Nintendo is giving us all a treat.

Flipnote Studio, a free download application for the DSi is currently available (again, for free) from the Nintendo DSi Shop. This application gives users the ability to create quick simple animations, or highly detailed cartoons in a similar fashion to old school notepad flipping.

Utilizing a set of simple (yet extremely useful) tools anyone, and I mean anyone, can create an animation of their own with ease. Amateur animators can then register on Hatena’s website, upload their animations, and even download other users animations and then edit them to their own taste. Flipnote animations may also be shared through the DSi’s local wireless feature as well as saved onto a SD card.

I had a chance to try out Flipnote at Nintendo’s E3 of the North and let me tell you, even with zero artistic ability and little interest in making a cartoon when I could be playing the new Super Mario Brothers Wii, I still had a blast with Flipnote and couldn’t put it down for a good 20 minutes while I finished my animation depicting a worm sliding across the screen.

Flipnote. For the DSi. Available now. Free.

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2006 was hardly what you’d call a good year for animation. Even though 16 animated features were released between the beginning of last January and December 31, only six of them could be considered successful and only half of those were any good. Meta review site Rotten Tomatoes, when it released its annual Golden Tomato awards recently, only gave Cars, the year’s best-reviewed (and in the eyes of this writer, mediocre) release, an adjusted score of 71%, while James Bond redux Casino Royale was awarded best wide release. For three years in a row, animated films (Wallace and Gromit: Curse of Were-Rabbit, The Incredibles, and Finding Nemo) had won the coveted best-reviewed prize.

It’d be nice to think Hollywood can learn a lesson from last year’s glut of CG, but so far we’ve seen Happily N’Ever After, the latest dreck from the Weinstein Company (which was responsible for Hoodwinked and Doogal), and the spiritless Arthur and the Invisibles, from the normally imaginative Luc Besson. Future months will bring Surf’s Up, a film that would like to convince us penguins invented surfing, and a Hollywood-backed, foreign-animated (to save money) CG production of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

And so, in the spirit of both the awards season and the recent holiday season, we here at andPOP decided to put together a list of 12 days of lessons for the animation industry. To have any insight into last year’s crop, of course, one needs to look at the movies released, their budgets (which doesn’t include the $40+ million typically spent on advertising), and what they’ve made (so far):

Hoodwinked (December 16 last year): Budget – $15 million; Gross – $51 million ($100 million worldwide)
Curious George (February 10): Budget – $50 million; Gross – $58 million ($69 million worldwide)
Doogal (February 24): Budget – Not released (probably around $15 – $20 million); Gross – $7 million ($26 million worldwide)
Ice Age – The Meltdown (March 31): Budget – $80 million; Gross – $195 million ($647 million worldwide)
The Wild (April 14): Budget – $80 million; Gross – $37 million ($96 million worldwide)
Over the Hedge (May 19): Budget – Not released (probably around $80 million); Gross – $155 million ($331 million worldwide)
Cars (June 9): Budget – $120 million; Gross – $244 million ($461 million worldwide)
Monster House (July 21): Budget – $75 million; Gross – $73 million ($135 million worldwide)
The Ant Bully (July 28): Budget – $50 million; Gross – $28 million ($54 million worldwide)
Barnyard (August 4): Budget – $51 million; Gross – $72 million ($105 million worldwide)
Everyone’s Hero (September 15): Budget – Not released (probably around $30 million); Gross – $15 million (domestic and worldwide)
Open Season (September 29): Budget – $85 million; Gross – $84 million ($183 million worldwide)
Flushed Away (November 3): Budget – $149 million; Gross – $62 million ($155 million worldwide)
Happy Feet (November 17): Budget – $100 million; Gross (so far) – $186 million ($327 million worldwide)

For the purposes of this story, I didn’t include independent productions like A Scanner Darkly or the French import Renaissance. Now, what can we surmise from this?

1. The audience still exists. The 14 movies combined cost $985 million and grossed $1.267 billion – an average cost of $70 million, and $90.5 million in domestic grosses each. When worldwide grosses are taken into account, the films grossed $2.7 billion, an average of almost $193 million each (with a profit – pre-TV, DVD, and merchandising sales – of $123 million each. Minus advertising, of course). None too shabby, especially when you consider that only four of those movies grossed more than $100 million in North America and only three others were considered legitimate hits. And that most of them suck.

2. They can only stretch so far. Remove those four hits – Cars, Ice Age 2, Over the Hedge, and Happy Feet – and the nine remaining movies grossed only $487 million total domestically and $938 million worldwide, or an average of almost $94 million worldwide each. Which means an average profit of only $24 million, minus advertising. Oops.

3. Let the artists be artists. Sometimes – not always, but sometimes – audiences can recognize crap when they see it. Cars and Happy Feet both had minimal interference between executives and creators (in the case of Pixar, of course, the executives are the creators), and I think this was reflected in their numbers. Flushed Away might have done better had the friction between its studios, Aardman (which produced the movie) and DreamWorks (which financed it) not caused DreamWorks to underadvertise the movie the way they did. The movie might also have cost less than its reported production costs of $150 million (the average DreamWorks movie costs $75 million, and the average Aardman film $30) and its $60 million domestic gross would have placated DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg and co. just fine.

