Introduciton
Good evening, fellow adventurers! Blaziker is here for yet another essay based on a recent animated movie, but rather than talking about the highly anticipated Super Mario Bros Movie (which I will do a review on as soon as I watch it), I wanted to put the focus on the animation studio in charge of this movie: Illumination Entertainment.
For more than a decade, Illumination Entertainment has been producing mainstream animated movies for its global audience, and together with DreamWorks is one of the two animation studios owned by Universal. While DreamWorks had produced award-winning films throughout most of its existence, Illumination serves as a more mainstream studio with its line-up of family-friendly films. However, that style had caused a rift in the animation community.
You see, pretty much the majority of the animation community enjoyed hating Illumination Entertainment, to the point that they endured even more hate than another mainstream animation studio, Sony Pictures Animation, even if most of Sony’s animated movies from the early 2010s to 2017 had been worse, to say the least. I, however, did not understand much of the hate towards Illumination (since I treat any animated movie and studio equally and fairly), until I listened to the reasons behind it.
At the same time, there are others defending the existence of Illumination, with some expressing why Illumination’s animated movies are not as bad as cancer, or that the community over blow their hate for various reasons. Even if the hate is simmering down, some still place a lot of doubt onto Illumination and whether they can deliver with The Super Mario Bros Movie.
In this essay, I am going to discuss two reasons the community hates Illumination, two reasons some in the community defends Illumination, and my personal evaluation of this situation. It is an issue worth looking at, given the amount of hype for The Super Mario Bros Movie.
Reason to Hate 1: Playing The “Safe” Game
The first reason behind the hate of Illumination is due to how they often play it “safe” and produce family-friendly, mainstream animated movies. To be fair, if there is one thing I dislike about Illumination, is that they are a one-trick pony, most of the time.
A majority of their movies, whether it is the Despicable Me series, The Secret Life of Pets series and the Sing series, all cater to the family-friendly audience. You have of course Despicable Me about a supervillain and his horde of short, yellow Minions (who of course had their own spin-off series, more about them later), talking pets like in The Secret Life of Pets, or even talking animals who can sing like in the Sing movies. Oh, and don’t forget about their Dr Seuss adaptations with The Lorax and The Grinch.
If you had to keep track, then you notice a pattern when it comes to their movies: Illumination Entertainment’s movies are the masters of the generic. A lot of their movies are admittedly lacking in terms of excitement, often pandering to its intended family audience, which was what ticked off the community in the wrong way. This is especially so in the cutthroat world of feature animation, where studios are encouraged to take bold risks and go for it, especially for Sony Pictures Animation after realising making a sell-out movie with The Emoji Movie did not work (despite being a box office hit, which made the situation even worse), who began changing course and started producing exciting movies that challenged the norm, such as Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and The Mitchells vs the Machines.
As for Illumination, they stuck to their guns and focus on not putting much effort into making their stories more exciting and riskier, often keeping it light. While I do not mind their approach, what I do mind is that the writing quality and style has been similar across almost their entire catalogue of animated movies, which will bore some of the audience. I want some variation at least, but Illumination usually does the same thing over and over again.
The same can be said for the animation. The aesthetics across their movies are similar, especially if you compare some of the character designs in their movies side by side. They all had a similar realism-style design language that can be boring at times, which, if you think about it, there is a reason for that. While Illumination Entertainment is based in the USA and have their own studio there, they also have their France-based Illumination Mac Guff studio (now remaned Illumination Studios Paris) who helped in some of the animation. There is an element of European CG animation put into some of the animation, especially with the two Minions movies, which was why those movies had further divided opinion, especially since a grand majority of European CG animated movies had worse animation, albeit with limited manpower and resources.
Still, when you are an animation studio that does not innovate a lot, this will put to question on whether Illumination is doing the same product repeatedly, and that is a valid question to have. This brings us nicely to the second reason behind the hate, and that correlates with the level of safeness Illumination plays.
Reason to Hate 2: Envy at the Box Office
The second reason behind the hate goes into how Illumination’s movies make bank at the domestic and international box office. Here is the thing, even to this day, animated movies profit well when their intended audience, especially with the family audience, occupies the cinema screenings. Indeed, that is the case for most Illumination movies.
In fact, for two years running in 2021 and last year, the highest grossing animated movie is Sing 2 (at US$408 million) and Minions: The Rise of Gru (at US$939.4 million) respectively. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, Illumination’s movies, such as the first Despicable Me movie (US$543.2 million), the first Minions movie (US$1.16 billion, the highest grossing animated movie of 2015) and the first Secret Life of Pets movie (US$894.3 million) all stormed the box office.
Unsurprisingly, given the level of genericness in Illumination’s movies that I discussed earlier, the animation community was not happy over that despite the lack of uniqueness in Illumination’s movies, they still can make a killing at the box office, to the point that this was the exact reason behind hating the studio.
There is also the “Minions” factor, and that is important as well. Gru’s trusty army of short, yellow and hilarious minions have resulted in sales from Minions merchandise, as well as their very own spin-off movie, and almost every day, do expect someone berating their hatred on the Minions. Yes, Illumination’s movies are often guilty of their merchandise tie-ins with their movies, which was also another money maker for the studio (more on that later).
