CHAPTER 1
History / Evolution of Animation
Animation—or cartoons, if you will—has a long, rich history. In order to understand how scriptwriters entered the picture and came to be where they are today, this section will briefly look at how cartoons developed.
In 1914, the marvelous artist Winsor McCay lovingly crafted line-art animation in a masterpiece known as “Gertie the Dinosaur.” It was the first time someone had created a true character for the screen and had the character act out a little story.
One artist doing all the work was both painstaking and time-consuming, so the next step in the evolution was the development of animation studios where teams of artists would work on projects, leading to specialization. Soon you had artists who did storyboards, character animation, backgrounds, painting cells, or other jobs. However, one area of specialization that never developed in these early studios was an actual scriptwriter. Artists, animators, and other members of the creative team worked out the gags or storylines collectively. In some studios, there was a bullpen of writers whose jobs were to generate ideas and gags, which were then worked up in storyboard form, but the writers didn’t write scripts as we think of scripts today.
The Fleischer brothers’ sing-along cartoons beginning in 1924 and Disney’s Steamboat Willie in 1928 were important milestones. They advanced animation styles and the use of sound and music at a time when sound was still new and revolutionary even for live-action films. Although Disney’s Snow White wasn’t the first animated feature ever created, it set a new high in the level of art, sophistication of character development, and memorable music. On the early animation features, there are people credited with the story and adaptation, but no actual animation script was part of the process. It was a fluid process of storyboards and story concepts being worked out in some combination of images and written word.
Other than the Disney features, most animation through the 1950s consisted of short pieces made to run in front of feature films, relying mostly on visual gags and jokes. As interest in theatrical shorts waned, many movie studios shut down their animation-production arms. This led William Hanna and Joe Barbera, who had formed HB Enterprises in 1944 (later Hanna-Barbera Productions), to focus on animation for the new medium of television starting in 1957. Initially, the studio turned out five- to seven-minute cartoons, giving birth to Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound. Then came the next evolutionary step—the half-hour animated sitcom of The Flintstones, debuting in 1960.
Producing animation for television, particularly in this longer format, was vastly different from making theatrical shorts. The need to turn out longer shows week after week on extremely tight budgets had a profound effect on both the quality of the animation and the need to streamline the process. Animators accustomed to working out gags for short pieces couldn’t maintain the volume of work that was required for the longer shows.
During the 1960s, these business-driven necessities led for the first time to the hiring of actual scriptwriters—people who knew how to type out a script that could be handed to the storyboard artists. Other studios—such as Filmation, DePatie-Freleng, and Ruby-Spears—sprang up to create animated TV series, and the step of hiring scriptwriters to first create the script was at long last integrated into the creative process.
Thus, the role of scriptwriters in the field of animation is relatively recent, given the entire history of the art form. At times, there has been an underlying tension between those who write and those who draw—I’ve encountered a similar tension in game design as well. Some artists may argue that only someone who can draw should be writing animation, while some writers might feel that artists don’t truly understand how to write. Each side of this argument has its pros and cons, but what it gets down to is that this is a storytelling medium. You can be a great visual storyteller who writes scripts, as well as a great storyteller who draws animation, or you can be any combination of the two.
Attempts have been made for a show to go back to creating animation the old way. I haven’t seen those efforts succeed for regular, half-hour series, however. Although some talented artists create their own shows and do the writing themselves, they are the exceptions. Today, the dominant method for creating a feature or television animation project is to begin with a written script, which then goes to storyboards and art design.
Another significant evolutionary step is taking place—the development of CGI (computer-generated images, frequently shortened to just CG) animation, also called 3-D. The ground-breaker in creating top-quality CG shows was Mainframe Entertainment in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. In 1994, Mainframe’s TV series ReBoot was the first all-CGI series. Initially, CG was more expensive than traditional cel, or 2-D, animation, but as the technology and techniques continued to advance, CG became more and more an integral part of TV and feature animation. Pixar’s Toy Story in 1995 showed that a CG feature could match the success of a 2-D feature, further driven by the enormous success of Finding Nemo.
