Triumph of the toons: how animation came to rule the box office

3/9/2026 at 8:06:36 PM

Animation is having it's best year yet, apparently. And yet nearly all of my peers (in our late 40s,early 50s now) who worked on world famous shows, are having terrible trouble getting a job and are pivoting to literally anything else.

by klondike_klive

3/9/2026 at 6:02:43 AM

"She advised film-makers to focus on character and emotion[...] So evident is Pixar’s formula that it has inspired an internet meme: “What if toys had feelings? What if fish had feelings? WHAT IF FEELINGS HAD FEELINGS?” [...] Film franchises tap into nostalgia, too. “Toy Story 5” will be watched by more than a few adults who saw “Toy Story” as youngsters 31 years ago."

Reminds me very much of Roger Scruton's diagnosis that our popular culture is defined by kitsch (which in turn is defined by sentimentality), echoing Wilde that the big problem of the latter is that it wants to have an emotion without paying for it, gratification on the cheap.

And I think animation is particularly ripe for nostalgia, just like gaming because effectively it never ages. The Scrubs reboot is an interesting case because just watching the first episode I think you can actually see Scruton's point, there's something immediately off about seeing the same jokes and characters played out by people well into their 50s in a painfully way too HD recreated set.

by Barrin92

3/9/2026 at 11:16:03 AM

Film franchises tap into nostalgia, too. “Toy Story 5” will be watched by more than a few adults

I always thought the reason Toy Story works for adults and children is that the toys are the 'parents': caring for their child, but with the awareness that their job is to render themselves unnecessary.

by zelos

3/9/2026 at 3:41:36 PM

> the same jokes and characters played out by people well into their 50s in a painfully way too HD recreated set

Not having watched the reboot yet, what are your thoughts?

I'm not sure I understood this criticism since it will be filmed in HD this time... is it that the sets mimic, but imperfectly and look wrong now?

I've also definitely wondered how it works with the actors. When I saw the trailer, my first thought was that Zach Braff looked old -- not in the age sense, but his haircut and clothes were simply... ones that didn't suit him.

by vintagedave

3/9/2026 at 9:28:39 AM

> in a painfully way too HD recreated set.

That does make me wonder if anyone has started shooting in SD again to make things look "nostalgic". The only ones I'm aware of are some art films that used super 8 for that effect.

by RobotToaster

3/9/2026 at 11:40:53 AM

I make a point of downloading sitcoms in SD, creating my own DVD rips if needed. There's something wrong about watching Seinfeld or Friends in 1080p.

by kennyadam

3/9/2026 at 10:31:54 AM

Gaming ages. Not sure why you are under the impression it does not. For example, what was seen as innovative controls at one point in time becomes really clunky 20 years later

by ekianjo

3/9/2026 at 6:34:07 AM

I've always been fascinated by nostalgia. It is such universal source of both positive and negative feelings for people. If anyone has any books or other media about nostalgia I'd love to hear about it.

Today's Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox (blegh) will be tomorrow's nostalgia. I just don't know if there will be cheap hardware available for future adults to experience it though. Plus it seems that pop culture is so much more fragmented now thanks to social media, so it's harder to capitalize on a single IP to milk later on.

by ares623

3/9/2026 at 7:31:26 AM

Minecraft is already nostalgia. It reminds me of starting university 16 years ago.

by ncphillips

3/9/2026 at 8:29:02 AM

Minecraft to me is similar to unreal tournament (I forget which version) as well as computer hardware from ~2015 onwards. It happened after some sort of critical point of technological development had passed such that it doesn't feel old to me unless I examine it immediately adjacent to something modern.

I suppose that will change for the games if truly high fidelity head mounted displays ever take off. For the hardware I'm less certain because aside from pointlessly bloated web frontends nothing that I do on a day to day basis actually consumes more resources than it did in 2015. Perhaps local AI on low power devices will be the critical point for me there?

by fc417fc802

3/9/2026 at 3:57:00 PM

> I've always been fascinated by nostalgia. It is such universal source of both positive and negative feelings for people.

I read somewhere that nostalgia is just bitterness towards the present. It's an emotional trap and best not to linger in nostalgia too long. Change is inevitable, we can't go backwards.

by lordfrito

3/9/2026 at 7:30:31 AM

I really liked the article shared here about 3 years ago: https://ravenmagazine.org/magazine/the-paradoxes-of-nostalgi...

Discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36465528

by whilenot-dev

3/9/2026 at 9:14:56 AM

>If anyone has any books or other media about nostalgia I'd love to hear about it.

