How long has it been since there’s been a new major traditionally animated movie?
I’m sick of computer animation. The characters still don’t look right to me most of the time, and the whole aesthetic is generally too homogeneous. Toy Story looks like The Incredibles looks like Cars looks like The Wild looks like Magagascar looks like Finding Nemo, etc ad nauseum to me. Whereas Aladdin, Snow White, and The Sword in the Stone all look very distinct.
There’s also a problem with the stories. The comic-relief has become the focus and gone overboard to the point that it’s like watching a washed-up Vaudeville comic stand on stage and beg, please laugh! please love me! Shrek was a decent twist on the fairytale but Shrek 2 and 3 were like parodies of a parody. Most of these movies have become like a modern Saturday Night Live skit: too long, decreasingly funny, and increasingly uncomfortable to watch.
I’m also dead sick of film and tv actors getting all the voiceover parts. I don’t want to hear Mike Meyers, or Miley Cyrus, or Dan from Roseanne when I’m looking at an animated character. I want to hear what a trained, professional voice actors believes that character should sound like. These vapid Hollywood goons suck the life out of characters like Mega Maid.
I think the next animated movie that comes along and uses traditional animation, along with taking itself seriously instead of being another fairytale/epic *with a twist!*™ is going to have a huge following and break all kinds of records.
Who else is ready for it to hurry up and come along?
The last traditionally animated film I saw was “Home on the Range” back in 2004. You didn’t see it? Neither did anyone else.
Actually all recent 2D films are hand animated, but computer inked and painted.
I don’t see your claim that the Pixar films look like each other, or like lesser films like “The Wild” or “Madagascar”. “The Incredibles” looks (to me) nothing like “Finding Nemo”.
I’ll agree with you about “Shrek”, and about most non-Pixar 3D films. But I’d put the story-telling of even the weakest Pixar film up against all but the very best Disney 2D film. It’s great story telling, and works as a 2D hand-drawn animatic of voices and camera moves on stills.
Again, I can agree with you for the most part, if you’re talking about crap-fests like any Dreamworks 3D film. But John Goodman as Sully in “Monsters Inc” was brilliant voice acting. It’s not as if John Goodman is box office gold, and the director will choose John Goodman because all the kids are huge John Goodman fans. That film even made me enjoy Billy Crystal, who I usually find as about as funny as cancer. “Monsters Inc” is near the bottom of my Pixar list with “Cars” and “A Bug’s Life”, but it’s still miles better than any Dreamworks title. “The Incredibles” starred Holly Hunter and Craig T. Nelson - two solid, talented actors brilliantly cast.
Look, I could agree with a lot of your rant if you hadn’t tossed Pixar on the same pile as Dreamworks/Sony Pictures Imageworks/Blue Sky/Etc.
For instance, I hate anime. Hate it. Loathe the “Bambi eyes”, the character design, the limited frame rates, the spiky hair, the pointlessly convoluted storylines…hate it. But I can appreciate and enjoy Miyazaki’s films like “Spirited Away”. He’s the pinnacle of the genre, as Pixar is in 3D. I know that if I start ranting about anime, the two things anime defenders will pull out are Miyazaki and “Grave of the Fireflies”, as if that justifies their love of Sailor Moon.
So, I’ll agree - any given non-Pixar 3D animated film is likely to be disposable crap cast with the flavor of the month. I’ll see them and laugh at some of them - mostly because I see a lot of movies. But I won’t buy the DVDs because I know they are filled with topical jokes that will age as poorly as that Robin Williams crap-fest “Alladin”.
Give me a well-written 3D film over a poorly-written 2D one any day.
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Really, I don’t get all the Pixar worship either. I’ve seen a few of the so-called blockbusters and the humor was all ripped off from elsewhere. Yawn. And I subscribe to the idea that just because you CAN do CGI doesn’t mean you SHOULD. I’m not against CGI per se – it’s had some excellent applications – but the Pixar stuff and its ilk do nothing for me. Give me some classic Looney Tunes, some Wallace & Gromit. But stop animating animals’ lips, mm’kay?
I started a thread on this topic a while back and was immediately piled on. I don’t know anything about film, my opinions are worthless, I should be forbidden to see any more movies because I’m a moron.
