AFI's 10 Top 10: Animation
The animation top ten was the first list and it got the evening off to a shaky start. The problems with this list run much deeper than its rather uninspired roster of, almost exclusively, Disney “classics”.
Most fundamentally, animation is not a genre; it's a medium. However, it is also the case that in Hollywood, animation verges on being a genre, but the American animation genre of the 20th century is not the same as the genre in the 21st century except insofar as animation is treated as a medium for children's, or “family”, films. In the 20th century, as ably shown by the list, animation was more or less the new medium for musicals. In this millenium, music remains an important part of animated films, but they are less often actual musicals. They are, however, characterized by hyperreal computer animation and dialogue rich with “clever” asides and pop culture references. Does that make a genre? Maybe, but not one that has much in common with the prior century.
The larger point is that in other parts of the world, and outside of the American corporate mainstream, animation is used to tell all kinds of stories, including those directed at adults. Even if one were to be biased towards older films in this “genre”, shouldn't there have been room for at least one film by someone like Ralph Bakshi? I don't know about anyone else, but seeing Wizards (1977) was, politically and aesthetically, an earth shattering experience for my eight or nine or ten year-old self, more profound, I would say than the original Star Wars. And certainly American Pop (1981) is enough of a cultural document, and marker for the form, to have been seriously considered for inclusion on the AFI's Top 10. I would also have looked to include one of Richard Linklater's forays into animation on the list (indeed, either Waking Life, 2001, or A Scanner Darkly, 2006, would have been nice companions to American Pop).
But, staying within the scope of children's or family films, the lack of either of Brad Bird's eligible films, The Iron Giant (1999) and The Incredibles (2004), seems like a critical oversight, and perhaps reflective of the fact that many of the voters were, undoubtedly, simply mining their own childhoods when making their selections.
(I'm not going to suggest specific alternate selections here because, as indicated above, I think that this list is inherently misconceived, and because I think most of the selections on the AFI list are more or less interchangeable in any event).
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