Animation isn’t a genre, it’s a medium (rant)

Something that’s been bothering me lately is when people or sites refer to animation as a genre.

I’m signed up to Letterboxd and IMDb and both class animation as a genre, but in general it just seems to be considered as such.

Here’s why it isn’t a genre. A genre tells you something about the movie. The tone, possible tropes, even stories, characters or settings you can expect. If it’s a horror, you know it’s going to be scary, and feature some sort of evil entity or presence. If it’s a sci-fi, you know it’s going to be technology or space-related and feature futuristic takes on things in the real world. A comedy is designed to make you laugh and will likely hit a lot of specific beats. If something is an animation, it could still tell any story and have any number of tones, falling under any genre.

By the logic that animation is a genre, we’re then accepting that Akira and Up are the same genre. Make live action versions of them both (which they probably will if given long enough) and they certainly wouldn’t be considered the same genre.

I guess why this really bothers me is because it’s unfair to animators and filmmakers behind animation projects to have all of their work lumped together under this shared identity that essentially ignores the specifics of the stories they are telling, and whether they mean to or not, this falsely implies that all animated films are the same and underplays the importance of the stories instead focusing on the medium/art form in an almost gimmicky way, instead of acknowledging the variety that can be found in animation.

If animation is a genre, then so must be live action, and 3D, stop-motion animation, and entirely CGI films, and that process whose name I forget where filmmakers would scratch images onto the film rather than using a camera to shoot actors.

I just feel like it diminishes the hard work put into the process in almost a patting of the head kind of way.

Granted the majority of animation films are family films, but I think this is in part caused by the (for want of a better word) “stigma” attached to animation and what is expected. That said, recent films like Sausage Party have pushed the medium in new directions.

I’m not saying the fact it’s an animation shouldn’t be referred to when being described, but I feel like saying “it’s an animated horror” or “an animated romance movie” is a lot more indicative of what to expect and to a degree more respectful than “it’s an animation”.

Maybe I’m alone in feeling like this or maybe there are many others who agree, I just thought it was worth pointing out. Hopefully this doesn’t come across as a pointless post that no one gives a shit about, I just love the artform that is animation whether it’s computer animation, Cel, 2D, 3D, stop-motion etc, and would like to see it explore more genres which I feel may be allowed to happen more if it wasn’t classed as a genre within itself and therefore expected to tell a certain type of story and satisfy a certain type of audience for the most part.

Edit: details

Submitted March 18, 2019 at 11:59PM by LancasterDodd777 https://ift.tt/2HtHlee