Picture it. It’s 2010 and you’re watching animated dragons fly across the screen with a beautiful music score playing throughout. Despite the mere beauty, you also learn valuable lessons, watching the small, weak protagonist learn self-love and inner strength. Now, to most people, that sounds like a fantastic film. To society, it’s children’s entertainment.
How to Train Your Dragon is one of the many examples of animation getting dismissed as a cinematic medium.
More often than not, animation gets ridiculed for its lack of “seriousness” and is plagued with the curse of being reduced to the children’s genre.
At the 2022 Oscars, the academy mocked the animation industry by insinuating that all animated films are exclusively made for children. As a result, the academy belittled and insulted the art of thousands who pour their entire souls into a society that dismisses them, inferring that their work is minuscule compared to the work of “real” film. However, animation is more than that.
Of course, animation companies like Disney, Pixar, Dreamwork and Illumination are aware that their target demographic is children. However, to assume that every single project that is created by an array of thousands of artists is primarily for children is chosen ignorance.
With an infinite number of choices for children’s entertainment, why spend millions and millions of dollars on animation when there are less expensive means? It does not make sense,; there must be a reason animation is chosen.
To me, animation can portray hundreds of themes in a way real-life films can only achieve in their wildest dreams. Their storytelling possibilities only increase with time as technology further allows them to convey the themes we spent our entire lives enduring. Animation is not just cinema; it is the heart of it.
