Since its inception in the late 19th century, the art of filmmaking has continued to evolve beyond what the world could have ever imagined. Where once films were devoid of sound and colour, audiences are now able to witness products that are otherworldly in nature, such as recent additions to the Star Wars franchise, thanks to vast advances in technology that are now ever so prevalent in the film industry. Sadly, as technology advances, past practices and norms within film, both in front and behind the camera, have been left to the wayside, with processes and practices that were once revolutionary and a staple of the industry now being underutilised within the industry. However, in recent years filmmakers have begun to return to older filmmaking techniques, such as puppetry, animatronics and forms of animation, and even the ways in which movies are being made are somewhat reverting, but why?
Where did they go?
There are a multitude of reasons as to why these practices disappeared in the first place, the short answer being money. Who would have thought? Major companies within the industry all share one common goal of making profit off of their releases. Companies such as Disney and Warner Bros. funnel an immense amount of money into film productions each year, with Disney reportedly spending north of $350 million USD in the hit 2019 Marvel Studios film Avengers: Endgame, which emphasises the risk studios are willing to take in the name of profit. This swing managed to hit as the film has grossed over $2.8 billion USD worldwide. Yet, production expenditures are not the only costs that go into filmmaking, with marketing and distribution costs sometimes equalling the same as production. According to a 2023 Collider article by Aidan Kelly, the marketing budget of Avengers: Endgame cost a further $200 million USD.
When these costs are taken into account, it makes sense that these companies would rather use newer technologies as a means of saving as much money as possible in such big and long productions. Studios would much rather put their faith into effects that feel more visceral and alive to the viewer, rather than practical effects that are more uncanny and otherworldly. The more real a final product looks, the less jarring it is for audiences to take in a film’s fictional world. Studios are straying further and further away from the practices that have made so many films uniquely stylistic and personable, yet many still fight to prevail in the current cinematic landscape.
The Unreal World
Animation has been a prevalent form of entertainment since the early 1900s, with it having one of the weirder trajectories in film history. Its early days were rudimentary, especially in comparison to the animated features seen today. Originally, animation was crafted through the drawing of images on a clear, transparent sheet called cels, and were photographed frame by frame to allow for the perception of a fluid movement. This practice took an immense amount of time and effort for animators, and the cels themselves were incredibly impractical as they were highly flammable and would let off harmful gases, while also being extremely fickle and prone to yellowing. This has led cel animation as a practice to be largely phased out, with computer animation, done through Computer Generated Images or CGI, being far less labour intensive and immensely cheaper in comparison to cels. This practice was popularised by Pixar Animation Studios, with them even releasing the first fully CGI animated picture in 1995, being Toy Story. CGI animation allows for the final product to feel more visceral, as the three dimensional format allows for depth and perspective within animation without the need for painstakingly long hand drawn backgrounds. This practice is most evident in animated films such as Lilo and Stitch, in which many backgrounds were hand painted and profoundly beautiful and immersive, but take an awfully long time.
Sadly, these technological advances have left traditional 2D animated movies to largely fall to the wayside, with Disney, the company most widely known for their 2D works, having not released a fully 2D animated film since the 2011 Winnie the Pooh movie. This is the medium in which animation truly hit its stride and spread to the masses, but larger studios such as Disney, Dreamworks, Warner Bros. Animation have deviated from the 2D style that raised them to fame in favour of 3D.
That being said, 2D animation has thankfully escaped from fading into obscurity within the cinematic landscape with several, granted smaller, studios adhering to the format and creating truly breathtaking, handcrafted works of art. Studio Ghibli is the largest of which studios that have only ever deviated once from the 2D realm, with their 2020 release Earwig and the Witch, which is considered widely their worst cinematic release in their forty year long tenure in the industry. There is also Ireland's own Cartoon Saloon, an animated studio that has made major waves in recent years in the animated world through their thoughtfully created 2D masterpiece. The studio has received a whopping five academy award nominations in its short twenty six year history in two different categories. There is a want for more 2D features, and thankfully those that we have seen in recent years have amounted monumental success both monetarily and critically. Evident from the Studio Ghibli’s 2023 film The Boy and the Heron which Box Office Mojo reported it grossed just above $282 million USD and an estimated $50 million USD budget. It also won an academy award for Best Animated Feature, beating 3D movies from both Disney and Sony. This hopefully puts the pressure on larger studios, most prominently Disney, to return to their roots, if even for irregular releases.
The Real World?
There are many films that have taken place within our real world, with some key differences. This can be most prominently seen in hybrid films. Hybrid live action/animated movies have been around since 1900, with the film The Enchanted Drawing being the first to implement this idea as a man draws onto his canvas and then pulls them out into the real world, a grand accomplishment for such an early endeavour. While this meld did exist in the early 1900s, it did not become a popular trend within the industry until the latter half of the 1900s, most prominently with 1964's Mary Poppins which masterfully combined the two artforms in a more seamless and revolutionary fashion. However, this format struggled to find a good footing in the cinematic landscape and was largely phased out by the late 1990s, bar one major franchise that has largely continued its use with each cinematic release since its 1996 hit with Space Jam, being The Looney Tunes. Wildly, the original Space Jam is currently the highest grossing basketball movie of all time according to Guinness World Records, with a global box office north of $230 million USD with a reported budget of only $80 million USD.
