‘Animation is cinema’: Ghibli vs. Spider-Man
Illustration by Killian Goodale-Porter.
Ryan Humphrey, Contributing Writer
“Animation is cinema.” It’s a mantra that has become increasingly popular online, especially after Guillermo del Toro used it when his stop motion adaptation of “Pinocchio” won Best Animated Feature at the 2023 Oscars. The phrase speaks to an important truth that often goes overlooked in Hollywood: Animation isn’t just a genre for kids — it’s a medium capable of producing meaningful art for all ages.
If anyone has the right to say it, it’s del Toro, whose remarkable interpretation of “Pinocchio” reworked the classic moral tale into a story of heroic defiance in fascist Italy. Despite its PG rating, it featured mature themes and beautifully crafted visuals that truly made it deserving of the term “cinema.”
It is harder to justify claiming “Animation is cinema” when referring to something like “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” — though the film’s online fans have gleefully adopted the mantra. In the most literal sense, sugary kids’ movies are part of the medium of cinema, but if being a movie is all it takes for something to receive the label of “cinema,” then it does not seem very useful as a descriptor.
To many, Martin Scorsese became a real-life supervillain when he argued that superhero films are not cinema. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying superhero films — I certainly do — but there is truth in Scorsese’s idea of cinema as an art form capable of introducing you to revelatory and meaningful experiences.
Despite the genuine care behind many of them, mass-produced franchise movies are designed above all else to make a profit, and in their quest to achieve as wide an audience while cutting as many corners as possible, they often lose much of the artistry that would make them worthy of a lofty term like “cinema.”
One notable exception is the apparent frontrunner for Best Animated Feature at this year’s Oscars: “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” the dazzling sequel to a previous winner of the award. Every one of the film’s gorgeously rendered frames bursts with artistry and care, and despite the multiversal scale of the storytelling, the film hones in on the personal, relatable struggles of its characters.
“Across the Spider-Verse” immediately gained a passionate and widespread fanbase, making it undoubtedly the fan-favorite to win the award.
The other frontrunner is Studio Ghibli’s “The Boy and the Heron,” the newest “final film” from Hayao Miyazaki, who seems to love cinema too much to ever retire for good. Beneath its fantastical surface of magical worlds and talking birds, “The Boy and the Heron” is a textured and dense meditation on the life, art and legacy of the man who has arguably done more for animation than anyone else alive.
It isn’t as accessible or easily understood as “Across the Spider-Verse,” and naturally does not have the same immense popularity, but anyone willing to seriously engage with it will almost certainly find something of value to take away.
I always took it for granted that “Across the Spider-Verse” would win Best Animated Feature, but after “The Boy and the Heron” triumphed at the Golden Globes, a terrifying future began to make itself known — a future where Miyazaki’s film wins the Oscar over its fan-favorite competitor and is promptly torn apart by a legion of self-professed fans of animation. I can’t see the future, but this one seems distressingly plausible.
It would not be a bad thing for “Across the Spider-Verse” to win the award over the more mature Ghibli film — both are tremendous artistic accomplishments. It’s a shame, however, that many of the most outspoken proponents of animation only seem to support a very limited selection of animated films — specifically English-language kids’ movies.
“Perfect Blue,” “Fantastic Planet” and “Princess Mononoke” are a few stunning, relatively well-known animated films that never seem to be included in the “animation is cinema” posts — likely due to either their foreign origins or to their often more mature content.
It’s hard to escape the sense that some proponents of “animation is cinema” are actually trying to justify their enjoyment of kids’ movies rather than animation specifically. Animated kids’ movies absolutely have value — Miyazaki’s filmography alone is proof of that — but animation being inseparable from children’s entertainment is a major barrier to it getting the respect it deserves.
“Animation is cinema” shouldn’t just be used as a shield to validate our own viewing habits. It should be an invitation for us to step out of our comfort zones and seek out everything that the medium has to offer. Whether or not “The Boy and the Heron” wins the Oscar over “Across the Spider-Verse,” I hope that both fans of animation and general audiences will give it a shot — although they might be better off watching some of Miyazaki’s earlier work first.
And who knows — maybe we live in the bizarre timeline where “Elemental” beats them both.
