Topic on Talk:The Millennium Age of Animation

There's an edit waiting in the Moderation queue that assumes the Millennium Age of Animation is over. I don't recall any discussion anywhere about that. Is the assumption accurate?

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I would think not. If anything, it's accelerating.

Edit: I wouldn't accept that the Millennium Age has ended until it is manifestly clear that we are in a new age of animation. What's different now about animation that explicitly and clearly demarks it from the animation of the Millennium Age? If there's no real difference, there is no new age. What justifies saying it's over?

I think it's close to ending, but not quite over yet.

We're reaching a point where the old, industry veterans who made a big name in the 1990s are being replaced by new ones. Studio Ghibli and Pixar were absolute powerhouses during the 2000s, but both certainly aren't their old selves any more. Pixar's new releases aren't as special as their old ones (they're still good, though, just not transcendently good). Studio Ghibli, who I have been following closer, has an uncertain future. We're getting How Do You Live? in classic Ghibli fashion, but after that no one knows where they are headed next. Hayao Miyazaki is retiring. Isao Takahata is dead. In this decade Ghibli released Earwig and the Witch, which is commonly believed to be their worst movie. Blue Sky studios shut down after Disney's acquisition. People are starting to get tired of Disney and Pixar's films, seeking refuge in Dreamworks and Sony films, with a newer style of animation.

You can make an argument for the Millennium Age ending, but I struggle to come up with a new era to replace it. The newer stuff simply isn't distinctive enough for this to be considered a new era. Studios come and go all the time. We still need to wait to see where Studio Ghibli's future leads. Plus, all I've mentioned so far are the mainstream stuff. There's plenty of indie animators innovating and continuing the tradition from the Millennium Age, such as Cartoon Saloon. There's no distinctive "end" to this era to me. Even if there is an "end", we still need to be patient to observe how the industry will move forward in the future.

Allow a note that says this era might be ending, and things are rapidly changing. I don't think a black and white "The Millennium Age of Animation is over" edit should be here because we can't clearly see what the future would be like.

Let's take a look at what we currently have in the way of ages of animation. Highly abridged, we have:

• Early Animation: "Look what we can do!" Cave paintings, Zoetropes, Magic Lanterns.
• The Silent Age of Animation: "Look what we can do for more than a second!" Animation is used to tell stories. Winsor McCay is the best-known animator from this era, and it's where Walt Disney learned most of the tools of his trade.
• The Golden Age of Animation: "Talkies!" Just like live-action, animation took advantage of synchronized sound. Walt Disney and Leon Schlesinger built empires in the early days of the Golden Age, Ub Iwerks showed off what short animated films could do, and in the middle of the age Disney proved the medium could be used for serious feature-length movies. Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and others also proved the medium could be used for comedy.
• The Dark Age of Animation: "Cut corners and make money!" Limited Animation ruled, along with the static background and Merchandise-Driven works. The Flintstones, Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner, and Scooby-Doo are three of the best of the age. Fans of avant-garde and big-budget animation had to look elsewhere, particularly Canada, the UK, and (near the end of the age) Japan, but their output was small compared to the juggernaut that was the US animation industry.
• The Renaissance Age of Animation: "Why did we stop telling good stories? Look at what the Japanese are doing!" Animation companies on both continents figured out what the live-action film studios knew all along: it's possible to have a good story in an inexpensive production that doesn't look cheap. Don Bluth and Hayao Miyazaki lead the way, and Disney released all ten of their "Disney Renaissance" titles. Computer animation reached the level where audiences could take it seriously, with ReBoot being one of the pioneers on that side.
• The Millennium Age of Animation: "Look what we can do with our home computers!" Everybody could make animation, and Sturgeon's Law made itself known - for every animator/storyteller at the level of Genndy Tartakovsky, Hideaki Anno, and Lauren Faust, there were a dozen or more at the level of... well, me. (No, I've never made anything worth keeping, let alone presenting to others.) And YouTube made it possible for everybody to see the mediocre works along with the good ones, whether they were mainstream or avant-garde.

What's the one-sentence next big thing that ushers in the next age of animation?

Honestly? Conformity is the rule and not the exception in animation since 2008.

Changes to the industry's management are to blame as far as I can tell. I'm not going to base it on the quality of New Tens media, only on the rationale behind it, and only in that it is very different from that of the era of ReBoot throught to The Fairly Oddparents.