In fact, these features were so successful that both DreamWorks and Disney have since announced that they have virtually abandoned 2-D production in favor of 3-D, decisions that continue to be hotly debated by writers, animators, and others in the field of animation. The one thing that doesn’t change, whether the project is done in 2-D or 3-D, is the need for strong stories, compelling characters, and well-written scripts. The fact that the Oscars now include a category for best animated feature supports the need for top-quality writing in an art form that continues to mature.
Genres and Categories
Animation has become wonderfully diverse and open to new forms of production (Flash animation, for example). Here is a rundown of the realms of animation production that provide opportunities for you as a writer.
Features
Features, or long-form animation, can be made for three major markets:
• Theatrical
The powerhouse studios for animation features are Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks, but many other studios compete in this arena, including smaller, independent companies, as well as studios in Canada, France, Australia, Japan, India, Ireland, and elsewhere.
• Direct-to-video
Some major studios have a separate division to create direct-to-video animated features. There are smaller, independent companies that also create direct-to-video.
• Television
There isn’t a lot of feature-length animation made specifically for TV. Although this does happen from time to time, it’s not a regular market. Early in 2004, Warner Bros. announced an in-house division to produce four TV movies per year, most likely to be based on the studio’s existing properties.
Television
There was once a thriving market for syndicated animation. Syndication refers to selling directly to as many individual TV stations as possible the rights to broadcast a program—rather than selling the rights to a network, which then itself broadcasts the program. Syndication of animation has all but vanished from the scene. The current outlets are networks and cable, though animation is seen less and less on network channels. The big cable channels such as Fox, Disney, Nickelodeon, and the Cartoon Network have taken over as the main outlets. Showtime, the Sci-Fi Channel, and others are experimenting with adult-level animated shows.
Animation for television tends to break out by age groups more than anything else. We have finally reached the stage where we can divide animation into shows for children and shows for adults.
Children’s Animation
When shows are evaluated for ratings, the age groups are broken down into:
• kids 2 to 11
• kids 6 to 11
• twins 9 to 14
In development, there are loose guidelines that differ somewhat from the above. It’s more common to break the categories down into roughly:
• preschool and very young (2–8)
• young heading toward twin (8–12)
I rarely encounter someone asking me to develop or write children’s animation for older than 12, an age when kids begin to shy away from this type of animation.
Animation for the youngest audience is usually geared toward soft, safe shows with educational content. Laws protect young children from content deemed potentially harmful. One such statute is the Children’s Television Act of 1990, which limits the amount of advertising that a broadcaster can air during children’s programming. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has laid down guidelines that require stations to air an average of no less than three hours a week of “educational” programming, though what gets approved as educational has been the source of much controversy.
The older group has a wider menu:
• comedy (SpongeBob SquarePants, Looney Tunes)
• humorous action-adventure (Jackie Chan Adventures, Kim Possible)
• serious action-adventure (X-Men, Teen Titans, He-Man)
• anime (Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Dragon Ball Z)
Educational, comedy, and action-adventure are viable markets for breaking into animation writing. The anime shows are done in Japan and don’t provide work for outside writers, except for one specialized job:
• ADR: This stands for additional dialogue recording. English-speaking writers are hired to write the English-language dialogue to either be dubbed over the Japanese dialogue or used as subtitles.
Animation for Adults
The types of shows being done for an adult audience range all over the spectrum. Here’s a partial list:
• sitcoms and satire
• edgy anthropomorphic animals
• science fiction
• fantasy
• cyberpunk
• contemporary, mainstream life with a twist
• sexy, naughty action-adventure
• weird, off-the-wall humor
• adaptations of comic books or comic strips
One comment needs to be made regarding the sitcom-style animation shows that run in prime time, such as The Simpsons or King of the Hill. Although they’re produced using animation as the medium, such shows are written in the same way as sitcoms, meaning they use a staff of in-house writers (who sit together in a room working out the shows) with experience in live-action sitcom and comedy. These shows almost never, if at all, use animation writers.
