism in animation made it synonymous with kid animation,” he lamented. But, ironically, the biggest driver of innovation in the medium (at least on the studio scale) might be the force that tanked live-action: Marvel. Since 2018’s Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse showed that audiences had an appetite for something more adventurously animated, it’s hard not to see the industry following the interest. And, of course, money.
In conversations with animators like Jeff Rowe, responsible for this year’s iteration of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Rafael reported hearing that people aren’t necessarily trying to copy the eclectic stylistic palette of Spider-Verse. But they took a lesson all the same: “You can stray from the norm in a way and still be a four-quadrant movie that's not just for kids and make a shitload of money.”
Outside the expressly commercial space, there are some exciting recent examples of live-action auteurs — Wes Anderson (The French Dispatch), Ari Aster (Beau is Afraid) finding a place for animation within their films. “Maybe some filmmakers are starting to see animation as something that can be experimented with,” he speculated.
That curiosity to keep pushing the craft forward is what energizes Rafael the most about what we still have yet to see from animation. “What excites me is just the same thing, that people are still trying to make things that are outside the norm even though studios may not want to.” He’s scared by the corporate climate inhibiting that creativity, namely from public enemy #1 in the movie business: Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav. Cutbacks in the industry are cyclical, and Rafael hopes the period of contraction we’re witnessing will also pass. But in cutting costs, “they're not understanding that if you don't take a chance on something like Spider-Verse,” he cautioned, “you don't have money that movie made … and the revolution.”
“I'm worried about studio heads, I'm excited for actual animators,” Rafael succinctly summed up the state of animation. In the meantime, you can find him at festivals like Annecy advocating for the future he wants to see. “I think there is a shared passion in spreading the word of animation as being more than what people think,” he explained. “Even if people are aware, you still want to make sure just because of that history of misunderstanding.” Hopefully now, you consider yourself a little more educated — as I certainly was.
I gave Rafael one slot on my ten recommendations of animated films for adults, and he selected On-Gaku: Our Sound (available on Criterion Channel), a film with deadpan humor so dry it could make Scandinavian masters like Aki Kaurismäki or Roy Andersson blush.
Here’s some of what he had to say about it:
That movie looks like nothing else, But it's also very deliberate. The closest thing it reminds me of is as a kid when you watch Ed, Edd n Eddy. This looks like a kid in school just drawing gross things. I like the reality they're seeing. The movie is just a very rough, at times kind of gross, visual. It does a lot of experimentation with visuals and how to present a world in a very meticulous way because everything is by design. It's all to tell the story. Also, the music is really cool [because] it's about this band.
Even just something low-key and down to Earth still shows those choices that portray the world in a unique way that can't be replicated. Just something as simple as motion, the fact that you can portray motion in such a unique way tells you everything about this movie was a choice. Everything about this movie can be experimented upon in a way that live-action just can't do.
This was a very small-budget indie movie. Japan is not free of the same issues of studio interference and risk-averse CEOs. But something like this shows how animation can be done by a smaller team and budget, it just takes time. You can make those decisions that no studio will allow you to do. You can explore that sort of deadpan humor in such a visually rich way that you couldn't do if you were dealing with a studio and live action.
And now, here are nine more films that show the wide variety of viewing experiences available through the medium of animation.
Anomalisa, rental
It makes perfect sense that Charlie Kaufman (the screenwriter behind Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) would one day take his talents to animation. The subtle surrealism of his storytelling translates seamlessly to stop-motion animation in Anomalisa, a film that treats puppets like real people. (Including in terms of sexuality.) This tale of a depressed author who feels like all people are indistinguishable from one another finds perfect expression here by having all other figures voiced by one actor, Tom Noonan. And then comes the one woman who cuts through the noise: Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Lisa.
Fantastic Planet, Max/Criterion Channel
This ‘70s French animation is some cuckoo bananas stuff. If you’re the type who likes to watch movies under the influence, add Fantastic Planet to your watchlist. As Rafael told me, “Eastern Europe had a big animation boom in the '40s and '50s that was completely different from Disney animation.” There’s no clearer illustration of that wave than this allegorical inversion of mid-century sci-fi paranoia, which was animated at the legendary Jiří Trnka Studio in Prague. Imagine a world where it’s the humans who are kept as pets by aliens and treated as second-class citizens. (Oh, and just absurd amounts of hippie-era sexuality.)
Flee, Hulu
Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s triply-Oscar nominated Flee is an animated documentary that recounts the harrowing journey of gay refugee Amin from Afghanistan to Denmark. It assumes the narrative form of a therapy session where simply recounting the traumatizing stories of his life that he’s suppressed has tremendous value for Amin as he prepares to enter into a marriage in which he wants to have no secrets. But Flee serves a purpose beyond just rehabilitating its subject, who needs animation for anonymity The film renders Amin’s scariest moments as haunting abstractions stripped of their vitality and detail, but it also recreates moments of joy and connection as reveries of cinematic fantasy. It’s a reminder of what cinema can do best: bringing us into heightened experiences by distorting them through the lens of artistry and vision.
