We all know what a “maester” is, right? George R.R. Martin created them to be the wise, science-minded scholar class of A Song of Ice and Fire, the epic saga adapted into Game of Thrones. In the feudal realm of Westeros, the maesters counsel lords and ladies into making informed decisions, teach their children to read and write and interpret history, and generally direct the shared wisdom of a collection of nation-states more often than not warring with each other for dominance. In that brutal medieval society, most people take this influence as a given, and the maesters’ collective knowledge (usually) isn’t questioned. Each keeps his logs and makes sure his high lord knows how the world has worked for centuries, as it has long been.
On our Earth, if there’s any similar force exerting curatory influence over the world of movies, it’s the Criterion Collection. For more than 30 years, if a film was included in the Criterion Collection, it’s given a maesterly treatment: an essay written about the film’s significance; perhaps a high-definition restoration; as many interviews from cast and crew as the Collection can muster; and beautiful packaging as befits of the greatest films ever made. No other organization on the planet succeeds at preserving a canon of film on this level more consistently than the Collection does.
Still, there’s a gaping hole in its output. Since 1984, Criterion has released all of three animated films: Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, on laserdisc in the ’90s (long out of print, with little hope for a DVD/Blu-Ray release); Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, in 2009 (widely interpreted as the latest cash-in on the Collection’s already-fellative relationship with Anderson’s work); and Martin Rosen and John Hubley’s Watership Down, in 2015. A fourth, Fantastic Planet, finally drops in June.
Whether more animated films deserve the honor isn’t really up for debate. They do. The essays that accompany Watership Down and Fantastic Mr. Fox make that much clear.
Here’s Gerard Jones, writing on Watership Down, a movie starring cute bunnies that uses roadkill imagery and the specter of violent predatory death to humanize its protagonists:
Few movies embrace the real dark the way this one does — the dark of night, of dreams, of sorrow and terror and peace.
And here’s Erica Wagner, writing on Fantastic Mr. Fox—Wes Anderson’s exploration of base animal instinct filtered through the lens of Roald Dahl cynicism:
How better to express the conflicts we all feel between our inner natures and what the world expects of us than through a group of animals that must negotiate the dangerous human world?
Plenty of live-action films released by the Criterion Collection simply don’t bother raising these existential questions. Armageddon doesn’t. The Beastie Boys Video Anthology doesn’t. Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist doesn’t. They raise other questions, certainly, but let’s not pretend this is an apples-to-apples comparison of critical consensus.
Take All Dogs Go to Heaven, a lesser effort from Don Bluth, the animation legend and Disney refugee responsible for The Secret of NIMH, The Land Before Time, and An American Tail. The film came out the same day as The Little Mermaid, didn’t enjoy nearly the critical or commercial success of Bluth’s previous work, and enjoys an especially disturbing reputation filled with horror and child endangerment. Despite that Roger Ebert called it “bright and inventive, and it was Bluth’s revolt that helped jolt Disney out of its production-line lockstep a decade ago.”
It’s uneven, sure, but all of this must make it at least five times as interesting and worth discussing as Armageddon—a movie the Collection unironically lionized as “a work of art by a cutting-edge artist [Michael Bay]”—right? Wrong. Under the Collection’s current practices All Dogs will most likely never get that chance. This is the best explanation we’ve found for the lack of animated representation in the Collection, via Redditor therealjshaff, adapted from a talk with Criterion President Peter Beckner and producer Kim Hendrickson:
Despite the release of The Fantastic Mr. Fox, animated films are NOT going to become a priority for Criterion. This is because most of the animated films that Criterion would be interested in releasing are already licensed to capable companies.
Yet the notion that they’d only want to release films not already licensed to capable companies never stopped the Criterion from releasing work from Stanley Kubrick, Wes Anderson, and Mike Nichols, to name just a few directors whose movies are made and distributed in home-video formats through companies owned by major studios. Meanwhile, MGM released All Dogs Go to Heaven on Blu-Ray with a lazy transfer, tinny audio, and only a theatrical trailer in the special features department. The Criterion Collection could blow that release out of the water and do the same for scores of animated pictures foreign and domestic—dozens of which have been suggested across the web, and on Criterion’s site. Exposing new audiences to even 20 of those films could go a long way toward further the Criterion’s mission to become “the most significant archive of contemporary filmmaking available to the home viewer.”
