Animation; My vision. (Is this plausible?)

Cafe Society
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I started the **‘Inside Out’ **thread thinking I would love the movie:

…but I didn’t.

I’m reminded of ‘The Lion King’. I’ve only seen it once before, but I remember thinking that the movie wasn’t consistent to me. I’m having a difficult time trying to explain myself… but if I recall correctly, there are scenes of the movie that I would liken to an anvil falling on Wile E Coyote’s head - well, maybe not THAT ‘slapstick’ but not ‘realistic’ either. I know, I know; a movie with talking animals is not supposed to be taken too seriously, but when Simba’s father dies… it just feels as if the movie’s requiring me to be in two frames of mind.

As I mentioned in the other thread;

“There’s ‘Wall-E’, which is overall a great movie, but I wonder if it would have been even better if they didn’t even include the ‘cartoony’ looking humans.”

This is a problem I have with multiple animated movies and TV Series, (and in a way, many live action movies as well.)

How are we supposed to feel as if these characters are vulnerable if there’s no “rules”? Yes, the film being animated allows for there to be more artistic license, but why do we always HAVE to resort to that?

When watching the episode of **‘South Park,’**of all things, ‘Make Love, Not Warcraft’ it dawned on me; Why can’t we use something like a video game engine for animated films? I don’t exactly know much about the tech, so perhaps it’s a pipe-dream, but wouldn’t it be cool to have tangible characters interacting with their environment, with set rules and physics? If you see a chase scene on the tops of tall buildings, the hero in pursuit of the villain, and they’re jumping from building to building, wouldn’t it be even more suspenseful if you knew the characters could only jump so far?

Is this a stupid idea? Be honest… I have thick skin.

Would it cost too much to produce?

My favorite cartoon growing up was ‘Ducktales’, I loved the adventurous series, but it hasn’t aged well for me.

I just would love to see a TV Show like ‘Ducktales’, but in a world that’s more immersive because it’s “grounded” in some ways. It’s like watching a movie that has to do with magic. Either magic is used to keep a character alive or safe, or used to revive the character after death. What’s the point?

That’s all. Be honest if you think it’s silly.

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Building suspense and creating likable, vulnerable characters is the job of the storyteller. You can’t fix bad storytelling with technology.

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Oh, I agree… Story telling is the most important thing. It would still look weird to have a Stop-Motion Dinosaur in ‘Jurassic World’… no matter how good the story.

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To answer your question - yes this is plausible.
Take a look at Mechinima.

In the Lord of the Rings movies, some of the large scale battle scenes were all animated with a system called MASSIVE - this requires a physics model and agent scripts. As I recall, their first test battle had all the orcs run away, so they had to reduce the fear response. MASSIVE was also used to model pedestrian flow during a redesign of Oxford Street in London. I always wondered if someone let a horde of orcs loose during the modelling. :dubious:

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I’d be amazed if they ever made a non-Japanese animated film that showed any of the characters getting so much as scratched. Let’s face it, the people who produce these movies have certain pre-conceptions about animated films. As long as these types of films continue to make money there not going to change. Possible yes, but extremely unlikely.

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I agree. But bad animation has always puzzled me - if you have absolute total control of everything in the frame, no need to depend on setting or set or actors or weather or the limits of the physical world, why isn’t every decently budgeted animated film perfect?

How can $100M go into all that labor with an unlimited scope and turn out completely unwatchable turkeys? Absolutely gorgeous, eye-searing turkeys, in many cases? How can so much work and care and talent, combined with absolute control, produce, say… the average Don Bluth film?

Yeah, it’s all in the storytelling. But good scripts are almost endless, and if it can be written down it can be done in animation. Just so frustrating/puzzling…

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The short answer is that leading huge projects is hard - even if you have one man with a Vision, you need to be able to share that vision with all the people in charge of various things and then you need those people to be good enough to be able to make the vision a reality. In addition to that, the more money you have involved, the more you have to fight the producers as well.

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Yeah, I know. Just wishing it was different for animation than the usual H’weird businessing.

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Any CGI animation you watch already is using a physics engine that’s significantly more powerful than anything you’d find in a computer game. If you want to animate a ball bouncing down a staircase, you don’t need to manually shift the ball a few pixels each “frame.” Instead, you create a ball in the engine, and a set of stairs. You assign certain attributes to both the two objects, and the “world” in general - things like weight, gravity, bounciness, and a dozen or so other, more fiddley variables. You position the ball at the top of the stairs, maybe assign it a little starting inertia to get it rolling, and then hit the “play” button and the engine calculates the movement of the ball bouncing down the stairs for you. You then run it a couple of times, adjusting the physics variables, until it looks just right. You then capture that specific set of movements and “bake” them into the scene. Then you can run that exact set of animation over and over, except now the engine isn’t calculating the physics of the ball any more, it’s just moving it along a pre-determined path.

Animating a bouncing ball by hand is actually pretty easy, but where physics engine really help in animation is when you’re animating a large number of small objects moving in a chaotic manner - such as a brick wall collapsing. Trying to animate a brick wall falling apart by hand - keeping track of the movement of hundreds of individual bricks as the move and bounce off each other and the ground and other objects in the scene, would be terrifically difficult - which is why they’d cover it up with a big dust cloud in a lot of older animation. With a computer, you can give each brick it’s own weight and resiliency, and let the engine calculate where each one goes.

