Huffington Post — How Sony Pictures Animation is reinventing the way that toons are made

Jim Hill

12 years ago

As the staff cuts at DreamWorks Animation and Walt Disney Studios
prove, bigger is no longer thought of as better in Hollywood. The suits
are now angling after a far more efficient business plan. Tinsel Town
2.0, if you will. A place where smaller teams follow shorter production
schedules and work within tighter budgets yet still somehow manage to
deliver top-quality motion pictures.

You know. The way that Sony Pictures Animation has been doing business for the past 10 years.

Oh, sure. Pixar's animated features get all the acclaim while Blue Sky Studios'
movies clean up at the box office. But over in Culver City, SPA has
been consistently turning out strong performing animated features for a
significantly lower price point than anyone else in town. Which — in
the wake of "Hotel Transylvania
's" success last fall (This Genndy Tartakovsky film sold $148.3 million worth of tickets stateside, $198.3 million foreign for a combined worldwide gross of $346.6 million) — has not gone unnoticed in certain corner offices.

Of course, one of the main reasons that SPA is often able to do so
much more with less if that this animation studio grew out of Sony
Pictures Imageworks. And given that the work ethic of a visual effects
house is hardwired into Sony Pictures Animation's DNA, it's no wonder
that these guys have a gift when it comes to delivering top-quality work
on very tight schedules.

And given that all of this got started back in July of 2002 when Sony Pictures Imageworks released its Oscar-winning short, "The ChubbChubbs!,"
it's kind of appropriate that SPA has recently gotten back into the
short animated film game with last year's traditionally animated "Goodnight, Mr. Foot" which Tartakovsky wrote, directed and animated himself and then continuing with the 22 minute-long movie "The Smurfs: The Legend of Smurfy Hollow." Which will have its world premiere in June when this Halloween TV special is screened at Annecy in official competition.

Now some industry watchers might see "The Legend of Smurfy Hollow" as a cold & somewhat calculated bit of brand extension. A way for Sony to cash in on "The Smurfs 2," which is expected to do big office this summer (The original "Smurfs
" was one of the biggest hits of 2011, selling more tickets worldwide than Pixar's "Cars 2" and Blue Sky Studios' "Rio"). But since The Smurfs: The Legend of Smurfy Hollow (in a nod of the old "Smurfs" television series
) will mostly be done in 2D while "The Smurfs 2"
will be a mix of live action and CG, from the Sony Pictures Animation's
point of view, there's more than brand extension to this Halloween TV special. "Smurfy Hollow" also allows the studio to expand its creative palette & production pipeline. It gives SPA different ways to tell stories.

And Sony Pictures Animation is taking the same sort of approach when
it comes to producing sequels to some of its more popular early
releases. When "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" developed such a
strong following after its theatrical release in September 2009, Bob
Osher — the president of the Digital Production division at Sony
Pictures Entertainment — decried that it was time for SPA to revisit
Swallow Falls, the setting of the original "Cloudy" movie.

But where this gets interesting is that Osher — rather than seeing "Cloudy 2
" as a strict cash grab — opted to also view this sequel as an
opportunity to grow SPA's creative team. So the studio had Phil Lord and
Chris Miller, the directors of the original Cloudy with Chance of Meatballs,
meet with Cody Cameron and Kris Pearn, two longtime Sony Animation
Pictures story artists. As the four of them tried to come up with an
exciting, entertaining storyline for this Cloudy follow-up.

Borrowing a page for Pixar's "Toy Story 2" playbook (i.e. John Lasseter and co. used scenes and characters that had been cut out of the original "Toy Story"
as the jumping-off point for that film's sequel), Phil, Chris, Cody and
Kris took some food-imals that had been cut out of the final act of the
first "Cloudy" movie and then made them into the main attraction
of this movie's sequel. And as soon as SPA management heard about the
proposed "Something Big was Leftover" storyline for "Cloudy 2" … Well, Osher and co. not immediately got excited about this creative new direction for "Cloudy" 's sequel, they also decided to let Cody and Kris direct the picture.

It's bold moves like this that are causing a lot of people in feature
animation to keep a closer watch on Sony Pictures Animation these days.
When Bob took up the reigns on the digital side of things and Hannah
Minghella was named as the new president of production for animation
back in March of 2008, these two brought a new energy and focus to the
operation. It was Osher and Minghella who rebooted "The Smurfs"
under the watchful eye of Michael Lynton (who grew up with these little
blue creatures) and Amy Pascal. Hannah was subsequently promoted to
president of production at Columbia Pictures in 2010. Bob and her
successor Michelle Raimo Kouyate are then responsible for recruiting
Genndy to come direct "Hotel Transylvania" which had been stalled in development hell for years before that.

And speaking of "Hotel" (Which SPA is already sequelizing. The
follow-up to this family-friendly vampire movie is due to hit theaters
in late September of 2015), Tartakovsky won't be returning to
Transylvania anytime soon. The Monday after Hotel Transylvania
held its U.S. premiere at The Grove, Genndy and his story team were
already hard at work boarding a big screen comedy-adventure starring
E.C. Segar's Popeye the Sailor Man. Which — if the early buzz on this
3D movie proves to be true — "Popeye" is really going to wow audiences when it sails onto screens on September 26, 2014.

And when you factor in the great work that's being done over at
Universal's Illuminations Entertainment (Their latest CG feature, "Despicable Me 2,"
will be bowing in multiplexes nationwide on July 3rd) and Paramount
Pictures' animation division (where they're currently hard at work on a
sequel to 2004's "The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie
"), Sony
Pictures Animation is now one of a trio of animation studios that are
delivering top quality feature films at a significant lower price point
than Disney, Pixar, Blue Sky Studios and DreamWorks Animation are.

Which — to hear Jeffrey Katzenberg talk (as he was reflecting on how poorly "Rise of the Guardians"
had performed at the box office during DWA's Quarter 4 2012 earnings
conference call) — is an issue that his animation studio is now
attempting to address. By mid-2014, DreamWorks Animation hopes to have
new technology in place that will then lower the production costs of
their new full-length features to $120 million.

Which — to put things in perspective here — will still be $35 million more than SPA spent during the entire eight years that "Hotel Transylvania" was in development.

Which is why — as we enter the era of Tinsel Town 2.0 — you should
expect to see even more financial pruning and production fine-tuning on
the Toon Town side of the operation.