Hence, when you are an animation studio that can capitalise on the box office success of your movies with additional merchandise and fanfare, it is not surprising that you get a lot of hate because you can earn money, despite your products being catered to the lowest denominator possible.
Now, here is the thing, while Illumination deserved a certain aspect of hate because of the two above reasons, I feel there are reasons to actually support them. Here are two main reasons to support Illumination Entertainment.
Reason to Defend 1: The Masters of Marketing
The first reason people defend Illumination goes into the passion they made into their animated movies, particularly the marketing. A huge issue for animated movies, even the big mainstream ones, is the marketing. More often than not, a good number of animation studios, even Disney when trying to market Lightyear and Strange World last year, struggle to get a good marketing campaign to promote their movie. Not for Illumination, because when it comes to marketing, they might actually a better than Disney at that department.
The major reason behind Illumination’s marketing has to do with the breadth of marketing, because they not only advertise their movies a lot, but the quality of their marketing is impressive. Yes, because Universal owns them, Illumination has a lot of resources to market, but they will make sure that their marketing campaign will convince their audience to come see their movie, unlike pretty much other animation studios struggling to showcase their animated movies’ unique selling point (USP).
A very good example has to be their frequent collaborations with McDonald’s, advertising through both Happy Meals and commercials. This is especially with one of the McDonald’s commercials with the first Sing movie that went viral (as seen above), to say the lease, and might be a leading factor in Sing being the fifth highest grossing animated movie of 2016 (with The Secret Life of Pets, the other Illumination movie that came out in the same year), and given it has similarities to Zootopia, the other animal-based movie besides The Secret Life of Pets, that was impressive.
If you ask me one thing I like about Illumination, it is that they are serious about promoting their work when animation studios and a good amount of distributors (especially with those that do not care much about animation such as Warner Brothers Discovery and Netflix). This is a concern as more studios continue to cancel promising animated movies and shows, so to see them proving that animated movies can still be successful would probably help to convince these studios to re-consider their cancellation plans.
Reason to Defend 2: Not the Worst Animation Studio
The second reason people defend Illumination goes to how they are not the worst animation studio out there. Probably the most important aspect when it comes to animated movies is the overall quality of the animated movie itself. If the animated movie in question is bad, then with some exceptions, I would not enjoy it. On the other hand, if I am enjoying the animated movie so much because the movie is so great, then yes, I will say I enjoyed it. So, what about something as generic as a good amount of Illumination’s movies?
To be fair, the sheer amount of genericness in Illumination’s movies is an enormous problem, but I do not have one issue with their movies. And that is their quality. Yes, Illumination’s movies are mostly the same in terms of the writing and the animation style, but most of them are actually of decent quality. With the mere exception of The Lorax and the first Minions movie, the quality of their animated movies are on average pretty solid, with some minute improvements as they continue to produce more animated movies. While The Super Mario Bros movie looks set to be an upgrade compared to their previous animated movies, don’t forget that they are also setting up their new animation division, Moonlight, which would be more experimental and goes beyond typical family-friendly animation. It took them so long, but Illumination is now no longer playing safe and venturing to new markets within the animation industry.
Another important factor to take note is that Illumination is far away from being the worst animation studio out there. This is because there are worse theatrical animation studios out there that produced way worse animated movies than Illumination. In terms of animation studios that had released animated movies theatrically, I can argue that a lot of animated movies produced by Vanguard Animation (Happily N’Ever After, Space Chimps), Splash Entertainment (Alpha and Omega, Norm of the North), Assemblage Entertainment (Norm of the North, Arctic Dogs), ToonBox Entertainment (The Nut Job, Spark: A Space Tail) and Anima Estudios (Top Cat: Begins, A Wizard’s Tale) are all worse than most of the Illumination’s movies, and don’t get me started when I add in Dingo Pictures and WowNow Entertainment onto the list as well.
Yes, Illumination’s movies are mostly generic, but I rather take a generic animated movie done well than terrible animated movies that put me in a foul mood any day of the week. In addition, the reason I mentioned the above studios that are worse than Illumination is to provide a warning to moviegoers who plan to see animated movies from these studios to exercise caution when seeing those movies. Trust me, the quality of most of their movies is not theatrical quality.
So yes, to say Illumination is the worst animation studio is probably a reach, because not only is their animation quality better than some animation studios that care little about quality, but they had now ventured to riskier animation ideas.
Conclusion
There is a certain level of justification behind the animation community hating Illumination Entertainment, but I felt the amount of hate towards them is a bit too far for me. This is because not only are they not the worst animation studio in existence, but they are one of the very few studios that put in effort to market their movies properly. In fact, I learnt a lot from the business of Illumination Entertainment by watching their movies and why they are one of the most successful mainstream animation studios today.
If you ask me, I say people had overhated and at the same time underestimated how strong Illumination is at the animation scene. While I had valid gripes about its tendency to repeat the same thing, Illumination is still a studio that, with more commitment and willingness to take risks, can excel in the mainstream animation scene. Besides, with them releasing two original animated movies with The Super Mario Bros Movie in a week and Migration towards the end of the year, let’s hope 2023 will be the year Illumination Entertainment shouts “Here we go!” and less “Mamma Mia!”
I hope you learn a few things about Illumination from this essay, and stay tuned for my review of The Super Mario Bros Movie. Until then, k thanks bye!
