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What accounts for the blossoming? Most industry observers credit the baby- boom audience, who grew up watching classic cartoons and see them as a reminder of their youth -- and something to share with their kids. From the industry standpoint, the high cost of animation (a fully animated feature ranges from $12 million to $25 million) seems less prohibitive in an era of soaring star salaries and $50 million-plus budgets. The appeal of animation has also been enhanced by home video: such cartoon features as Bambi and The Little Mermaid have been among the hottest sellers at the cassette counter.
Cartoons have, moreover, simply got better. After the golden age in the 1940s and '50s, animation all but disappeared from movie theaters, while TV bastardized the genre with schlocky "limited animation." The current revival was sparked by Walt Disney Studios, which has more than tripled the size of its theatrical-animation unit since 1984 and ventured into TV cartoons for the first time. The busiest newcomer is Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, which has produced cartoon features like An American Tail and maintains an animation unit of more than 300 in London. Even Hanna-Barbera, the K mart of TV cartooning (The Flintstones, The Smurfs), is upgrading quality with such features as The Endangered, an ecological adventure film that will cost $14 million and take a Disney-like 2 1/2 years to produce.
Animation remains a curiously old-fashioned, labor-intensive craft. A typical feature-length film requires 100,000 frames, or cels, each of which has to be painted by hand. Even with simpler TV animation, a half-hour cartoon usually requires 16 to 18 weeks of production, compared with three or four weeks for a live-action show. To save money, much of the work is shipped overseas, usually to the Far East. Artists there do most of the frame-by-frame drawings, working from character models and storyboards prepared in the U.S. Computer animation is also being used to provide more visual texture and fluid motion. With computers, for example, Disney's forthcoming The Rescuers Down Under was able to use a palette of several hundred colors, many times the number used in most animated features.
Computers, however, cannot replace human craftsmanship. "It is really difficult to duplicate the character quirks that an artist puts into animation," says Jean MacCurdy, chief of animation at Warner Bros. With animation in eclipse for so many years, finding those artists was a challenge. "Great animators are like great actors," says Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg. "The talent pool is so small and so precious."
Yet good animation is not entirely dependent on technical wizardry. "The secret is getting good writers who understand how to take advantage of the animation medium," says Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons. "I've always been inspired by old Jay Ward cartoons like Rocky and Bullwinkle, which was fairly primitive animation but had great writing, voices and music."