Contemporary Hollywood Animation: Style, Storytelling, Culture and Ideology since the 1990s by Noel Brown

Abstract

Reviewed by: Contemporary Hollywood Animation: Style, Storytelling, Culture and Ideology since the 1990s by Noel Brown M. Tyler Sasser (bio) Contemporary Hollywood Animation: Style, Storytelling, Culture and Ideology since the 1990s. By Noel Brown. Edinburgh University Press, 2021. Our narrative for Hollywood animation generally goes as follows: European fairy tales inspired the Gold Age of early Disney princesses, all of which are white, traditionally beautiful, kind to animals, helpless, prone to singing, and longing for domestic responsibilities and wedded bliss with Prince Charming until The Little Mermaid (1989) instigated the so-called Disney Renaissance, whereby Disney princesses obtained some agency while remaining still mostly white, still traditionally beautiful, still kind to animals, still singing, and still longing for wedded bliss. Then came Frozen (2013), which somewhat subverted these patterns. In a very general sense, we have thought about Hollywood [End Page 121] animation as being synonymous with Disney and basically rebranding the same princess archetype. Noel Brown's Contemporary Hollywood Animation complicates this scholarly narrative for those movies produced since The Little Mermaid. Therefore, instead of a single, sustained argument, Contemporary Hollywood Animation blends a nuanced history of American animated features with clear analysis of thematic patterns and how such patterns "recapitulate the values, beliefs, hopes and fears of the nation" (1). The first chapter alone warrants the need for university libraries to procure a copy of the text, as it will need to be included in all syllabi dealing with Disney, children's film, or any part of contemporary cinematic animation. Brown empirically tracks significant production trends in Hollywood animation and contextualizes them in terms of business, aesthetics, and influence. A few examples include the enormous increase in the annual number of full-length features released (roughly seven in the early 1980s compared to more than seventy in the past five years) (3); the commercial impact of Star Wars (1977) in terms of marketing a franchise via ancillary products (kidvids, theme parks, books, toys, etc.), often which outshines box office earnings; the transition away from cel animation and towards CGI; and the shift away from adapting children's classics to producing original screen plays. As evidenced in this opening chapter, unlike contemporary scholarship on animation by Chris Pallant, J. P. Telotte, Christopher Holiday, Eric Herhuth, M. Keith Booker, Deitmar Meinel, and Lilian Munk Rösing, Brown offers a "comprehensive introduction to Hollywood animation since the 1990s that encompasses celanimated, computer-animated and stop-motion traditions of filmmaking, examines major formal, ideological and industrial trends, and relates films to social and cultural developments in the United States" (39). Having demonstrated major changes in the industry since the 1990s and the hybrid methodology adopted in the text, Brown turns towards the dominant theme in mainstream animation: family and kinship. In other words, Brown finds in several contemporary movies not only somewhat diverse depictions of family but also that the focalization now often includes that of both young and older characters. While contemporary animation has "only gone so far" in its acknowledgment of LGBTQ+ families (55), representation of diverse family structures has progressed. First, there has been a normalization of single-parent homes, surrogate, and extended family units, and a narrative of "reconstruction of damaged or incomplete families" (39). Second, the traditional American (or Western) convention of the isolated hero moving towards some self-obtained goal has been partly supplanted by the now more common narrative of a family, traditional or otherwise, collectively working to obtain goals (67–77). Such shifts speak to other changes as well, such as the replacement of diegetic songs that dominated early animation, themselves based on 1930s Hollywood musicals, in an effort aesthetically to [End Page 122] make these contemporary family films appear more realistic. Further, expansions on how these films depict family speaks less to aesthetical shifts and more to studios' attempts strategically to market their product to adult demographics in that these films dually address child and adult audiences (43–47). Hence, the movies reposition the focalization of characters to embrace both old and young points of view, to emphasize adult themes such as the cyclization of life, and to include characters who find pleasure in watching their children grow and become like them. Yet...