A triumphal account could be given of animation in 2024, a year in which animated titles were often found propping up a sluggish US box office and a record six animated features ended up in official selection in Cannes. But it would have to reckon with a growing anxiety in the industry, which found expression at an unusually acrimonious edition of Annecy, animation’s biggest festival. I’ll come to that.
Let’s start with the triumphs. The summer was dominated by Pixar’s Inside Out 2, which has now grossed more than any other film this year – and any other animated film in history. It pinched the latter record from Disney’s remade The Lion King (2019), whose prequel, Barry Jenkins’s Mufasa: The Lion King, will come out before the year’s end. Disney’s sequel to Moana (2016) has just arrived in UK cinemas: the original was the most streamed movie in the US in 2023, according to Nielsen. At the time of writing, then, animation’s remarkable year at the box office is far from over.
Sequels and spin-offs tend to rise to the top of the rankings, but we don’t have to look far down to find an exception: DreamWorks’s The Wild Robot. The hit sci-fi feature breaks with the photorealist approach of classical Hollywood CG animation, rendering its lush forested environments in painterly textures. While I admired the artistry, the adulation that greeted it says much about the industry, which over the decades has served us so many films that look like each other that innovations end up seeming like revolutions.
For variety of style and subject, we can always turn to independent features. Of the Cannes crop, only one landed in the main Competition: Michel Hazanavicius’s World War II drama The Most Precious of Cargoes, whose high moral seriousness and well-known director placed it squarely in the festival’s comfort zone. But the breakout hit at Cannes was Flow, the second feature by Latvia’s Gints Zilbalodis, which follows a ragtag gang of animals through a flooded world. ‘Follows’ is the operative word: the handheld camera moves with the characters through the CG environments; montage is sidelined. This film language, atypical in animation, was facilitated by the use of Blender, open-source software that’s increasingly popular for low-budget productions. (Julian Glander’s Boys Go to Jupiter, a surreal Florida-set satire of the gig economy, is another example.)
Wordless and transcendental, Flow is the polar opposite of the year’s other festival favourite. Adam Elliot’s talkative Memoir of a Snail is a rough-hewn, grimly comic study in human kinks and hang-ups overlaid on to a story of loss. It took the top prize at the BFI London Film Festival – the first stop-motion film to do so. This was a fine year for stop-motion veterans: Claude Barras followed his beloved My Life as a Courgette (2016) with the eco-fable Savages, while the Brothers Quay delivered their long-gestating adaptation of Bruno Schulz’s novel Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, a typically idiosyncratic interpretation which is more enigmatic and less psychedelic than Wojciech Has’s 1973 live-action version.
Psychedelia was in rich supply in María Trenor’s Rock Bottom, a dreamlike fictionalised re-enactment of prog-rocker Robert Wyatt’s life around the creation of the album of that title. Though flawed, the film is admirably committed to mapping both the singer’s emotional terrain and the mid-1970s hippie scene he moved in. But it was only the year’s second-quirkiest animated biographical film about a musician: the top spot goes to Piece by Piece, an enjoyable romp through the relentlessly successful career of Pharrell, presented in a CG Lego aesthetic. The film is unusual in that animated documentaries are almost unheard of in Hollywood, even if the format is long established elsewhere: take Percebes by Alexandra Ramires and Laura Gonçalves, a sensitive portrait of an Algarve community where barnacles – percebes – are harvested and sold as delicacies. The short film won the grand prize at Annecy.
Elsewhere at the festival, rare boos greeted the screening of the French music video for Chien Méchant’s ‘Étoile filante’, made with generative AI. Annecy’s artistic director defended the selection of such works, comparing the situation to the ‘controversy’ around ‘3D software’ in the 1990s – and failing to note that there were no comparable concerns about plagiarism back then. But the anger at the festival ties into general alarm about the rise of AI, which goes beyond the question of copyright. January saw the publication of a major report, co-commissioned by the union The Animation Guild, which predicts in sobering detail widespread job disruption across the entertainment industry – including animation – by the end of 2026. So this prospect looms over the years to come, as it did over the one just past.
