Frank Falcone is founder and partner at guru animation studio, a Toronto computer-based character animation shop. He welcomes your thoughts at frank@gurustudio.com

What happened this year at the Bessies? There wasn’t a single animated spot in sight. In fact, ‘animation’ was inaccurately used to describe what were essentially visual effects enhancements or animated buttons or tags (very nicely executed, granted) in entirely live-action-conceived commercials.

Animation is a technique, but for better or worse it’s also come to be classified as a ‘genre’ of cinema or commercial. It has visual and story attributes that make it immediately identifiable with a style of storytelling. It has its own shelf at the video store. In fact, we see animation and expect a certain message.

And that’s the problem.

There is a continual malaise in our perceptions about animation. A typecasting is born, no less, out of the industry itself. Not surprisingly, soon after the passing of Walt Disney, the industry’s greatest visionary, the medium began to define itself solely by its appeal to children.

Animation was shunted to the ghetto of Saturday morning TV in the 1970s, and a barrage of infantile programming followed, seemingly designed to fill the spaces between more lavishly produced cereal commercials.

Not until Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with its cross-pollination of film techniques and great comedic acting, did we get even an inkling of the possibilities of animation again. This was a hybrid world with its own set of rules.

Yet even after this landmark, the string of highly successful Disney films that followed regressed to mimicking the early classics with a formula of appropriated fables and infectious singa-longs.

With Disney’s pervasive hyperrealism, we judge what we see by criteria similar to live action. But a true exploration of animation’s potential as a communication medium requires animators to forget about verisimilitude and create their own reality. This would break the myth of ‘genre’ perpetuated by the dominant Disney style and the sugar-fueled cereal adventure, which pander to a narrow demographic.

Writers who feel the need to disengage their intelligence when writing for this medium only add fuel to the fire. Animation can convey emotional depth, thoughtfulness, irony, wit – all the things we come to expect in live-action films – forging an emotional connection with us from outside our immediate reality.

The incredible box office of Shrek and Toy Story 1 & 2 proves that cross-demographic story appeal is not only possible, but makes for greater success in animated films. Many of these films reveal a level of detail and sophistication enabled greatly by recent advances in animation technology. Perhaps this is the vehicle that will lead animation out of the gutter.

Granted, films like these and South Park trade heavily in parody, but is irony the only way out? Can we continue to sustain a new generation of animated films that only poke fun at what is so typical about this familiar ‘genre’?

In a perfect world, the playing field of ideas is thrown open to both live action and animation without prejudice. After all, animation directors commit their impulses to moving images with as much conviction as their live-action equivalents.

Both collaborate with writers, producers and art directors. A live-action director sits atop a chain of grips, gaffers, DOPs and actors, while an animation director sits atop an equally complex chain of inbetweeners, ink-and-painters, set builders, CG character riggers, digital lighters and animators. Each is engaged in the representation of a reality, imagined or otherwise, and each uses their skills and techniques to engage the viewer’s intellect and passion. The lines between these worlds will continue to blur.

Animation scholar Paul Wells writes in his forthcoming book Animation: Genre and Authorship: ‘Arguably, animation provides the greatest opportunity for distinctive models of ‘auteurism’ and revises generic categories’.

So how should we begin revising these categories? If commercials are the popular experimental media of our age, why are feature films breaking these boundaries for us? Spots test the waters for breaking through to an audience, so the future of the animated medium lies in commercials.

The standout animated films and commercials bend notions of genre. They have adult sensibilities; they toy with our preconceptions; they deal with subject matter that has its own sense of reality; and they shock us with their intelligence.

Who isn’t amused by the brilliant Spike Jonze-directed spot for Sunkist juice, where the family runs screaming out of the kitchen after the animated character on the bottle comes to life in 3D? Or by GI Joe as he scoops a thinly veiled Barbie away from Ken in the Will Vinton stop-motion classic? Or the recent subversive ‘Popeye and Bluto as more than mere friends’ campaign? How about Filmtecknarna’s ultra-hip kinky cow for Boddington’s Chilled Cream Beer?

These ideas transcend demographics to achieve truly universal appeal, far from the fairy tales parents grudgingly endure with their kids because the marketing machine has deemed it necessary.

To challenge the prominence of live-action moviemaking, animation directors must earn their credibility by supporting and creating intelligent and mature work, while producers and agency creatives must cast aside their preconceptions and represent the medium bravely to their clients. It’s been a long time coming.

[And, yet, as I write this, I overhear guru’s reel playing, and hear a voice above all the candy sweet pops and whistles coaxing ‘Hey, Oatbran lovers!’] *

-www.gurustudio.com