Whatever. You (generic you) probably hate movies that I enjoy too. I’ll just stay home and leave one more seat in the theater for your warm ass. Enjoy. I know the Pixar franchise will go on merrily on without me, laughing all the way to the bank.
Sorry, but you really should try to avoid conflating Pixar with other companies. It makes you look, at best, inattentive. Pixar has never animated the lips of animals, other than when the animal is a completely animated character like in “Finding Nemo”. You’re thinking of Sony Pictures Imageworks or Disney’s dire looking upcoming “Beverly Hills Chihuahua”.
I love “Looney Toons” and all the classic Aardmann films. But my favorite Aardmann film is their most recent “Flushed Away”. Classic stop-motion clay animation look, done entirely in computer. Same animators, different tool. You may as well rant against animators who have worked in pencil switching to pens. A talented animator can work in any medium.
It would help if you could avoid lumping utterly different animation styles together simply because they use the same tool. Every Disney 2D film since “The Sword and the Stone” came out of a computer. The hand drawn pencil animation is scanned into a computer, and all the “inking” and “painting” was done in a system called CAPS. The cells you can buy? Made specifically for sale and never used in a film. Films like “Tarzan” use 2D characters in 3D environments. There’s nothing more artistically valid about an animator posing a character as a series of hand-drawn frames on paper than to do it as a plasticine model…or as a 3D computer model.
Your loss. The folks at Pixar love animation - 2D, 3D, stop-motion, claymation, cut-out - creating emotion and the illusion of life, as do I. I grew up on classic Warner Brothers and MGM, Jay Ward, and Disney animation, but unlike you I appreciate that the folks at Pixar have been able to tell stories that could never be told with 2D “cell” animation.
One more guy jumping in in support of old-style animation, whatever you want to define that as, and who doesn’t like the newfangled, slick CGI animated features and their stunt-casted voice acting and stupid pop culture references.
This viewpoint is about as popular around here as spreading horse shit on a piece of bread and drinking it down with a glass of whale come, but so be it. I’m a traditionalist. I can’t stand the “modern” style of animated movies.
My favorite animated movie is The Plague Dogs. One movie like that is worth a thousand Shreks or Madagascars or Rattatouilles.
I’ll give you that. Even though I didn’t like Monsters, Inc. or Sully, I like John Goodman so he was a bad example.
But why? What’s with the Pixar worship?
Going down a list of their movies I see:
Toy Story - not very good but fairly original and cool aesthetic for the time
A Bug’s Life - I know I saw this movie and I swear I don’t remember one thing about it
Toy Story 2 - crap
Monsters, Inc. - crap
Finding Nemo - crap
The Incredibles - mediocre
Cars - crap
Ratatouille - terribly boring crap
WALL-E - looks uninteresting
How are these different from films like:
Robots - which was decent except all the pop-culture references and Britney Spears dance
Hoodwinked - actually my favorite modern 3D animated movie
Madagascar
The Wild
Ice Age
Happy Feet
Antz
Bee Movie
etc.
I’ll have to look for that. When I saw that clip it immediately reminded me of Watership Down and then I clicked ‘more info’ and it says it was made by the same people.
I love love love Monsters, Inc.; but to me, the greatest animated film of all time is “Snow White.” By far. You won’t find anyone with a voice like that anymore. We’re all too jaded.
For something of a factual answer to the OP, Disney closed down their 2D animation studio, and there hasn’t been anyone competing with them since Don Bluth Productions which closed down over a decade ago. So there currently is no American animation studio in existence that has any intention or experience to do a movie-quality and length film.
(Actually, I’m partly lying. The guys at Pixar wanted to do a 2D film, so Disney kept on some animators to do The Princess and the Frog, which should be coming out next year.)
Here’s the thing. Yu don’t have to like Pixar films. If you don’t like them specifically, then that’s no problem - they aren’t going to please everybody. If you’d rather see a rotoscoped dog film than a painstakingly well crafter 3D film, then that’s your business.
But don’t lump Pixar in with Dreamworks, Blue Sky, or Sony Imageworks. Each studio makes very different films from each other. The films with all the lame pop culture jokes and stunt casting are not Pixar, they are primarily Dreamworks.
Pixar, on the other hand, and somewhat uniquely, takes the same principles as Walt Disney imbued into his first animated features, to create wonderfully crafted adventures. The only difference is they use a different technology to realise them. They don’t rely on stunt casting, they choose great performers. Sometimes it may appear it’s stunt casting, with names like Tom Hanks and Billy Crystal, but they utilised them perfectly as character actors, and they grabbed Tom Hanks before he was on the A-list.