The defining factor seems to be that other than industry vetetans like Faust, those involved on creating new works are not only a lineage leading back to the writers and artists for The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack - which on it's own is not enough to define the new era - but also that with rare exceptions the animation industry is not making animation for children but for all ages, which you would hope would be a good thing.

This sword cuts both ways; in film, animation for all ages has generally led to innovation and financial success, while on television - or later, streaming services - it more often than not led to creative stagnation and has even resulted in unprofitable works continuing while ones with great financial potential are abandoned (like how marketable Glitch Techs was compared to Infinity Train). The same seems to be true of anime.

Most importantly, current writers in many industries - most visibly in animation - are usually sticking to tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Isekai in a formulaic manner rather than an explorative one.

If that doesn't qualify for a new age of animation then I understand, it's just that I'e more than noticed that most cartoons haven't felt well-written since Steven Universe became popular, and since that's subjective I'm instead trying to base it on the root cause of it all.

I get now that maybe I should have proposed that before trying to alter this entry. Feel free to make changes on the observations above or to dismiss it all. I don't really feel like this place is what I'm looking for in a trope wiki now that I've seen its limitations and that censorship is still in place if a work just so happens to be NSFW. I might not have use for porn, but being an asexual deprived of a way to find escapism for the past 6 years has made me realise that if I want ideas for how to subvert speculative fiction tropes in an era of trope wikis that ban content based on US law or Google ad revenue, I've literally had to deep dive into some places I've got no other business being in. Making a NSFW subpage for tropes would be fine, but ATT doesn't seem willing to do that so I don't plan on remaining here for long.

Conformity is the rule and not the exception in animation since 2008.

What, just 2008? That's been true at least since 1942. What people conform to changes, but they still Follow the Leader.

Changes to the industry's management are to blame as far as I can tell.

That was certainly the case in the 1970s. Now... I think with no firm evidence that things aren't as bad now as they were then, but they aren't as good as they were in the early-2000s.

Most importantly, current writers in many industries - most visibly in animation - are usually sticking to tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Isekai in a formulaic manner rather than an explorative one.

That's Sturgeon's Law making itself known. It's been around for over a century, with the particular memes changing; it just hasn't been visible because of the cost of keeping works in circulation before the arrival of YouTube and similar sites.

Making a NSFW subpage for tropes would be fine, but ATT doesn't seem willing to do that

From the relevant policy: "it's okay to talk about pornography and violence on the wiki. It is not okay be pornographic or violent on the wiki." From the same policy: "The wiki is not rated G."

We're willing to discuss NSFW works and tropes. We do have to follow UK laws in the matter, though, so we need to word the Sex Tropes carefully - that's one reason why the Trope Workshop exists.

"That was certainly the case in the 1970s. Now... I think with no firm evidence that things aren't as bad now as they were then, but they aren't as good as they were in the early-2000s."

This I have to disagree with now that I've had time to thing about it. Cartoons are not making money, not even when corners are cut, and that's what I was alluding to with "change in management". It's not even greed alone that's changed the age, it's the attitude of the writers.

The Second Dark Age of Animation: "Put a chick in it and make her gay, every time, or we'll say you're a nazi and sic the witch-hunters on you."

To be clear, I'm not conservative either and don't want to bring politics into this. It would be just as awful if everything in Western Animation was "The Adventures of Bibleman" in some way, as my point is that agendas, rather than the computer adoption of the Millennium Age, are what defines the contemporary age of Animation and have since ~2008.

In short, the 1970s treated animation as a Circus. The 2010s treated it as a soapbox.

There isn't one. Maybe AI-generated footage might become this in a few years, but it's no way near mature enough to qualify as the next evolution of animation. Nor do I think "look what we can do to real people with deepfakes" counts, either. We need a visible sea change in the medium, and until we have that next new thing, you can't say the current thing is over and done with.

I'd say that the difference between the original Ben 10 or Spongebob Squarepants, and Twelve Forever or The Amazing World of Gumball is what I'm trying to express, and I don't mean stylistically.

The phrase you'd be looking for is "Let's make it look like the social issues behind animation went away!"

Basically, ever since Adventure Time went on the air, the animation industry feels gentrified.

I don't get the feeling that there's been some kind of revolutionary transformation in animation that marks a shift to a new age. I know we don't normally require sources, but this is one of the times I'd prefer to have some authoritative backing rather than just somebody's say-so.

That's fair. I'm no authority on the matter, it was just based on my observations. You've probably noticed I've stopped editing purely out of fear that my edits are no longer welcome.