4. The technique doesn’t matter. A couple of years ago studio thinking went like this: everything by Pixar and DreamWorks/PDI (and even material like Nickelodeon’s Jimmy Neutron and The Polar Express) was a hit, therefore it was because of the CG animation. This year many, many pieces of underperforming CG animation were released, and I’m not even talking about the underadvertised Wild or the low-budget Doogal. I’m referring to movies like Open Season, Ant Bully, Monster House, and Flushed Away, and that’s not counting the acknowledged underperformance of both Cars and Over the Hedge. It’s not the animation. Get over it.

5. You don’t have to break the $100 million mark to turn a profit. Two of this year’s hits whose names haven’t been thrown around much are Hoodwinked and Curious George. I can’t vouch for Hoodwinked, but Curious George worked just fine for what it was, and Universal allocated its budget accordingly. Both were aimed at modest audiences and became modest hits. Same goes for Barnyard, actually. You don’t have to break the $100 million barrier before you’ve released a movie.

6. Don’t create product for product’s sake. And here’s the flip side. Audiences – at least, I’d like to give them this credit – can tell when a given movie was born at a marketing meeting. This was the case for Curious George, The Wild, Ant Bully, and Open Season, to name four. Open Season especially had a lot of talented artists working on it (it was directed by Roger Allers, whose best-known work is an obscure 1994 Disney release, The Lion King), as did Ant Bully. And you know what? I think audiences can tell. 90% or more of the artists involved knew they were working on product (a few wrote as such on their blogs). There was no passion. And you can tell in the finished “films.”

7. It’s the story, stupid. Animators have been bemoaning this one for years. The Ant Bully started because an executive at Warners read a kids book and thought it’d be a good movie. Same thing happened with Shrek (proof that if you throw enough crap at the wall, some of it will stick). The Wild was inspired by a painting, Open Season a cartoonist’s idle doodlings. Instead of starting with toys, or random ideas, filmmakers need to start with stories. Most animators know that. Their bankrollers don’t. Maybe this season can help.

8. Sequels can work – if they’re done right. As Ice Age 2 (and live-action releases like Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and Casino Royale) proves, sequels can be among the most financially successful releases for a studio. However, put the same time and effort into the sequel that you put into the first movie. That’s the difference between Toy Story 2 and Shrek 2 and everything Disney’s ever released straight to video.

9. Enough with the talking animals. We get it. Anthropomorphized critters are funny. In case you forgot though, they don’t always have to be the heroes. They rarely were in Disney movies (Lady and the Tramp, Robin Hood, The Fox and the Hound, Oliver and Company and The Lion King were released farther apart than you might think), and they weren’t in Cars, The Polar Express, or The Incredibles. If there’s a reason they’re the main characters, fine – I had nothing against the ants in Antz or A Bug’s Life, and probably wouldn’t if another good idea for an ant movie came along, nor do I object to the heroes of Flushed Away or Happy Feet. But don’t have anthropomorphisized characters just because they’re easier to merchandise. Have them because they’re in service of a good story.

10. Don’t remake something everyone and their children can still remember. The ants in The Ant Bully looked exactly like the ants in Antz. The Wild was basically Madagascar (why Madagascar was such a huge hit is still something I’m trying to figure out). Barnyard was The Lion King. Open Season was several, much more entertaining, Bugs Bunny cartoons. Heck, even Cars was Doc Hollywood, and Over The Hedge followed the blueprint established by every other DreamWorks film to date. Audiences can tell. Not always, but most times, they can. If you want to remake a story that someone did more than twenty years ago (A Bug’s Life was The Magnificent Seven and Antz was any number of Woody Allen movies) go right ahead, but don’t do something that’s still fresh in our minds.

11. Star voices have little to do with it. With a cast of luminaries including Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Paul Giamatti, and Nicholas Cage, Ant Bully had one of the greatest casts of any film this year. Did it show in the box office? Not a penny. Doogal had Jon Stewart. The Wild had Kiefer Sutherland. I doubt Queen Latifah’s addition to the Ice Age cast brought it any more bucks, and I doubt anyone watching Over The Hedge cared that Gary Shandling (who had the largest role) isn’t as big a star as Steve Carell or Bruce Willis. Occasionally films will make big bucks because of a big-name cast (Aladdin, Shark Tale). But at least Aladdin came after The Little Mermaid and Beauty & The Beast, and Shark Tale had an interesting enough concept for Will Smith, Renee Zellweger, Jack Black, Robert De Niro, Martin Scorcese, and Angelina Jolie to be a draw once the audiences’ interest had been engaged.

12. Have a good advertising campaign. This is quite possibly the most important. There’s a difference between spending $40 million to simply create awareness and saturate the market (everyone knew Eragon came out, but nobody wanted to see it) and spending $40 million to actually make people like the movie are two different things. The fact is, the advertising campaign’s one of the most important parts of the film, and it needs to be taken into consideration as early as possible. It’s the difference between the grosses for The Iron Giant and The Incredibles, even though both are of relatively equal quality and share the same director. Flushed Away and Happy Feet both saturated the market with their ads, but Flushed Away didn’t look like anything worth seeing – it was about a rat, it involved a toilet, and the slugs looked annoying. Happy Feet, by contrast, emphasized a cute penguin, Robin Williams, and great dancing. Nothing about overfishing.

There is hope. Producers recently pulled the plug on Cat Tale, another CG release that would have been about a cat, Rover, who grew up in Dogtown and returns to Cat Town to find his roots. 2007 will probably be full of backwash from the recent greenlight-happy days of the industry, but after that things should start to clear up.

And there you have it, 2006’s twelve days of lessons for the animation industry.

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