Even for something like a character jumping from roof to roof, what you probably do there is have the computer define the parabola of the jump - if he starts here, ends here, is this high at the mid point of the jump, and have the character model follow that parabola, while you animate the body movements by hand. In an animation engine, you generally won’t have something like a “jump distance” variable that’s assigned to each character, which you would in a video game. But I don’t think setting that sort of limit on the physics of a character is going to materially effect the way the audience experiences a film. Think back to the opening of the first Matrix movie, where Trinity is running across the rooftops, chased by cops, and makes a series of dramatically more difficult jumps, until the last one is clearly superhuman. I’m pretty sure no one in this thread knows how far Carrie-Anne Moss can long jump. Odds are pretty good that she couldn’t have made most of those jumps in real life, though - even the early, realistic ones. The rule in all movies, live action or animated, is that characters can jump precisely as far as the story requires them to jump. If the script for a live action movie calls for a character to jump across a ten foot gap, and the actor can’t jump further than eight, then they use some combination of camera editing, stunt doubles, and wires to make it look like the character gets from one side of the gap to the other.

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If you’re writing a book, you have absolute control over every aspect of the story, too. So why do bad books still get written?

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Books don’t typically involve an entire creative crew, and novels in particular have the quirk of emphasizing the author’s sole vision. But yeah, I get the point.

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Some of what you’re describing might be the animation ghetto. Gotta keep it light hearted, make sure there’s a happy ending, don’t be too edgy, and so on.

Animation is expensive and takes thousands of man hours. The more it hews to reality the more the suits and bean counters will want to know why you just don’t make it live action.

I’m not really sure what you mean by video game engine. Machinima has been mentioned, which can be funny but it’s not generally used to tell serious stories. A video game engine has scaled down models compared to a CGI 3D animation program for performance reasons since it has to be played in real time. The animations are canned. You’re really limited in what you can do.

If you want more down to earth cartoons you might have to go international. But you mentioned DuckTales and grounded, so I’m not sure what you mean exactly. Do you mean more mature subject matter and less goofy hijinx, or what?

Hating on Don Bluth? That’s a paddlin’.

A lot of European animated movies are pretty screwed up, too.

I think the closest you’ll find to that in America are the DC Animated movies. I think they’re all straight to DVD, or they have a limited theatrical release at most. Lots and lots of ultra violence. They have decapitations, stabbings, impalement, spree shootings, people getting beaten to a bloody pulp, and even the occasional child murder. I haven’t seen them all, but The Flashpoint Paradox was particularly grim dark. At the end all the heroes get together and basically murder each other for like 20 minutes. They also don’t shy away from showing female heroes taking a beating from a male villain.

The Justice League/Justice League Unlimited series was mostly bloodless and tame in comparison, but they had some pretty violent fight scenes too. Like this brutal cat fight – they really love beating the crap out of Super Girl, don’t they? Even has a punch right to the baby makers.

MTV Liquid Television back in the day had some violent and bizarre cartoons. The best one by far was Aeon Flux, which had a lot of BDSM overtones and futuristic body horror. Probably one of the most underrated animated works to come out of the West, though it definitely has a cult following (enough that it led to that awful live action movie). The Maxx had some disturbing imagery too. Did you know bunnies can scream? Ugh.

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Rock-a-doodle, dude. :dubious:

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Maybe a “video/computer game engine” isn’t what I’m looking for. What I’m basically saying is that it would be nice to have an animated adventure TV show/Movie where the characters have attributes and disadvantages that play off of their environment. Something that if you were somehow able to play as if you’re playing a game, you would be able to traverse through the environment limited to those abilities/disabilities.

Perhaps you’re tall and fast, perhaps you’re able to make the jumps from building to building. Now if you’re short, you wouldn’t be able to do the same, but you COULD fit in an air duct to “progress” through whatever goal you’re trying to accomplish, where the tall and fast wouldn’t be able to do so.

How far you can jump, or how fast you can run, or how quietly you can sneak up on someone has to do with the character’s physical attributes and their environment. I’m not saying that it has to be true to real life. For instance… Mario can only jump so far and so high. If Mario’s in the mud, he has limited jumping power. Though it doesn’t have to be crazy Mario physics.

As I mentioned in the ‘Inside Out’ thread, one of the scenes I had a problem with was:

The way Joy and Sadness got back to headquarters where they filled up a bottomless bag, (a bag in which we didn’t know it had the power to be bottomless until this all played out,) with her imaginary boyfriend(s) then emptying the bag with them somehow perfectly stacked up. That is some sloppy story telling that doesn’t create any doubt whether or not the characters will make it to headquarters.

It’s feels like they cheated to get the characters out of a jam. ‘Toy Story’, on the other hand, was a little more plausible when Woody and Buzz were trying to catch up with the moving truck they were in pursuit of, due to one of them having a rocket of some sort on their backs.

I know I’m all over the place… but it seems to me like cartoons HAVE to include ridiculous scenarios in which they through out ALL the “rules” and that takes me out of a film.

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Throw*

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I recently had the desire to see a live-action Gummi Bears. So I started writing the screenplay myself. I want to see them grounded in a reality too. Gummi Bears has a very cartoony premise, with a lot of slapstick, but if you reined that in and instead portrayed those parts as comedy only, without the physics exaggerations, playing it “straight” as though the bears and trolls were photoreal and like actual living creatures, interacting with real humans, i.e. not like the Smurfs and Alvin and the Chipmunks movies, but more like the recent Paddington movie, I think it would still work.

Not sure if anyone else would want to see that, but I really would.

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For the first part of that when Bing Bong was introduced and offered the bag to Joy, they had him empty it out, with a sight gag about how much was in there. Then he delved in to grab the last item. It illustrated nicely the ‘Mary Poppins’-esque trait of the bag.

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I prefer animation with at least some elements of fantasy or science fiction. It’s the main reason I don’t watch King of the Hill. The closest thing to a slice of slice style cartoon I watch involves cute, colorful, magical, talking ponies.

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I would see that.

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The OP could try watching AD Police Files. It’s not terribly good, but the physics of metal-meets-flesh are pretty well represented.