Amid over at Cartoon Brew recently wrote an interesting post recently about the Best Animated Feature Oscar being a bad idea. I’m not sure I agree with him wholeheartedly (I think I’d be pretty happy to receive any sort of Oscar recognition), but he is right that it does pigeonhole animation in the minds of the public.
Animation is not a genre. No more than “Australian” films or “Black and White” films are genres in themselves. Perhaps the attraction of animation used to be the novelty of it when it was rarer, but audiences are more sophisticated now and they don’t go see Kung Fu Panda because it “was made by computers”, but because it’s a family movie and a comedy.
Does the marketing of animated films as a genre hurt it? I think so. In it’s never-ending malaise, the now defunct (Australian) Film Finance Corporation commissioned research company Bergent to find why our own local audiences hated our films so much. The conclusion was that a lot of it was in the marketing of these films as “Australian” and the negative connotations that came with it. The recommendation was to market “Australian” films as their proper genres – comedies, action, romance etc. Incidentally, the study also found that “Arthouse” was a bad word to use too, and anything “arthouse” should be marketed as its proper genres too.
It’s fair to say though that some people make a pretty good job of selling animation as a genre. Anime distributor Madman does pretty well in Australia, however, Anime can be considered a genre in itself with such a fanatical fanbase (Again, I think this is changing as tastes become more sophisticated and the market moves away from the fringes). From our research of animated features and their distributors, there’s a “Madman” in a lot of markets that finds success distributing non-studio animated releases. But could they do better?
As part of the research we are doing for our feature film slate, we surveyed about 120 animated features over the last 6 years and their worldwide box office takings. We decided to survey some live action films made for the same audiences too. Comparing the live action and animated films with production budgets between 20-50M, we found that the animated films consistently underperformed their live action counterparts in a lot of countries. In some cases they were distributed by the same people! There’s got to be room for improvement and money to be made in changing the marketing of animation just that little bit.