Mark Fisher/K-punk on hauntology.

by bondarchuk

3/9/2026 at 6:46:30 AM

The vast majority of our media, most of our culture, has been created by artist / writer types, you know; kinda shallow, superficial, not particularly intelligent, not very well educated people, with nothing to say aside from meaningless platitudes like "all you need is love"

I guess that's normal? I dunno, I dont have any further conclusions. Maybe we should be concerned about it?

by everyone

3/9/2026 at 9:56:48 AM

"the vast majority of our media and culture has been created by media and culture specialists" - well yes obviously, just as our technology has been created by technology specialists.

by pjc50

3/9/2026 at 7:06:55 AM

someone definitely could've used a bit more love in their childhood

by ares623

3/9/2026 at 7:10:22 AM

Yes, everyone. The username makes it clear. Really though, the supreme arrogance of calling the whole of an entirely different industry mediocre is practically indicative of our craft at this point.

by CSSer

3/9/2026 at 8:47:30 AM

I think that dismissal culture makes no sense when it is aimed towards artists.

For me it is kind of hard to like the things I produce, because of the obvious egocentrism bias. Do I like it, because I like it, or do I like it, because I made it and had to sacrifice something for it?

When I'm judging other people's work and I like it, I consider that feeling to be more genuine, even if the creator outright panders to my preferences.

by imtringued

3/9/2026 at 10:33:27 AM

Majority of industry is mediocre. It’s in the definition of the word, ffs.

by wiseowise

3/9/2026 at 8:02:43 AM

I can't read the article because of the paywall (signup-wall?), but I can think of at least one (more?) reason for this state of affairs: in animation, at least some of the films still have original ideas. Whereas live-action movies designed with mass appeal in mind are mostly continuations or reboots of long-established (and tired) franchises (MCU/DC Comics, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Mission Impossible, Jurassic Park etc. etc.), or adaptations of video games, musicals or (if you're lucky) books.

by rob74

3/9/2026 at 11:04:59 AM

I knew, sort of tangentially, a guy who wrote scripts for a living. He would write a script, then sell it to a studio. Usually it would just sit on the proverbial shelf and never get made into a movie.

But a couple times they actually optioned something he wrote. What followed was a rewrite process involving no less than six other authors that were tasked with adding things the studio wanted into his script. No love story? Well, we'll just have to shoe-horn that in, because otherwise the women might not see it. Anything offensive to a major market, particularly China? That gets ripped out. Does it have merchandising? If not, we'll add characters, or robots, or whatever so we can sell toys and video games.

Etc, etc. The script that actually gets made bears no resemblance to his original work, and more importantly, they turned his original scripts into Generic Hollywood Movies that were virtually indistinguishable from the others.

The real problem here is for a couple decades nearly every well financed movie made money. So the studios analyzed just what a successful movie needs to have and created an assembly line to produce them. After awhile audiences were bound to look elsewhere for something new.

by laughing_man

3/9/2026 at 12:11:30 PM

If you really want what you wrote to make it to the screen in a recognizable form, I guess it has a better chance if you publish it as a novel first and hope it has some success and gets made into a film...

by rob74

3/9/2026 at 8:11:58 AM

I don't know which cinemas you frequent, but the movie world is much richer than the n-th instance of a MCU film or Star Wars. Of the 20 or so movies I watch on big screen every year, only 2 or 3 are of that type.

by teiferer

3/9/2026 at 8:28:01 AM

That's why I wrote "movies designed with mass appeal in mind" - there are luckily still independent movies, but those rarely can compete with the movies I mentioned at the box office.

by rob74

3/9/2026 at 8:09:39 AM

I notice I’m a huge hypocrite in this area. I always complain to people that there are too many remakes but then given a line up of movies in theatres, I end up begrudging paying for the remake.

Sometimes due to peer pressure of the group I’m with, sometimes due to the fact that they’re guaranteed to be an okay time.

The most recent non remake I watched was hamnet, and basically the whole thing went over my head.

by czhu12

3/9/2026 at 8:36:09 AM

Sure - it's called a "guilty pleasure" (if the movie actually turns out to be enjoyable). The last franchise continuation I truly enjoyed watching was Indiana Jones 5, mostly out of nostalgic reasons. And before that, I sat through all three of the "third trilogy" Star Wars movies, increasingly thinking "what am I doing here?! This is exactly the same plot as the first three movies, just with more CGI and a more diverse cast?!".

by rob74

3/9/2026 at 9:41:32 AM

> This is exactly the same plot as the first three movies

Well I hoped with each one there would be a different plot.

The only thing essentially different is the Reylo plot which is kinda spread between the three movies. It makes for like half of an original movie.

by bananaflag

3/9/2026 at 8:29:50 AM

I just watched "Good luck, Have fun, Don't die" and I'll put it up as an example of an original story. Definitely of the gestalt, but original.

by Intermernet

3/9/2026 at 9:59:05 AM

If I wanted to start an argument, I'd say that any movie where more than 50% of the frames are more than 50% CGI should be counted as "animation". Which covers most of those franchises.

by pjc50

3/9/2026 at 10:32:19 AM

Saying CGI is animation is a bit like saying a photo printer prints paintings, because the latter uses pigments (just like painters!).

by erichocean

3/9/2026 at 1:38:37 PM

[dead]

by aaron695