o the 2001-2002 television season lurches to its feet and begins to walk—belatedly, given the horrors of September, but successfully, at least to this viewer and practitioner. I find myself scrambling to keep up with Smallville and Enterprise as well as old favorites like Buffy and Farscape. Those are just the sci-fi and fantasy series; I'm going crazy trying to keep up with non-genre comedies and dramas, too. (Someday I plan to discover just when, exactly, my available television viewing time shrank to 90 minutes per evening.)
As a writer, I'm also finding myself overwhelmed, this time by new opportunities in an old field: sci-fi television animation. Well, when I say old, I'm only speaking chronologically. For the first 30 years of network television (1950 to around 1980), filmed sci-fi was limited to the occasional series we all remember (Twilight Zone, Star Trek) and a few we'd rather forget. Good or bad, sci-fi and fantasy represented few hours compared to the hours devoted to cop shows, soaps and comedies set in the real world and produced on film in what we laughingly call "live action."
TV animation has always had a much higher percentage of sci-fi and fantasy. In fact, back in the days when I was a network programmer, I did a little study of my own, and realized that about 80 percent of Saturday morning and after-school animated programming could be classed as sci-fi or fantasy. And if you threw in The Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner Hour (remember Marvin the Martian?), it was even higher.
Animated sci-fi has a brief, but honorable history in prime time: we all remember The Jetsons, and I have a personal fondness for Jonny Quest. More recently we have The Simpsons, which is sci-fi, horror or fantasy whenever it wants to be, and Futurama, which is that rarest of things—funny sci-fi. There's no mystery as to why animation is often, or even usually, sci-fi or fantasy. The medium allows you to create new worlds, unbound by the real-world constraints of set construction, location and money. (It doesn't cost you any more to have an artist draw a fantastical background rather than, say, downtown Chicago.)
This, of course, was in the days when animation was a physical process in which artists painted backgrounds and other artists drew characters which could be photographed moving against those backgrounds, often several times a second (with the exception of certain cheap TV series I won't name here, where the characters moved once every two seconds).
Erasing the live-action line
The computer revolution changed all this. While animation still relies on artists—people who, unlike me, can actually draw—for character and background design, much of the grunt work of animating is now performed by software and silicon chips. And while you still need certain artistic skills, the process can be incredibly cheap and easy: I know one promising young producer-writer-animator who did a whole 10-minute presentation of his concept over several afternoons spent lounging in a Starbuck's.
Live-action sci-fi series have benefited. Look at Enterprise compared to the original Star Trek, or even compare it to the very expensive and effects-heavy (for its day) Battlestar Galactica. Enterprise, of course, is as expensive as any network live-action
drama.
But the right approach to CGI (it doesn't have to be feature-film quality; they're only going to see it on a small TV screen) can be a tremendous asset to a producer. One of the reasons Babylon 5 was even possible was that the video toaster gave the show tens of thousands of dollars of graphics at a fraction of the traditional cost. And this was several CGI generations back.
CGI has transformed traditional filmmaking to the point where the line between "live action" and animation no longer exists. The live-action (if fanciful) Forrest Gump would not have been the same movie without CGI. In fact, I can hardly think of a recent feature film that doesn't use the process somewhere. Well, maybe Legally Blonde.
The artificiality of animation—the look that tells you it's a cartoon, even a very realistic cartoon—is gone, too. The end product of this evolution is a project like Final Fantasy, where CGI is ostensibly used to create settings, action and characters that appear to be "real."
How could any sci-fi writer pass up a chance like this?
Well, here's why.
Writers must change or disappear
Traditionally, animation is not a writer's medium. As recently as 20 years ago, it was the storyboard artist who was considered to be the primary creative force in the field. (What were the famous "nine old men" of classic Disney features? Artists.) Animation writers are still struggling for Writers Guild of America representation. An awards recommendation for the Nebula award of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America was made out to "whoever the heck wrote" Disney's Atlantis. (For the record, the screenplay was credited to Tad Murphy, with story credit shared by Gary Truesdale and Kirk Wise, Joss Whedon, Bryce and Jackie Zabel and Murphy himself. See what I mean?)
Part of this is due to the general perception in the business, and the audience, too, that animated programming is kid stuff. Much of it has been, and will be. Much of that will undoubtedly be unambitious. (Well do I remember a famous TV animation producer who justified the lameness of his product with the immortal words "To a six-year-old, there's no such thing as an old joke.")
Perhaps this mindset—that what you're producing doesn't have to meet a high standard of characterization and storytelling—explains the otherwise inexplicably bad scripts for such highly visible animated projects as Titan A.E. and Final Fantasy.
The money is not the same, either.
On the other hand—
Until about 1930, writing for movies was nothing but storytelling, structuring a scenario that would be photographed. The resulting film would then be enhanced by "cards" containing a few helpful words of dialogue or description.
Then movies began to talk. Studios went looking for playwrights as opposed to scenario writers. Those who couldn't adapt to the new technology disappeared.
The brave new world of CGI and animated filmmaking feels similar, making me a scenario specialist looking at this newfangled technology with suspicion and doubt. I ask myself if I have the time and energy to learn something new. Then I look around me and see Monsters, Inc. and Harry Potter approaching, and Lord of the Rings. None of those films would have been possible without CGI. (If you doubt me, look up the animated version of Lord of the Rings.)
How could I pass up a chance to be part of this revolution, especially in bringing it to television?
After all, I'm a sci-fi guy. I live for the future.
Animation, here I come.
Michael Cassutt is currently developing animated projects for Nickelodeon, Sony and MTV, and is writing a live action script for Fox.