Mad God, Shudder and rental
What if animation were so expressive that it didn’t even need dialogue to fill in the gaps? That’s the bet Phil Tippett, the Oscar-winning visual effects artist behind Return of the Jedi and Jurassic Park, bet on in his long-gestating feature debut Mad God. This vision of apocalypse is pure vibes of doom, perhaps a product of the thirty years it took Tippett to make the stop-motion film. He was admitted to a psychiatric ward shortly before completing it, and it’s not hard to see that spirit of mania reflected in this inventive labor of love.
Mary and Max, Tubi (free with ads)
Claymation is for more than just Aardman and their chickens! Mary and Max is friendship cinema on downers as an unlikely relationship forms between a young Australian girl (voiced by Toni Collette) and a middle-aged American man with autism (voiced by Phillip Seymour Hoffman). It’s an interesting experiment in discordance to deploy such childlike animation forms in service of a very adult story, but the film sits at the perfect intersection of sadness, simplicity, and sincerity.
Persepolis, rental
Marjane Satrapi deserves a coming-of-age story with a style as expansive as her view of the world, and she got just that in the adaptation of her graphic novel Persepolis. The movie is an autobiographical account of her youth against the backdrop of the constantly changing political climate of Iran. She loves many of the Western items and concepts that fundamentalists can’t stand, from Bruce Lee in her childhood to Michael Jackson in her adolescence. But Marjane, even from a young age, has the perfect weapon to fight even the most repressive of regimes: resilience, high spirits, and imagination. The film’s style allows her to hold longing for what is lost with imagination for what could be within the same frame, and it’s moving to watch unfold.
Waltz with Bashir, rental
Animation is quite literally something only possible in cinema, not reality, and yet many documentarians have found it a useful aesthetic tool to draw out memories that are not available through the archive. In Waltz with Bashir, director Ari Folman uses hand-drawn animation as a way to visualize how one former Israeli soldier’s experience feels somehow unreal to him. Only in talking to people he experienced the Lebanon War alongside and converting himself into a character inside a narrative can he fully grapple with a past he cannot remember but whose impact he cannot shake.
(NOTE: I took this recommendation from a 2022 post about expanding the lens on documentaries beyond true crime — perhaps you’d find that interesting as well.)
The Wolf House, Tubi (free with ads)
If you saw the aforementioned Beau Is Afraid earlier this year and was curious to see more from the wild animated interlude, you’re in luck! The Chilean animation duo of Cristobal León & Joaquín Cociña have a feature, The Wolf House, under their belt. I’ll be honest with you: I’d be hard-pressed to describe what exactly happens in this dark fairy tale inspired by real events in their country’s history. But I was riveted by every single frame thanks to their mind-blowing use of mixed media in stop-motion. The way characters, items, and scenes can transmogrify before our eyes into something entirely unexpected and different kept me glued to the screen in a way I seldom ever experience.
World of Tomorrow, YouTube
This is actually a short film you can watch directly on YouTube by clicking the link below! But if you take it together with the other two installments of World of Tomorrow, it more or less sums up to feature-length. Yet even one of these shorts from animator Don Hertzfeldt packs more philosophical heft than most features. These sci-fi episodes, each of which involves an alien encounter with a young child, get at something aching about what it means to be alive. His simple hand-drawn stick figures evoke both the simplicity of the ideas and our small, insignificant place in the vastness of the universe.
You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd. I’ve also compiled every movie I’ve ever recommended through this newsletter via a list on the platform as well.
Since seeing Beyoncé’s Renaissance film, I’ve been bumping the album pretty much non-stop. “HEATED” and “AMERICA HAS A PROBLEM” really popped for me on the big screen.
I loved this Jewish read of why A Charlie Brown Christmas is so resonant by James Poniewozik of The New York Times (gift article).
I’m closing out the year with some reviews! I loved The Iron Claw (in theaters December 22) and was a little more mixed on The Boys in the Boat (in theaters December 25).
I’ve also published two of my favorite interviews of the year on Slant Magazine. First, there was legendary German director Wim Wenders about his big year releasing both the documentary Anselm and the narrative feature Perfect Days.
Then, there was actor Christian Friedel on playing the commandant of Auschwitz in the haunting new film The Zone of Interest. Perhaps approach this one with caution if you haven’t seen the film.
You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.
Something fun is coming for subscribers on Yorgos Lanthimos soon!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall