Animated movies have played an important role in my life. When I look back on my childhood, animated movies are the soundtrack to some of my warmest memories. My sociology professor would gently suggest it was the mass marketing, but I never thought of toys and fast food when my sister and I took the VHS tapes to my grandma’s house, or spent afternoons watching old Mickey and Pluto cartoons on the Disney Channel. We just liked the improbable little world where a mouse owned a dog, and that dog had a bump on his head just like ours did.

I’m not alone in this. Animated movies have played as crucial and defining a role in our lives as our favorite childhood books, pets, teddy bears, and days in grade school. It’s not a phenomenon of the 1980s or 1990s, though they certainly exploded into childhood consciousness then more loudly and messily than they had before. But ask your grandparents, aunts and uncles, or parents about memorable experiences (cinematic or otherwise), and they’ll undoubtedly tell you about the special day they saw The Jungle Book or 101 Dalmatians. It has nothing to do with life lessons, merchandise, or growing up with a desire to draw. They’re just good memories, made better by the warmth and safety of an animated classic. They painted magical worlds that were all the more amazing for being sketched out on paper.

But animation — as we knew it — is dying out. We’ve had a good 90 odd years of it (I’m drawing the starting line at Gertie the Dinosaur, the obvious precursor to our love of Totoro and Mickey) and I don’t think we’ll ever lose classic hand-drawn animation. But it’s going to become a novelty, like black-and-white film, an artistic choice for some radical director who wants to make a flamboyant and expensive statement.

Now, don’t think I’m some old eccentric who disdains Pixar and DreamWorks as “lesser animation” because it’s CG. It’s still animation, and it’s beautiful and memorable. Wall-E and Finding Nemo are no less wonderful than Snow White; Toothless is every bit as delightful a character as Thumper. It takes just as long to do, and its creators have to be just as dedicated. But with the upcoming Rango (a film that used motion capture to give life to its characters, and prides itself on the realistic scales of their skin), we’re seeing the future of animation — one where it’s essentially striving to be real life.

Animation was always about a heightened reality. It was about mice, birds, dogs, and ducks doing things that they wouldn’t do in real life. Disney could have made a live action Snow White (and probably will soon enough), but they didn’t want that. Walt Disney believed animation wasn’t to “duplicate real action or things as they actually happen,” but to “picture onscreen things that have run through the imagination of the audience and to bring to life dream fantasies and imaginative fancies.” There’s something about animation (like a comic book or favorite picture book) that absorbs us and our imagination more comfortingly than watching actors. We all pretend to be the star of the film, but animation is fuzzy enough around the edges that we don’t come up against the knowledge that we aren’t the hero or heroine. You don’t see Cinderella or Aladdin in People magazine; they simply exist in the frame of the screen, and can therefore be you.

But Rango is set to shake things up. They’ve not only taken the next step in CG realism, but they used motion capture to give their lizards, frogs, and rattlesnakes more life. That’s awesome from a technological point of view, but from an artistic point of view, I sense the beginning of something sad. With their marketing emphasis on showing Johnny Depp playing Rango, they’ve combined cartoons with People magazine. Animated characters and their human actors will simply become one and the same, erasing all boundaries between animation and live-action, and rendering the genre null and void. CG longs to be taken for weighty reality — see: Avatar, Robert Zemeckis — and it’s a desire that encroaches even into animated film where it has no business being. Bambi with a realistically rendered deer is horror; in thinly sketched watercolor he’s a tender metaphor. Needless to say, only one of those is a film kids can (or even want to) see. Children could end up being nudged out of the demographic.

In 100 years, animated films may be no more, unless animation studios remember Disney’s directive — bringing to live imaginative fancies, not duplicating real action — animation will become just be an arbitrary label that means “made on computer.” We will wonder why we’re watching a wolf that looks exactly like Hugh Jackman have an Arctic adventure when a slight rewrite could just have Jackman play the part as a human. Pluto isn’t memorable because he looks like a real dog and a real actor; he’s loveable because he’s an exaggerated one who is preposterous, but still has the warm eyes and bumpy head of your own pet. Pixar seems to have figured this out early, and has resolutely stuck to a simplistic and “cartoony” style that other animation studios (DreamWorks, Sony) have simply copied. Studio Ghibli is another holdout; they’ve incorporated computer elements, but have largely eschewed heavy CG worlds. It will be interesting to see who goes the Rango route, and who maintains the line of “imaginative fancies.”

Good stories will always have an impact on us and our lives, no matter what format they’re told in. Our small descendants will still thrill to movies, and fuzzy memories will always come of watching them with friends and family. Disney, Don Bluth, Studio Ghibli, and Pixar will still be loved and cherished 100 years from now, and even more so because it will represent a lost art form, an intangible magic, and a sense of safety that CG reality will never have. The reason these animated movies have nurtured us is because they were drawn to be ours. Mickey was our friend, Pluto was our dog. If Jesse Eisenberg became the face of Pluto tomorrow, he would be something else altogether. When technology and reality clash, there can be no animation, and I suspect the genre will be a cherished chunk of nostalgia as time goes on.

Tags: animation, avatar, rango