The latter two movies that Warner Bros. Animation released within the Looney Tunes franchise failed to emulate ‘Space Jams’ monumental success, with both 2001’s Looney Tunes: Back in Action and 2021’s Space Jam: A New Legacy being considered box office failures. Many may have thought that this would have led the company to stray away from the model that they have evidently failed to replicate, but they would be wrong. Coyote vs. Acme traded the traditional 2D-live action model for a CGI crafted 3D-live action format. Yet the film has faced monumental setbacks since its filming in 2021, because in 2022 Warner Bros. erased it, along with a multitude of its products that no one had laid their eyes on at that time. The most prominent one was the DC movie Batgirl, which was meant to release on streaming but, instead of just releasing the movie or selling it off, the company decided to shelve the entire finishing feature length film as a tax writeoff according to a report by Borys Kit and Aaron Couch for The Hollywood Reporter.
This led to an outcry for justice from creatives, fans, and the average cinemagoer alike, and while films such as Batgirl are likely to never see the light of day, Coyote vs. Acme has been given a glimmer of hope thanks to public outcry. The film was recently picked up by the distribution company Ketchup Entertainment in March of this year and will now be released on August 28th 2026 in the US. Showing that what fans and audiences want can truly impact what we see on our screens.
Strings and Gears
The corporeal world we exist in is vastly colourful and full of natural wonders that would be almost incomprehensible to envision if not for the fact we can see them everyday, yet it does not really possess a singing, felt frog and loudmouthed, felt pig like the world of The Muppets does. Puppetry has been a prevalent feature in filmmaking since its inception, with it being a form of entertainment that predates the big screen by a long shot. Yet, no other property has captured its charm like the late, great Jim Henson had, beginning in 1955 when he first created his infamous and beloved puppets. His creations began on TV, such as Sesame Street which still airs today, and even included The Muppet Show which ran from 1974 to 1981, but his creations found infamy on the silver screen. His characters did not exist in a world that was stitched together, literally, but rather they were fitted into our own, humans and muppets living side by side. A monumental task, as with such otherworldly and inhuman characters, it can be hard to take their inherent wackiness seriously amongst such A-List actors like Sir Michael Caine, yet their unique portrayal allowed those of all ages to relate to them.
Puppetry is a gruelling art form when it comes to time, puppets on the smaller scale may only require one puppeteer or voice actor but they still take a long time to create and an even longer time to master, and the larger a puppet is the more time and man power it requires. The franchise has however not had a cinematic release since 2014’s Muppets Most Wanted, and a more The Office like spin-off in 2015, which were both considered financial, or for the latter critical, failures and has led to their strings being tied to streaming ever since, hence causing them to stray into obscurity. Yet, Disney has recently announced that a new TV special for Disney+, more akin to the original The Muppets Show from the 70s even possessing a special guest as always with Sabrina Carpenter, has been greenlit with a proposed 2026 release from producer Seth Rogen of all people. It is being considered by fans and those within the industry that it will be a backdoor pilot, meaning that if it does well we may be seeing a lot more of these singing and dancing puppets very soon.
Jim Henson was not only known for his puppeteering endeavours however, as his wider creations as a whole have featured across many different genres. The Jim Henson Creature Shop was established in the 1960s and continues to stay in business today, creating not just puppets but also creature suits, digital effects, and even animatronics. The Creature Shop team were hence able to work on bigger and less childlike films, most recently creating the murderous animatronics in the Five Nights at Freddy’s horror franchise, a large stray away from singing frogs and dancing chickens.
Another creative integral to the world of puppetry and animatronics in film is the renowned Phil Tippett. Most well known for his work in stop motion animation in particular Claymation, with him even spending an astounding thirty years, on and off, to create 2021’s Mad God, a one of the more grotesque yet detailed movies ever made let alone in the style. The two revolutionaries even worked together on the original Star Wars trilogy, the original trilogy aliens were largely created through puppetry or animatronics such as Yoda or Jabba the Hutt, and the large mechanical weapons such as the AT-AT’s were handmade models, their movements on screen being portrayed through meticulous stop motion animation against handcrafted backgrounds to create the illusion of monumental machines crashing through the landscape.
A New Hope
While style in cinema is constantly shifting and older practices are becoming less viable for studios for a multitude of aforementioned reasons, audiences and creatives alike continue to strive for ingenuity and passion in cinema. Practices that were prevalent since film's inception are still used by filmmakers today, and while there are of course some that could be left in the past, it is important to continue to preserve the history of film in everyday productions. Change and technological advancements are not a nuisance, on the contrary they are necessary to make film as realistic and artistic as possible, but should not completely replace the older and iconic ways.
Relevant Sources
Title Image credit: Unsplash, Jakob Owens
https://collider.com/avengers-endgame-box-office-budget/
https://deadline.com/2025/09/warner-bros-box-office-2025-1236557609
https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/star-wars-the-empire-strikes-back-anniversary-at-at-history
https://www.imdb.com/news/ni64347009
https://guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/102295-highest-grossing-basketball-movie
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/the-muppet-show-special-seth-rogen-sabrina-carpenter-1236350351/ https://unsplash.com/photos/black-and-gray-camera-tripod-kbd1oAf-9Ms