I don’t care if you don’t like Pixar, but please don’t tar them with the same brush as Madagascar or Into The Wild.
I’ll just add that, while I think that Pixar is generally better than other studios at the moment, I agree that they lack the majesty that Disney films did. But it should be noted that Disney had mostly lost that trait as well before at least a decade before they gave up on 2D (and is why they were unable to afford to continue doing 2D films, since what they made didn’t sell well enough.) A lot of the features of the crap movies we’re seeing coming out of the CGI stuff is things that are inherited from the Disney formula for kids movies.
My only problem with Pixar is that, nice as they are, they’re still making kids flicks and distinctly without the magic that Walt Disney was able to imbue into his creations. Personally, I don’t even get that out of Ghibli films. Laputa would probably be the closest.
We’ll just have to see whether The Princess and the Frog can bring it back, or if we’ll be weighted down with stupid sidekicks again.
I too miss traditional animation, although I don’t eschew CGI films altogether.
I love The Triplets of Belleville, which is, I believe, hand-animated for the most part. There are a few scenes which have been CGI’d, but they don’t dominate the film. Hand-animation brings a truly organic quality which can’t be duplicated. I think I’ll have to rummage the DVD drawer and watch this one again.
This reminds me of nothing so much as the CD-Vinyl arguments of the late 1980s where the old-schoolers kept arguing that some sort of ‘warmth’ was lost in the transfer to digital.
Even what traditional looking animation is being put out today (and yeah, you’re pretty much going to have to look to anime for feature films) has heavy CGI work, and in some cases is completely 3D (See Kakurenbo–creepy short film, completely 3D but almost looks like cel animation). Computers have been major tools in the trade for a while now, and when used well it really enriches the animation. I like the philosophy used in Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex–the characters are hand drawn, but there is a lot of CGI that is meshed in very well. And for something just plain gorgeous, see Appleseed Ex Machina (whoever decided to use toon shading for Appleseed should be shot though).
Well, pardon me if I don’t bother to memorize all the competitors in a genre in which I am utterly uninterested. It was shorthand, mm’kay? And I never said that Pixar animates lips. My overall post was speaking of CGI in general.
I have yet to see an animated film, or an ad for an animated film, along the lines of what Cisco listed above that didn’t either bore or annoy the hell out of me.
Oh, woe is me, my life is such an empty shell because I don’t like a particular type of movie. :rolleyes:
Yeah, no kidding. We can’t just have a different preference, oh no, we’re sad losers who deserve pity and scorn.
I hated everything Dreamworks did until Kung Fu Panda. It’s a great movie. Easily as good as anything Pixar has done and up there with some of Disney’s best work. I was totally shocked to see it come out of a studio that I’d written off as a bunch of hacks.
CGI isn’t a genre. Nor is animation. They’re art forms. Media, if you will. The genre can range from family to adventure to science fiction to drama or any number of other stories, and often do.
Geez, all it boils down to is you enjoy a certain kind of movie and I don’t. There’s no proving that one opinion or the other is right or wrong. It’s possible to dislike things no matter how wonderfully they are made.
I once was babysitting a kid who was having some melon as a snack. He offered me some and I declined, saying I didn’t care for melon. (I still don’t.) He said, “Oh, but this one’s REALLY GOOD!!” Don’t care. It could be the most heavenly melon in the world; I still don’t want any, thanks. But you go ahead and enjoy it, if that’s what floats your boat.
The Simpsons Movie and Persepolis kept the old school 2D flag flying; both came out last year and enjoyed some success. Most 2D animation these days is for television, much of it revolving around Batman or the X-Men.
If we’re including television there’s some brilliant 2-D work being done and some of the best isn’t superhero themed at all: Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, Samurai Jack, Avatar, Chowder. We’re actually in the middle of a little golden age right now.
The thing that really blows my mind is the painterly effects in the original Fantasia (the Nutcracker sequence–mostly on the flower fairy parts). They’re just incredibly rich and amazing. We may not see anything like that again, ever.
I do enjoy most of Pixar’s stuff. (A good, solid story always helps.) I got a kick out of the stylized animation in the ending credits of Ratatouille.