RAY GUNN Director Brad Bird Says Animation Shouldn’t Be Treated Like a Genre for Kids: “It’s Film” — GeekTyrant

Animation isn’t a genre. It isn’t automatically kids’ entertainment. It’s a way to make movies, tell stories, and Brad Bird would like people to finally treat it that way.

The director of Ray Gunn has spent much of his career working in animation, and during a recent Q&A I attended following a screening of the film, Bird talked about his love for the medium and why he doesn’t buy into the idea that one style of animation should replace another.

The conversation started with the technological advancements that helped Bird and his team create the detailed world of Ray Gunn. While the film was made with CG animation, Bird made it clear that he doesn’t consider CG some superior evolutionary step that makes hand-drawn animation obsolete.

Bird explained: “Well, I think that it’s mainly in the area of detail, but I don’t want to give the impression that I think other forms of animation are inferior. I really love hand drawn animation, and I was prepared to make this one hand drawn.

“But I also love CG. I love stop motion. I, you know, there are many different forms of animation and they’re all really valid to me. And I don’t want to see any of them go away, because sometimes there’s a feeling of like, no, this is, this is it, and the other kinds of animation are old-fashioned, and I don’t believe that. I think they’re all really valid.”

That’s a refreshing attitude at a time when animation technology keeps changing. Hand-drawn animation, CG, and stop-motion aren’t competing to determine which one gets to survive. They’re different tools filmmakers can use to tell their stories.

Bird’s feelings about animation go beyond technique, though. Later in the conversation, he was asked about balancing the more adult material in Ray Gunn with making a movie that younger viewers could still enjoy.

For Bird, trying to calculate exactly what a particular demographic wants is a good way to screw up a movie.

He said: “Well, I don’t stop and think about that if I think about that, I’ll stink, you know, I think that you can’t necessarily know what people have, a wide age range and a wide, you know, everyone has a different kind of life.

“If you start thinking that you’ve got to appeal to, what will everyone like three years from now? I mean, that’s really the question. And if you think of that, you just go insane because you can’t know.

“The only chance you have, I think, is to keep it simple and say, I like movies. What do I want to see? And then hope that other people feel the same way. Because I can’t tell you what every person will like or not like. I can tell you what I like, and I can act on that.”

Bird would rather make something he wants to watch than manufacture a movie for an imaginary audience. That philosophy also connects to something he thinks animation gets wrong when filmmakers start talking down to viewers.

Bird continued: “So, I think too much animation tries to make a movie for them, and and for an audience that doesn’t include the person making it. And I think there’s something patronizing about that, That you can feel it.

“I mean, even when I was little, and I didn’t understand grown up films, I liked the fact that I was reaching for them, rather than being talked down to. And I think that animation at its worst talks down to people, and goes, you will like this. You know?

“It’s like, no, you’re there to be told a story and get wrapped up in it and care about the characters and laugh and cry and feel romantic and all those feelings.

“So, you know, I am really hoping that every year animation is seen a little more as just film, and I think that’s correct. It’s not a weird offshoot medium. It’s film. It’s just a different way to do film. And I think it’s cool.”

Animation doesn’t need to be placed in its own little box where every movie has to target children, satisfy a demographic formula, or prove which animation technique deserves to stick around.

A great animated movie should be allowed to do what any great movie does and tell a story, make you care about the characters, make you laugh, hit you emotionally, and maybe show you something you haven’t seen before.

Ray Gunn is Bird putting that philosophy into practice. He isn’t treating animation as a genre.

He’s just making a movie.