Can You Reboot an Animated Film?

Animated films are back on top at the box office. "The Croods" and "Monsters University" have cracked the top ten for the year so far, and "Despicable Me 2" is expected to join them soon. Quite a few of this year's offerings are franchise films, proportionally more than you tend to see in most other genres. It's easy to see why. Animated films are among the most costly and risky to produce. Since franchises have become the norm, we've seen plenty of animated sequels, prequels, midquels, and spinoffs. However, I've noticed that one trick that animation studios can't seem to pull off is an "Amazing Spider-man" style reboot.

"Shrek," for instance, has been a solid performer for Dreamworks since the first film in 2001, spawning three sequels, a spin-off, a couple of television specials, related shorts, theme park attractions, a musical, and loads of merchandising and tie-ins. It bears a lot of the responsibility for what the current landscape of animated CGI films looks like. However, since "Shrek Forever After" in 2010, nobody has been talking about continuing the "Shrek" movies. A "Puss in Boots" sequel is still technically in development, but that seems increasingly unlikely as time goes on. Dreamworks has its schedule for animated films mapped out until the end of 2016, and there's no sign of anything Shrek-related. The franchise, by all indications, seems to have run its course for the time being. But in a couple of years, wouldn't it make sense from a business perspective to reboot "Shrek" from the beginning?

We know you can reboot animated characters, particularly the older ones. There's still a steady stream of family movies made to star CGI updates of characters who were introduced in 2D traditional animation. There's a "Smurfs" sequel coming this summer, and "Peabody and Mr. Sherman" will arrive in digital form next year. The old Disney and Warners stars like Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny have been brought back endless times in all kinds of different projects, to try and keep them in the public consciousness. Bugs and friends currently star in "The Looney Tunes Show," running on Cartoon Network since 2011. Mickey Mouse is appearing in a new series of shorts and a titular cartoon series this year, aimed at returning him to his old anarchic, slapstick roots. All these new versions have been accompanied by redesigns, reinterpretations, changes in medium, and changes in technology, but they're still unmistakably supposed to be the same characters we knew decades ago.

And yet, animated features have almost never been rebooted. Disney is pushing ahead on a live action "Cinderella" and its second live action "Jungle Book" rather than of going back to the literal drawing boards. There's no reason why they couldn't make animated reboots of their most famous movie properties to reflect more modern tastes. I'm sure many of them would be very successful. On the other hand, there's something timeless about animation that means these films have a remarkable longevity that the superhero movies and the horror movies don't. Old television shows and the old theatrical shorts are more inaccessible and tend to expire more quickly, but animated movies can stay in circulation indefinitely. Multiple generations grew up on the Disney classics and their images are still responsible for selling tons of merchandise each year. Today's kids may not watch the old "Smurfs" cartoons or Daffy Duck shorts, but they're still watching "Peter Pan" and "The Jungle Book." So I suspect that if Dreamworks ever made a new, rebooted "Shrek," starting all the way back at the start of his story, it would end up competing with the old one for people's attention.

Also, I don't think that reboots of animated characters work as well as live action ones fundamentally. Franchises have so much draw because they offer familiarity. If you go to a Superman movie, you know to expect a superhero who can fly and has super strength and disguises himself as an ordinary person. If you go to a Sherlock Holmes movie, you get a detective story set in Victorian London. The details can be different, and the actors involved can give their own takes on the main characters without feeling off. Also, I think we understand that actors age, so there's no way to make a new James Bond movie starring Sean Connery, or take more trips to Oz with Judy Garland.

However, there's something so iconic about an animated character, there's much less room in our minds to allow for major variations, and cartoon characters are effectively immortal. Talented artists can keep churning out "Simpsons" episodes for twenty-five years, never changing any of the designs. As long as the original versions of the characters remain successful and familiar and relevant to the younger generation, there's nothing to be gained by starting over from the beginning. "Alvin and the Chipmunks" may have been a hit with kids, but I think that's only because the franchise was all but dead by the time of the reboot. To us old school "Alvin" fans, the CGI chipmunks still look very odd.

I expect "Shrek" will return at some point in the future, once the memory of the current films has faded a bit and Dreamworks has figured out a way to bring him back in a different format. There are still plenty of non-film options - more spinoffs, television series, direct to video sequels, video games, crossover projects, web content, and more. 3D IMAX re-releases are also a very real possibility. Any new Shrek movie, however, is either going to be another sequel or prequel for the foreseeable future. If a reboot happens, it'll be far off in the future, when the current version of the grumpy green ogre has become a nostalgic relic. And that day may never come at all.
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