Nick Picks | Why Live-Action Versions of Cartoons Are Fortunately Dying Out

Warner Bros. recently announced that they’re making an animated, feature-length Scooby-Doo movie for theaters. Sony is also working on an animated Smurfsmovie, while Blue Sky Studios will be releasing The Peanuts Movie this November. Maybe these adaptations will be good or maybe they’ll be bad. Either way, there’s one thing all three films are doing right upfront: they’re staying loyal to their animated roots.

There was a time when all big screen adaptations of classic cartoons remained in the realm of animation where they belong. Anybody remember A Man Called Flintstone, The Chipmunk Adventure, or any of the four original Charlie Brown movies? They didn’t break new grounds for animation, but they were all fun and true to their source material. None of them were huge moneymakers when they came out, however. So eventually movie studios decided to give these cartoons a makeover by transferring them into live-action.

Robert Altman’s Popeye in 1980 was arguably the first film that tried to bring an animated icon into the real world. It was The Flintstones in 1994 that really got this trend started, though. Everybody saw this adaptation when it came out, but did anybody actually like it? Most people probably remember the advertisements and toys it inspired more than the movie itself. Since The Flintstones was a big hit, though, it motivated studios to keep green lighting live-action remakes.

Over the next two decades, we’d get live-action versions of Scooby-Doo, Garfield, Dudley Do-Right, Fat Albert, Mr. Magoo, Marmaduke, Josie and the Pussycats, The Smurfs, Speed Racer, G.I. Joe, Alvin and the Chipmunks, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, The Cat in the Hat, Richie Rich, Transformers, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Underdog, and Yogi Bear. Even contemporary animated shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender, Dragon Ball Z, and Aeon Flux weren’t safe from the live-action treatment. Aside from being live-action, all of these movies had one thing in common: they all sucked. A couple films were descent enough like Casper and George of the Jungle. Superheroes like Batman and Spider-Man also had crossover appeal between animation and live-action. For the most part, however, live-action adaptations of cartoons were just expected to be horrible.

A lot of these movies failed because you rarely sensed that the filmmakers liked or respected the cartoons they were adapting. They were corporate sellouts driven by the studios and nothing more. What really killed these productions on arrival, however, was the decision to make them live-action. Studios seemed to assume that leaping from animation to live-action would make a movie more cinematic and adult. Rather than upping the ante, though, all of these classic cartoons took major steps backwards.

The benefit of animation is that the medium allows a world to be as hyper and imaginative as possible. In live-action, the world loses much of that freedom. By comparison, the product ultimately feels lifeless. Since most of these adaptations utilized CGI to bring characters like Scooby-Doo and Garfield to life anyway, changing to live-action was completely pointless. If your star’s going to be animated and their environment is going to be cartoony, why not just make the whole movie animated?

Fortunately, live-action versions of cartoons are starting to die out seeing how a fair deal of them underperformed at the box office. Even follow-ups to financially successful adaptations, like The Smurfs 2, Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties, and The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, were duds. That doesn’t mean people aren’t still occasionally drawn to crap. That’s why we’re getting a forth Alvin and the Chipmunks and a fifth Transformers. For the most part, however, even kids today aren’t dumb enough to be fooled twice.

It helps that animation is as profitable and marketable as ever. For the longest time, Disney was the only studio that knew how to make quality animated features people of all ages would pay money to see. Nowadays, we have numerous animation studios that are turning out hit after hit. That’s largely because these movies are made just as much for adults as they are for children. Ironically, now Disney is the studio that’s primarily producing live-action remakes of animated masterpieces. At least they’re balancing things out with new animated classics like Frozen.

In an age of nostalgia, grown-ups are also looking back on their favorite childhood shows. This has prompted studios to invest more in animation and filmmakers to try harder, which will hopefully mean the new Scooby-Doo, Smurfs, and Peanuts movies will actually be worthwhile. The key to successfully adapting anything is to have affection for the source material. Anybody who would give the go ahead to a live-action Cat in the Hat clearly had zero affection for the original TV special or children’s book. They just saw an easy way to make money through an established franchise. With people finally starting to realize that animation is a plus and not a disadvantage, however, at least studios are taking a step back in the right direction.