To get a better sense of the prime-time writing process, I recommend purchasing the May 2003 issue of Written By, the monthly magazine of the Writers Guild of America, west (WGAw). This issue features articles about animation, including one about the writing staff of King of the Hill. You can purchase back issues of Written By magazine by calling the WGA Publications Department (323-782-4522) to make sure that the particular issue that you want is available. Then send $5 to Written By at the WGA, 7000 Third Street, Los Angeles, California, 90048. The $5 price includes domestic postage. If you’re in Canada or overseas, you should call and inquire about postage.
If your interest lies strictly in these types of shows, this book won’t help you. The only advice I can give on this topic is that prime time is one of the most difficult areas of writing to break into. You’ll need to study how live-action sitcoms are written and developed, and you’ll need to write two or three brilliantly funny spec scripts for existing shows. A “spec” (for speculative) script is a sample script based on an existing show. You write this script on your own to show how well you can handle matching the sensibilities of the show and the dialogue of the characters. You must live in Los Angeles and get an agent who can represent you well in this specialized area of the business.
A few prime-time non-sitcom animation shows (for example, Batman) have shown a bias against using animation writers and a preference for using live-action writers, even though these are done along the lines of other animated shows. This says something about how even writers coming from the field of animation can view animation writers.
Anime
I want to touch a bit more upon the impact of anime on the current animation market. As I said, anime is created and produced in Japan and has become wildly popular, not to mention profitable, for the American market especially. “Anime” covers a lot of territory. Pokémon (a fun action show for kids) is quite a different thing from Cowboy Bebop (harder edged for adults) in look, tone, content, and intended audience. It’s a good idea to become acquainted with a range of anime, both the type intended for children and the type intended for adults.
This explosion in popularity has had ripple effects. The desire to draw upon both the visual and storytelling techniques of anime has definitely had an effect on Western animation. I’ve already had one situation where it was taken for granted that I knew what the distinctive qualities and features of anime are, and that I could incorporate them into the script. Be prepared for a producer or story editor to ask for something to be done in an anime style. Don’t be afraid to ask the story editor or producer what elements of anime he or she wants you to incorporate.
In some cases, the influence is mainly visual: the oversize eyes, small chins, small nose, small mouth, the hair and clothes flowing elegantly or aggressively in the wind, an action shot of the character that is static while a streaked color background flashes past to simulate motion, and various other visual themes common to most anime. There are also cultural differences that can trip up a Western viewer. For example, to the American audience, crossed eyes indicate silliness; to the Japanese audience, they indicate ferocious anger or readiness for battle.
In some cases, there are stylized anime emotional cues—a character emanating heart symbols to indicate being lovesick, wavy streaks down a character’s face to indicate crying, a character’s eyes turning into stars to indicate being bedazzled, and so on.
When the influence reaches the writing level, it means you must think in an anime storytelling manner. This includes certain types of poses, moments of silence and confrontation that cut back and forth between the two antagonists, certain types of shots (for example, ultra-close-up on eyes), and other such poses and characteristics that you can absorb only by watching a sufficient amount of anime.
On another level, there is a more fundamental difference in the nature of the stories the Japanese like to tell in anime. They tend to be more complex, sometimes sadder or grimmer or with a sense of doom, and approach the character’s emotions and actions differently than a Western writer tends to do. For some reason, this aspect of anime hasn’t had the same level of influence on Western writing. When someone says, “Write this in an anime style,” what they mean most of the time is to mimic the visual storytelling style, not the plot, dramatic structure, or thematic style.
Alternate Forms of Animation
Exciting developments have made it possible for creators to make animated projects on a more independent basis. These innovations allow homegrown talent to develop outside the realm of the media megacorporations.
Flash software makes it possible to create animation for the Web, and has advanced to the point where Flash animation has been used in animated TV series. Though it’s a limited form of animation, Flash nonetheless provides the means for individuals to create original projects of good enough quality to demonstrate a creator’s potential.
Machinima is animation created by using videogame technology, animation, and art assets, which are then edited, with voice, sound, and music added to create a virtual “film” using the videogame engine. Some of these Machinima have won awards at film festivals, two examples being Hardly Workin’ and Red vs. Blue.
With the explosion of media being created for the mobile and wireless market, it’s worth paying attention to ways in which animation might be created specifically for that use.