Surf’s Up is just the latest in a long line of animation movies that are currently big business at the worldwide box office.With so many studios getting in on the act already this year we have had Flushed Away, Shrek the Third and Happy Feet and the risk of an oversaturated market is fast becoming a reality as the movies are failing to be a hit with the critics. Animation began when brothers Walt and Roy Disney founded Walt Disney in 1923; Disney is now one of the largest media and entertainment corporations in the world.Disney produced Mickey Mouse Steamboat Willie in 1928; it was the first cartoon with sound. Only nine years later they released the first full length animated film in U.S history.Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was also the first full length feature film in for the studio.Disney have gone on to create some of the most memorable movies of all time including Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid and The Lion King, which is the highest grossing traditional animation in history.
In recent years, as computers have become more advanced, the way animation is created has changed. At the forefront of this change is Pixar Animation Studios, a computer animation studio, which makes feature films using CGI.
Disney bought Pixar for $7.4 billion and together they have released a string of movies including Toy Story/2, A Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc, and Finding Nemo to critical acclaim and commercial success bring animation movies to a new generation of viewers.
But this reinvention by Pixar highlighted to other major studios that money was to be made in the animation genre of cinema.
And this is where the real problem has started. Studios, who are trying to follow in Pixar’s footsteps, but have smaller budgets and therefore producing movies of a poorer quality, are beginning to clog the market.
Only Dreamworks have produced a successful animation franchise in Shrek. But even this appears to be running out of steam as the Shrek the Third has met with a poor response critically. Despite this Shrek 4 and 5 are already in the pipeline.
But one studio has been producing high quailty animation movies for the past twenty years Studio Ghibli.
Ghibli is a Japanese animation studio that was founded in 1985 by the studio's most prominent director Hayao Miyazaki.
However many of these films went unnoticed by a western audience until Miramax released his 1999 movie Princess Mononoke, which had enjoyed major commercial success in Japan.
It was Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle that won over the west with Spirited Away winning an an Oscar for best Animated Feature. To win over the west many of the films were re-released using the voices of well known actors including Christian Bale, Lauren Bacall and Kirsten Dunst.
Unlike many of the westren animation movies the anime films always deliver a strong emotional message. Miyazaki is famed for using strong female lead characters as well as depicting the horrors of war - and these feature are evident in almost all of his movies.
Unfortunately Tales from Earthsea, the new offering from Ghibli has failed to be a commercial success here in the UK.
More and more studios are jumping aboard the bandwagon in the fight to rule the animation box office. But all this is coming at a cost - the cost of quality .
Later this year Pixar will release Ratatouille, in a bid to make up for the disappointing Cars. And will a second Madagascar and two more Shrek movies on the drawing board from Dreamworks the stauration of the market sets to continue and may reach bursting point.
Helen Earnshaw