Life not a bowl of berries for today’s animators

With “Shrek 2,” the latest big-screen animated hit,
grossing more than $125 million in its first five days at the box
office, one might think there is currently a huge demand for
animated films in Hollywood.

The truth is actually quite the opposite.

While there have been some mega-blockbuster animated films over
the past few years, the market still tends to favor live-action
features rather than animated ones.

The Shorttakes Film Festival, exhibiting today in Ackerman Grand
Ballroom, has chosen seven animated films from a submission pool of
18, all from the minds of college students. Unfortunately,
Shorttakes may be one of the few outlets that animators get to show
their work.

“There are so many independent filmmakers now making
animated films that the industry has become a little
saturated,” said Doug Ward, manager of UCLA’s animation
department. “With all those filmmakers and animators,
it’s a lot harder to get your film into film
festivals.”

With such competition within the animation scene, it’s a
big financial risk for animators to fund and animate their own
feature-length animated films, which is why most young animators
are sticking to the short film formula instead.

“The problem with making an independent animated feature
film is if you don’t have a distributor, it will be hard for
people to see it,” said Ward. “With short animated
films, you aren’t taking as much of a financial
risk.”

Even with the minimal amount of animated feature films in
theaters each year, it is just as difficult to get animated shorts
on television. Celia Mercer, an assistant professor in UCLA’s
animation department, sees that successful animated series like
“The Simpsons” and “South Park” come few
and far between on television.

“I don’t think there is a big market for shorts on
TV,” said Mercer, “(although) they do pop up here and
there.”

Ward says animation hit its peak during the late 1990s, but has
not been nearly as lucrative since then.

“When the dot-com phase came about in the late 1990s and
computer animated movies were showing how far animation could go,
the animation industry was nuts,” said Ward. “Now, the
market has died down a little and distributors aren’t paying
as much (for animation) as they used to.”

Short film animators were once able to get their work shown at
movie theaters, when animated shorts would be shown before a
feature-length film. Mercer doesn’t think this practice will
return anytime soon.

“It lengthens the duration of the overall screening
time,” she said. “The theater would rather just have
another screening per day.”

Despite the success of recent feature-length animated movies
such as “Shrek 2″ and “Finding Nemo,”
Mercer doesn’t anticipate much change in the way animated
short films are received, relative to their feature-length
counterparts.

“There are some people very committed to (animated
shorts), but I don’t see anything changing (in the
market),” she said. “It needs the next Mickey Mouse or
a phenomenon like that.”