Thing is, we want to help them get there. The Collection can do two things tomorrow to start themselves off:
Commit to a schedule.
It is not even close to “good enough” to release the odd animated film once in a long while. If the Collection wants to tout cartoons of quality, it should do it as seriously as it possibly can. Fantastic Planet will come out 72 films after Watership Down in the collection, according to Criterion’s spine numbers. Why not commit to releasing just one animated film for every 30 live-action releases? That would rapidly increase the inventory and show an earnestness of effort. And the Collection could start doing just that by…
Enlisting talent.
When the Criterion Collection released the definitive edition of The Graduate last month, it predictably dove deep. Among other features, Dustin Hoffman and the film’s producer and screenwriter sat for exclusive interviews on the film—which was also given a shiny new 4K restoration—and legendary New York magazine columnist Frank Rich wrote the accompanying booklet’s central essay. Criterion employs approximately 40 people. In order to ramp up its animation game, it should add at least one or two cartoon experts to their ranks as consultants, if not full-timers. Here are just a few suggestions:
- Genndy Tartakovsky: A filmmaker (Transylvania) and showrunner (Samurai Jack, Dexter’s Laboratory, Star Wars: Clone Wars) whose savvy skill with action is matched only by his fluency in humor. I’d be very interested to hear what he thinks of The Secret of the Kells—the French-Belgian-Irish fantasy film with the same sort of line work and attention to artistic history that exploded out of every frame of Samurai Jack.
- Floyd Norman: The first black animator who worked at Disney, and a font of knowledge on matters of race and Disney history. Ask him to weigh in on why Zootopia is a very new type of film for Disney to release—because it is.
- Ari Folman: Who directed Waltz With Bashir, an intensely personal animated documentary based on a search for his memories as a soldier fighting in the 1982 Lebanon War. Just imagine someone of Folman’s experience or stature breaking down the themes in a film like World War II tragedy like Grave of the Fireflies, and try not to cry while you do it.
- Andrea Romano: A casting and voice director who has worked on almost every animated thing worth watching that has been produced for children’s television over the last 30 years. Attempt to secure her to discuss the struggles of dubbing animation. Squeeze those discussions in between the five shows she’s probably overseeing at the same time.
- Don Bluth: All Dogs Go to Heaven. The Secret of NIMH. An American Tail. Titan A.E. The Land Before Time. If there’s a non-Disney Kurosawa of animation, it’s Bluth—and he’s still alive and trying to self-finance a Dragon’s Lair movie. His IndieGoGo raised more than twice what he asked for. Holy Christ, just email the guy. Here!
And sure, these are all naive wishful thoughts. Doing crazy crap like this costs money. The question becomes: “Do we want to license and release a 26th Akira Kurosawa movie, or do we want to invest in something we’ve never tried before?” To me that’s a no-brainer, but when you run a physical media publisher in the age of streaming, it’s a tough question to answer. It hasn’t gotten any easier since Newsweek profiled the Collection in 2009.
“What is exclusive to Criterion is prestige,” the magazine wrote then. “And more than anything, that’s what these films gain from the company’s imprimatur.”
The medium that grew (just as film did) from Egyptians depicting motion in their burial chamber illustrations deserves that prestige. In that way, the origins of film share inextricable common ancestry with animation. The form deserves plaudits all the more in 2016, now that Disney has learned how to maturely address race relations in a way that feels contemporary and important, characters like Sterling Archer have crossed over into the broader pop-culture consciousness, become some of the most popular on television, and Cartoon Network saw one of its biggest years ever in 2015, and even mumblecore’s Duplass Brothers have dabbled in animation. As of this week, anyone can use the same software Studio Ghibli uses to make animated films. Cartoons have come a long way since Snow White, and our best librarians—obsessed with logging the history of cinema—should champion and embrace that growth.
The great irony of the maesters in A Song of Ice and Fire is that they’re actually not great at their jobs. Their histories are as woefully incomplete as those of any medieval society in our own world—leading some online conspiracy theorists to believe there’s huge degrees of malice and greed behind the omissions.
But we live in the real world, where animated blockbusters make more and more money, and several outlets have already pointed out holes in the offerings.
Fantastic Planet’s a great start. But it’s time to do more, Criterion, before someone else does.
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