Animated Movies: More eye candy than feature film it seems.

Would you look at that! The LA Times agrees with me! http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-fi-ct-animation-20130820,0,2186903,full.story

Despite my opinion that we're being overloaded with an increasingly narrowing spectrum of animated movies, it's fact that since Toy Story was brought to the silver screen, we've witnessed an industry expansion that's near rivaled that of live action films themselves. What exactly shows this though?

-75. 75 animated movies have been released since 2008, and there's another 13 yet to come from now. Think about this: In a full year of films, you'll usually only have about 10-12 at most really catch your eye. Imagine the influence 75 animated films is gonna have on that, or 15 per year for the correct perspective (maybe 8-10 that are really advertised well).

-Animated films are making box office numbers that many live action films can't touch. Insane. Now I'm not saying this shouldn't be happening, but to live in a time where movies like Monster's University and Despicable Me 2 can compete in the box office with something like Les Miserables? It's pretty shocking.

-The sheer concentration of animated movies being put out in one season is believed to be a major reason why movies like Rise of  the Guardians and Turbo performed much less than satisfactory for Dreamworks.

Like I said before, I think the film companies like Dreamworks are going too heavy into animated film production. Nearly to the point where they're practically a dollar a dozen. When you have a major success like Shrek (which has now been milked dry by excessive sequels), and How to Train Your Dragon, the first course of action should be to dial it back and get into deep planning once again. You can't assume your next film will be great just because the prior was. You need to treat them individually. This leads me to my next opinion.

Animated films are still films. We go to the movies primarily to see something entertaining, be it through a good story, well developed characters, and impressive cast performances, (and yes, even mostly the festival of special effects). The deal I feel with the more incoming films is the producers are using the animated aspect for compensation to the rest of the movie. The important cinema elements appear to in many cases take a back seat to emphasis on visuals.

Are movie producers ignoring these issues and continuing on just to gamble on their proposed next big hit? Or are they simply unaware of the connections present?

Either way, I believe there's some rethinking and sorting out to be done. That's my two cents on this. Thanks for reading!
                        Joel Congi - Apparently now some sort of professional media commentator.