How Hollywood’s “cartoon period” inspired Robert Redford to launch Sundance
In the modern Hollywood landscape, cinemas are almost completely dominated by colourful, explosive, four-quadrant blockbusters based on comic books, video games, or animated properties. In a way, you could say cinephiles are living through a “cartoon period” of cinema history.
Fascinatingly, though, Robert Redford must have looked into his crystal ball in 1980 and gazed in horror at the future, because he claims that seeing Hollywood embracing “cartoon” movies 45 years ago was what prompted him to create the iconic Sundance Film Festival. In this respect, he was way, way ahead of the game, and his gamble secured the future of American independent filmmaking as one of the only alternatives to the “cartoon period” that loomed ominously on the horizon.
“By 1980, when I started Sundance, I could see that the film business—which did through the seventies accommodate some of the edgier films, like Dog Day Afternoon—was following the youth market,” Redford told New York magazine. “We went through kind of a cartoon period, where you had movies like Dick Tracy and Popeye. I worried that maybe the films that I liked to make were going to be taken away.”
I mean, Dick Tracy didn’t exactly leap from the funny pages to the big screen. The road was long, messy and full of detours before Warren Beatty finally brought him to life in 1990. Beatty had been sniffing around the rights as far back as the mid-1970s, fascinated by Chester Gould’s square-jawed sleuth, but Hollywood being Hollywood, nothing moved quickly.
By 1980, United Artists had snapped up the yellow trenchcoat for themselves, part of the same comic-strip gold rush kicked off by the box office thunderclap of Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie. Everyone wanted their own cape or cartoon hero, and suddenly, even Dick Tracy was back in play.
That same year, he watched in dismay as Beatty’s McCabe and Mrs Miller director Robert Altman helmed Popeye, a musical-comedy adaptation of the popular comic strip about the musclebound sailor powered by spinach. Redford couldn’t comprehend why the acclaimed director of M*A*S*H and Nashville had chosen to make Popeye, which flew in the face of the grit and reality of the New Hollywood era, and the rest of the industry felt largely the same. Even though Popeye made a tidy profit at the box office, it was critically reviled, and Altman’s career as a “serious” filmmaker was left in tatters for a decade.
In the wake of these moves toward adaptations of comic strips, Redford began to get itchy feet. He didn’t get into the movie business to play cartoon characters, and he could already see that the drive to make these high-risk, high-reward films was limiting the opportunities for the kinds of films he made his name with. It makes perfect sense, too: in a Hollywood landscape dominated by “cartoons”, how much room is there for the likes of Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men, or The Candidate?
“There was no room for independent film anymore,” Redford told a Sundance audience at the iconic Egyptian theatre in 2015. “Everything was becoming more centralised. I could see there was going to be a gap.” So, Redford took a $25,000 grant from the US government and started a series of non-profit filmmaking workshops – which he dubbed “labs” – under the auspices of the ‘Sundance Institute.’
After five or six years of these labs, Redford realised there was nowhere for the filmmakers who developed projects there to screen their films when they were ready for audiences to see. That’s when the idea for the Sundance Film Festival as we know it today came into being, and the first edition of the industry-altering event was held in ’85 in Park City, Utah. Before long, it became much, much bigger than Redford ever anticipated.
“I thought if we have a festival, we could bring people together to show their work,” Redford explained. “But I didn’t anticipate the public’s interest – people started coming from Los Angeles and other cities to have a wider choice in the marketplace.” This was a triumph for Redford, obviously, and as of 2025, the Sundance marketplace is one of the last bastions of resistance against the “cartoon movies” Redford was always so wary of.
