What's With All the Horror Cartoons?

If you're a fan of animated films, you might have noticed that we're in the middle of a glut of horror-themed cartoons. Laika's "ParaNorman" arrived last month, Sony Pictures Animation's "Hotel Transylvania" came out this past weekend, and Tim Burton's "Frankenweenie," based on his 1984 live action short, is due in theaters tomorrow. Of course, this could all be a coincidence. Looking at the producing studios' prior output, Laika's last film, "Coraline," was horror-themed, and all of Tim Burton's animated work has had more than a tinge of the macabre. "Hotel Transylvania," which is really more comedy than horror, spent years in development hell before finally emerging as a finished film, and no one could have predicted it would be at the same time as the other two. And it makes sense for all these projects to be released close to Halloween to take advantage of the spooky holiday spirit.

But still, it's a heck of a coincidence. We've had a "Monsters vs. Aliens" here and an "Igor" there, but rarely more than one or two animated horror titles a year, and usually spaced well apart. I have a couple of theories, one of which is that more than one creative genius decided to try their own spin on a kid-friendly horror cartoon, as it's a promising little genre with plenty of material waiting to be explored. There are so many animated films being released now, and it can be a struggle to make any single picture stand out from the crowd. There's definitely an increasingly famiiar pastel-hued, children's picture book aesthetic that a lot of recent CGI films have adopted. Horror films are a license to get away from that, with a more extreme color palette and wilder designs. It's no surprise that "ParaNorman," "Hotel Transylvania," and "Frankenweenie" are all very visually distinct, tell completely different stories, and are difficult to confuse.

Or maybe it's something a little deeper than that. The American feature animation industry has blossomed in recent years, and we have multiple studios that are thriving financially. The competition among the major players, including PIXAR, Dreamworks, Blue Sky, Sony, Disney, and Illumination, has really heated up, and we keep seeing the bar for quality pushed higher and higher. PIXAR landed two Best Picture nominations at the Oscars in 2010 for "Up" and 2011 for "Toy Story 3," which were lauded for being more thematically serious and challenging. And yet, American animated features have always been limited to very family-friendly, mainstream pictures. We saw some experimentation with more adult ideas for a while, when animators were still seeing what CGI was capable of. This lead to some interesting features like the dystopian "9" and action-adventure "Beowulf," but none of these did particularly well. However, foreign animated films for grown-ups have had more success, and we're regularly seeing gems like "Persepolis," "Waltz for Bashir,” and "Chico & Rita" in the art houses.

Animation fans have often traded theories about how to make Americans more accepting of more adult animation, which would allow for a wider range of stories. However, the conception of animation being children's media is so deeply ingrained, I think any change in attitude is going to be incremental over a long period of time. So how do you push at the boundaries and do something challenging if you don't have PIXAR level talent, and you want to stay kid-friendly enough to attract a paying audience? You make something scary. You create something that parents have to think twice about bringing the littler kids to see, because the warnings are implicit in the choice of material. If you're a smaller studio like Laika, you make "Coraline," a stop-motion horror film that was genuinely frightening. Horror is one of those few genres that can straddle the line between kid-safe and truly adult, that can tap into some very dark themes while still maintaining a friendly exterior. "Coraline" has lots of great visual spectacle, but it also features a sinister doppelganger of the young heroine's mother, who lures the girl into a fantasy world full of disturbing doubles of people from her real life. And when "Coraline" does well, you follow it up with the ghosts and zombies of "Paranorman."

In 1993, Disney took a major gamble backing "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas," which has become a cult classic and probably the defining Halloween-themed animated film of this generation. All the other horror cartoons that followed since owe "Nightmare" a major debt. It's fitting that Burton's back with "Frankenweenie," which looks to be another very risky film. It's a monochromatic homage to older horror flicks that its target audience probably won't be familiar with. But then again, who can resist a new spin on the classic boy and his dog story? As we go into opening weekend, the box office forecasters are predicting that "Frankenweenie" is going to get crushed by "Taken 2" and the much more accessible "Hotel Transylvania," but there's a lot be said for he fact that the "Frankenweenie" feature actually got made. And there's always the chance that like "Nightmare," it'll find its audience over time, because it's been established that the audience for these slightly older-skewing films does exist.

I doubt that there are many people who want to see all three of the latest animated horror films in such quick succession, but there are clearly a lot of people who are game for one or two of them. And that's enough.
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