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Fun Stuff => ENJOY => Topic started by: Thrillho on 14 Mar 2015, 04:57
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So lately I've been periodically watching some of the Disney classics, including Aladdin (God I still mourn Robin Williams, as much as one can mourn a famous person) and I've realised that however good the Pixar classics are (I did consider the Toy Story trilogy the greatest one ever made... until they announced a fourth one) I just prefer traditional animation.
There is just something joyful, and remarkable, and a realness, a thickness to the hand drawn stuff that I really just love more than CGI no matter how good CGI gets.
Am I alone in this? What are the pros and cons? What do you guys think?
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Hence my love of anime. Even there some CGI creeps in these days (and it's hard to argue against for the fancier action scenes); but it's commonly used for backgrounds rather than characters, for instance, and a lot of effort goes into making the techniques not stand apart too much. You can see a developing showcase of Japanese animation techniques at http://animatorexpo.com/ (http://animatorexpo.com/) (which I started a thread on that's being studiously ignored).
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I'm inclined to agree. CGI tends to look a little too uncanny valley for me much of the time. I was rather happy when Ghibli went back to traditional cell animation, despite the expense and work entailed, and mourn their passing from feature films.
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I'm not against newer forms of animation, rather against the focus on 3D modeled animation. Paperman (http://en.www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperman) was a movie Disney showed before Wreck-It Ralph in the cinema, and while it appears like a traditionally animated feature, most of it is computationally generated. Basically they created software that takes key frames penned by an artist and interpolates between them. It's basically having the lead artists doing what they did before and saving on the giant artist teams that do the real frames.
This message is coming from Tapatalk inside my phone!
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I like both, but I do feel more amazed by hand-drawn animations. Howl's Moving Castle uses both and I think it's really the perfect balance of hand drawn and computer animated. Especially those backgrounds, holy shit. But then movies like Finding Nemo are just so gorgeous in their clean lined simplicity and I think that's why it's still one of my favorites from Pixar. It felt like I was in the ocean at times. (I really regret not seeing this in 3D when it was redone for theaters.) I think there's a time and a place for CGI, but I don't like it when it clashes with the story or is just over the top. I'm having a hard time thinking of a good example at the moment, but when I do I can explain it better.
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If you need a good old-fashioned hand-drawn animation fix, find out if and when Song of the Sea is playing near you.
Should have won the Best Animation Oscar. Way, way better than Big Hero 6.
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I believe right now the Japanese are the best at mixing the two, although even Ghibli made the CGI aspects of some scenes a bit too obvious (I'm specifically thinking of the rosegarden scene in Spirited Away). They usually "paint" very well over CGI, and don't overuse them.
If you want to see a magnificient traditional animated movie, try "The King and the Mockingbird (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_and_the_Mockingbird)" by Paul Grimault and Jacques Prévert. It's a favorite of both Miyazaki and Takahata. The castle in the Lupin III movie "The Castle of Cagliostro" by Miyazaki was designed as a shout-out to the king's castle of that movie. Some years ago, studio Ghibli bought the rights for it in Japan, had it dubbed, and released it to theatres, just for the sake of getting this jewel known to their compatriots. I'm not even sure it wasn't a financial loss.
But reading further about it, it has been poorly distributed in English-speaking countries, apparently.
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I think that with CGI, you gain certain capacities with detail but, and this isn't strictly necessary, loose the great variation in style. At the Thoughbubble Comics Convention a couple of writers and artists talked about the transition to the screen, either by live action or CGI and the consensus was that dropping the stylisation of the original format severely compromised the character of the work meaning you had to try and compensate in other ways. It rarely works well. After all, could you imagine seminal pieces like Black Hole, Maus or even Groo translating to CGI? Look at the work it took to bring The Snowman to the screen in a way that was true to the original work.
As good an excuse as any to link to one of my favourite animations, a brilliant combination of stop motion and animated works.
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I love traditional animation. Something about how it can flow so smoothly hits my buttons. 3D can look amazing and the advancements for making such a tough task easier are impressive but holy shit I love this stuff.
Edit. Bonus clip:
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Good God I love Gerald Scarfe.
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Good God I love Bill Plympton.
Well why didn't you say so earlier.