‘Silly Rabbit! Flicks are for Kids’: Animation for Adults

Cat Earley

When Disney’s Beauty and the Beast released in 1991 and became the first animated film to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, it should have been the sign the film industry needed to recognise the public’s growing appetite for animation as being - perhaps - a bit more nuanced than a 20th century gimmick. In fact, the film would not be animation’s (or much less, Disney’s) first major appearance at the Academy Awards ceremony, with Disney’s first feature film Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937, Disney Studios) taking home the studio’s first (honorary) award in 1938 and Pinocchio (1940, Disney Studios) taking home their first official Oscar some years later.

In the decades that followed, animated films would continue to dominate the Best Original Score and Best Song categories, reaching their 20th century peak in the 90s when the Disney Renaissance brought films like Beauty and the Beast to the very apex of the Academy Awards, even challenging prestige live-action films like Silence of the Lambs (1991, Jonathan Demme). Tipping into the beginning of the new millennium and in response to the unexpected commercial and critical success of Dreamworks’ Shrek (2001), the 74th Academy Awards in 2002 finally gave the public what they had assumed we had all been waiting for.

They added a Best Animated Feature category.

And in the years that followed, Disney, Pixar, and even fringe studios like Paramount Animation would remain locked in an annual tango for the honour of being crowned Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, but no animated film would ever come so close as Beauty and the Beast did to a Best Picture award ever again.

So what is it about animation that drives this infantilisation in the film canon? After all, many don’t consider classics like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves akin to Sight and Sound poll smashers like to their predominating status as ‘children’s films’ as contributing to their low-brow nature, but plenty of animated adult films have graced our screens in the past decade. Netflix’s Bojack Horseman (Raphael BobWaksberg, 2014-2020) premiered on the streaming service in 2014 and cultivated its own dedicated fan base of cinephiles and sad kids alike, but - despite its cult popularity - the show is rarely given the Golden Age of Television prestige it arguably deserves.

Perhaps it would be easier to continue to list animated classics like Bojack and touching and sophisticated tales like Flee (2021, Jonas Poher Rasmussen) as the true taste-makers of the genre, but I believe to completely dismiss the family-friendly flicks that came before them as merely ‘kids’ movies’ would be to fundamentally misunderstand the genre and its strengths. After all, why choose to create an animated film at all? What does animation add to the artform? Beauty and the Beast used its animated world to bring candelabras and clocks to life and smashed the barrier of disbelief in the minds of its audience with its dancing plates and loveable beastly hero. Shrek not only recreated a preexisting medieval fantasy world, but used its setting and characters to turn that world comedic. What does animation do but make the unimaginable visible? An obvious avenue for films geared towards children, but also a clear gateway into the more nuanced storytelling we now see in shows like Bojack Horseman, which - in the vein of Shrek - heavily leans on silly character names and presentations to convey more complex story beats, and - like Beauty and the Beastcapitalises on the fluidity of animation to portray concepts and displays more difficult to achieve in live-action cinema.

This year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Picture see films like Turning Red (2022, Domee Shi & Lindsay Collins), Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2023, Guillermo Del Toro), and Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2023, Dean Fleischer Camp) nominated - all films that have been incredibly commercially successful in their own right, but perhaps lack any recognition of that success by the larger award ceremonies. After all, the Academy has demonstrated an admiration for story beats that convey themes of coming-of-age and complicated mother-daughter relationships in films like the live-action Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert, 2022), but not in Turning Red. They have shown their interest in the nuances of life and death in Best Picture nominated All Quiet on the Western Front (Edward Berger, 2022), but not in Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. Why the double standard? Maybe the obvious answer is the most likely one in this instance - children’s films do tend to inspire a kind of adult-snobbery, an insistence that no family-friendly film could ever be as impactful or ground-breaking as one which has a 15+ label stamped on it - but what does that say for the dozens of brilliant animated mature films that have been and continue to be completely snubbed at the Oscars year after year? Whatever the reasoning, the Academy’s messaging is quite clear: if you want a Best Picture nomination, go live-action; Animated flicks are for kids.