I was just thinking about this the other day. As a kid, all my favorite animated movies were done in the traditional style - Aladdin,Beauty and the Beast,Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, the frightening All Dogs Go To Heaven by Don Bluth, and many others. Then Toy Story came along. Wow! I thought. How cool! This kind of animation kills those lame movies I used to like! And indeed, it was a great movie.
But now it seems like all new animated movies are done in that Pixar style, and I find myself nostalgic for the old-style animation. I can’t think of a single animated feature film that’s done traditionally. Except for A Scanner Darkly, which I feel doesn’t count because it was rotoscoped (by the way, when it came out, a lot of people acted like it was the first film to ever use the technique. I guess they’ve never heard of American Pop.) Anyway, are traditional, hand-drawn-style animated films gone for good?
They’ve pretty much already become extinct. Cel animation was very labor intensive and expensive. As computer technology as developed it’s taken over and made it possible to animate movies much cheaper. Even filmmakers who want their films to have the look of cel animation just use computers to duplicate the appearance.
I can certainly understand the economical justification for switching to CG. But are we ever going to see a feature animation that even tries to duplicate the old style?
When I first became aware of cartoons, this had already started – before 1960. A lot of Hanna-Barbera’s “style” was based on shortcuts in animation (All their characters seemed to have colars and neckties, even if they had no shirts, because that way they could do separate cels for body and head), which included xerography and computers even at that early date.
As I became aware of the way things worked, I felt sure that computers were going to take up the slack in animation by doing the grind work of in-betweening and coloring. Only it didn’t happen, at least not for quite a while. There were still human coloring and in-betweening going obn for a long time after computers started to become common in society, and computer animation went in a completelt unexpected (to me, anyway) direction – rendering “3-D” shading and textures. I suspect the early software for in-betweening wasn’t sufficiently convincing, so they couldn’t simply toss it over to the machines, and instead played to the computers’ strength in emphasizing “3D”. (I recall someone making a big deal about finding just the right mathematical description to give the motion of a sauropod dinosaur chomping on plants – that’s the mark of an insufficiently developed technology, when you enthuse over exactly how to perform something that ought to be a common task like in-betweening. )
Now computers ARE used for filling in the motion and coloring (I understand they don’t even have a color department at Disney anymore) . But now everyone EXPECTS that “3D” shading and texture, as evidenced by the success of Pixar and Shrek-like movies, and the poor performance of things like Home on the Range and Brother Bear. (You might feel that the storytelling and imagination put into The Incredibles and Shrek might have more to do with it, but I suspect the Money People prefer tangible differences like overall style to more amorphous entities such as “creativity”. So there seems to be a big push to make everything in a style that they think people will be more willing to shell out money for.
I certainly don’t see “2D” disappearing. Literally – there’s plenty of it on TV. But the Big Money always seemds to be going to what is perceived as a Sure Thing, and right now that’s “3D”
I read an interview with John Lasseter, one of Pixar’s directors, in which he said everyone at Pixar loves ink and paint cel animation, and they’ve never viewed their own computerized style as a replacement for cel animation, but just as a different tool in the box. Pixar movies always have some sort of homage to old-style animation in them.
When the Pixar people took over Disney’s animation department, reigniting the cel animation tradition was a big priority for them.
A random thought: Could it be that 3D animations is harder to copy? Any 6th grade classroom has a kid or two who can draw a perfect Pluto or Tarzan. To get the perfect Shrek, though, you need the computer with the textures and all that. It sounds like a good way to protect your merchandise franchise.
At any rate, I love cell shaded rotoscoped 3D models (think Tarzan tree branches). I hope we get more good movies in that style.
That’s largely because of differences in how humans and computers see images. If you show a human two pictures, one with a black circle on the left of a white background and another with a black circle on the right of a white background, and ask the human what the frame in between them should be, a human’s first thought will be a black circle in the middle of the background. Humans naturally process images as pieces arranged in various ways, so our natural interpretation of a scene changing is the pieces moving.
But if you show the same two images to a computer, and ask it what goes in between, the natural response will be two gray circles. The computer is much less adept at identifying corresponding objects between pictures, but instead deals with the value of each individual pixel. So it assigns to each pixel a value intermediate between the starting and ending values, and you end up with circles halfway between black and white. One can program a computer to do rudimentary object-identification, but it’s a very difficult AI problem, and even the best programming is still nowhere near as good at it as a human.
I thought it was drawn by hand but colored on computer.
As far as Disney and cel animation: Their upcoming feature The Princess and the Frog will be hand-drawn. But I believe it’s being outsourced to another studio since Disney no longer has a traditional animation department.
Nitpick: while both Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast are “traditional” animation, both of them used 3d animation techniques - the tower rolling through the snow in Aladdin and the ballroom dance scene in Beauty are just two examples.
Non-nitpick: the reason Toy Story is a great movie isn’t the phase change in animation, it’s the fact that it’s a great movie – well written, well directed, well acted.
As some people have pointed out, the precise techniques once used to produce 2-D films are being phased out (and have been since the early 1990s - Rescuers Down Under in 1990 was the first Disney film to have computer colorization), but the style is still deemed as viable, at least by those who actually make the films. 2-D is still a very popular medium for television, and some shows are drawn quite artistically - think Avatar: The Last Airbender. And outside the U.S., animation studios have produced a very diverse array of highly regarded 2-D style films - Spirited Away, The Triplets of Belleville, and so forth. Meanwhile, 3-D rendering is no longer a free meal ticket for movie studios: films like Valiant and Final Fantasy have failed to find an audience in spite of their medium. In the end, good storytelling and memorable characters DO matter; this is largely why Home on the Range tanked as well.
One thing that American 2-D animation has going for it is that the new creative director of Walt Disney Animation Studios, John Lasseter, is a HUGE fan of Hayao Miyazaki. I mean, a serious uber-geek. He responds to people like the ones who shut down 2-D at Disney by saying, wait a minute. Those guys over there (Japan) just won an Oscar for their 2-D animated movie. They certainly don’t think the medium is dead. Why can’t a long-time industry leader like Disney do something like that?
Argent, are you thinking mainly in terms of domestic full length movies? Cuz there’s a whole panopoly of cool animation, both movies and series coming from Japan every year in volume and they use every technique. Even the computer generated series are still hand drawn on tissue paper with needle-like pencils first and that’s a lot of human hours! Admittedly you tend to get very cool backgrounds and movement but it’s not so cool to see flat, one dimensional characters in front of them.
I have collected cels from series I like but now days the best you tend to get is the background cels and collections of tissue paper drawings with the animator’s marking on them. On the flip side, it seems like the Japanese anime leans more toward story and characters. This method allows more series and more episodes to get out so I for one welcome our new computer generated overlords.
Disney uses the CAPS system they developed along with Pixar. The Princess and the Frog will be made in-house by the recently renamed Walt Disney Feature Animation.
Ah, thank you. I thought I might have been confusing it with their upcoming live-action/animation princess spoof Enchanted, and I was. The animation for Enchanted is being done by James Baxter Animation- that’s what I was thinking of.