Hating on Cal Arts Style is the New Dogwhistle
>It has always been trendy to hate on what is popular, and especially what is popular with young female audiences. When a certain animation style becomes the norm, for example, that animation style may begin to see harsh criticism for no other reason than it is “mainstream” and therefore “boring.”
>Recently, there has been a trend of hating on an aesthetic known as “Cal Arts Style.”These are usually animated movies with racially and culturally diverse characters that promote tolerance and inclusivity.
>Pixar’s Coco (2017), Soul (2020), Luca (2021) and the upcoming release of Turning Red (2022) are favourite targets for this particular crowd.
>The term “Cal Arts Style” was coined in the 2010 by animator John Kricfalusi in order to mock the animation style allegedly being taught at the California Institute of the Arts — aka “Cal Arts” — on his blog.
>The original definition was that of an art style “derived from late 1950s to 1970s Disney Movies — and Don Bluth — who emulates 1960s Disney movies” being taught to students at Cal Arts.
>Kricfalusi criticized Cal Arts Style for being repetitive, lazy, and copy-paste, using all the same line art — especially eyes, hands, and mouths — across several different animated feature films.
>The original blog post was concerned almost entirely with “recycled” line art in a particular hand-drawn style. Since the 2010s, the definition of “Cal Arts Style” has become far less concrete.
>For several years it was used (primarily on Tumblr) to describe the “bean head” style of popular cartoons including Adventure Time, Steven Universe, and Gravity Falls, none of which use directly “recycled” frames in the same way that Disney was often guilty of during their celluloid era. Instead, they use generic shapes in character design that make the art style simplified and easily reproducible.
>Cal Arts Style” is a controversial term in the animation world because it is — rather lazily — used almost exclusively to refer to whatever style is currently trending in the industry. According to Kelsey McCarthy writing for Redbubble, calling animation “Cal Arts Style” has become a “somewhat derogatory” shorthand for being a “lazy artist,” since animation using generic, rounded shapes can be “easily copied” and therefore are “thought of as being unoriginal.”
>Because the benchmark for what “counts” as Cal Arts Style is constantly changing, the term has essentially become meaningless in actual discussions of animation.
>If it was used to exclusively refer to the thin-line, bean-headed style of shows like Steven Universe, it would at least have a purpose outside of being a rather rude way to call and artist’s style lazy or unoriginal.
>Instead, it has become a “catch-all” for animation deemed too simplistic, stylized, or “cartoony,” and therefore adds nothing to animation discourse.
>The four films I presented at the start of this article look nothing like Steven Universe —and they can’t, because 3-D animation requires a significantly different skill set than line art and is, well, not flat. Pixar’s 3-D movies have fantastic texture, shading, consistency, and variability, all things lacking in what was previously called “Cal Arts Style.”
>Calling movies like Soul and Luca “Cal Artsy” only makes sense if the term has become a shorthand for something else either simply “being mainstream,” or something much more insidious, like racism.
>The argument that animation has devolved into a “lazy” game of cut-and-paste is flat out wrong, and deliberately disingenuous.
>If we go back to the example of the “bean head” style I showed above versus the official character renders in the same pose, it is obvious that the similarities between character designs across cartoon IPs has been greatly exaggerated:
>Calling art “Cal Arts Style” is mostly just a smokescreen used to attack anything cute, bright, colorful, round, or just not hyper-masculine. You know, the sort of things that young women are often drawn to.
>Anything even remotely cute, feminine, progressive, inclusive, or “SJW-y” (whatever that means) has been co-opted into this conversation of “Cal Arts Style,” when such a thing…
>doesn’t really exist? Many artists and animators who have never stepped foot in California, let alone at the California Institute of the Arts, have adopted a digital line art that is reflective of current trends in children’s cartoons, but each IP is, in fact, visually distinct and the artists involved worked incredibly hard on them.
>The same goes for recent 3-D animated films: trends in visual style do not mean artists are getting “lazy”! Granted, those who have been making pronouncements about Pixar’s recent lineup are in the vocal minority, and their tweets —>including @Bolverk15’s criticism of Turning Red — are often ratio’d, gaining far more comments than likes. Those comments demonstrate that for most viewers,
>not only is there nothing wrong with Pixar’s animation, but the fact that their last several stand-alone films have been racially and culturally diverse is appealing, rather than a drawback.
>In Soul (2020), a uniquely African American experience of music, specifically jazz — which has a rich tradition in Harlem that spans back to ragtime, blues, and the call-and-response style of work song developed by enslaved people in antebellum America is showcased.
>A vibrant array of Black characters populate the New York City of Soul, rather than the white-washed NYC we’re used to seeing on shows like Friends and Sex and the City.
>In Luca (2021), two young sea monsters try to blend in among humans in a small Italian town circa 1960. The central theme of the movie is about accepting bodily difference not everyone’s body looks the same, but that doesn’t meant they aren’t valuable members of the community.
>One of the main characters is a fisherman with a limb difference (he is missing one arm) whose acceptance of the boys is the first step in the town’s reckoning with its xenophobic treatment of their semi-aquatic neighbours.
>In Turning Read (2022), a Chinese-Canadian tween must learn how to control a confusing change in her body: when experiencing intense emotions, she turns into a giant red panda!
>As an allegory for reaching menarche, Turning Red will break significant new ground when it come to depicting puberty in a Pixar film, as well as having a diverse set of primary and secondary characters.
>What do these films all have in common? They share a visual identity and aesthetic with one another and Pixar’s other films a style of big, round heads, empty mouths with blocky teeth, soft edges, geometric shapes, bold colour palettes, and realistic textures.
>They also teach our children how to be empathetic; to see other cultures as beautiful; to live a day in someone else’s shoes; to fight for their passions and pursue their dreams; to see others as complex, unique human beings; and to see beyond the markers of race, culture, gender, and disability to the values we share and the communities we can build together.
>Turning Red, the latest in a series of films with a culturally diverse cast of characters, has been subjected to horrendous reviews.
>It is also first Pixar movie directed entirely by a woman, Domee Shi, and features the first-ever fully female leadership team, from producer Lindsey Collins through the art and story departments.
>As it turns out, “animation bros” don’t take too kindly to women and racial minorities “invading” an industry that has been predominantly white and male since the 1930s.
>Just as there were protests about the all-female reboot of Ghostbusters before the movie was even finished, so too has there been an outcry about the number of recent movies highlighting nonwhite experiences. Representation have very frequently been drowned out by the screeching of the anti-Woke crowd who decided the movie was bad without ever watching it.
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