Well, an “anonymous inker” is still a human artist; they know what the animator’s drawing is, they probably have at least a general concept of the character and the plot they’re working with. We’re still seeing the hand of an artist, rendering an analog of the hand of another artist. Lots of the art we’re familiar with actually represent a primary creator’s ideas being iterated or mediated by a bunch of other people (the famous chef probably didn’t personally prepare your plate, for example). The animators, for their part, may be seen as translating the ideas of the director.
My impression is that big-production CGI films have just as many, or more, levels of people assembling each frame, using toolboxes of algorithms created by yet other sets of people.
A better analogy is a studio movie. In this case, one animator creates a character in the same way that an actor does.
It is possible that one person could set up the camera, do all the lighting, do their own make-up, record and mix the sound and act all the parts. Nobody makes films like that. But only a complete jackass would claim that the work of person who is “only” acting is lessened because other, more expert, people were involved in the cinematography, lighting, make-up, sound, etc.
The “Mr. Tortilla Head” scene in Toy Story 3 was brilliant animation, a genius piece of work up there with anything in the entire history of animation, no matter what medium. He sounds like one of those people who thinks the “computer” is doing the animation, and that it is somehow less “pure”.
Perhaps. He’s written books on the subject. I’d hazard a guess that he’s seen all the features on animation technique that you have. He’s in the bonus features on several of the Warner animation collections.
Not that I’m arguing Barrier’s position here. I certainly don’t share all his tastes.
Sure. My comments about levels of production were in response to The Hamster King, who pointed out that there were levels in hand-drawn animation. Yes, we all agree; pretty much all films, animated or not, are collaborations of a whole bunch of people. We can still talk about which specific techniques widen or collapse the distance between auteur and audience, and which techniques encourage or discourage reliance on them in place of other values.
Sure. But I wonder, if they didn’t have the flash that processing power brings, would they convey the same story? Or would limits in one area squeeze greater creative juice into another?
…making his ignorant and close-minded position even more appalling.
Look at the extras in the Toy Story 1 and 2 collection The Ultimate Toy Box. There are scenes that were cut from the storyboarded script before animation that are presented as animatics, hand drawn sketches with sound and motion. The storytelling is so solid that the animatics are exciting. With no processing power at all other than the human brain.
All of Gollums facial features were animated using Andy’s facial acting as a guide, but they exaggerated and distorted, creating the character in concert with Andy Sirkus.
Oh, Serkis’ Gollum is great, specifically because it’s his. Motion-capture like that is a pretty different thing from straight animation. The CGI of Gollum is mostly his costume, not his character.
I understand that, were those scenes being made today, they could use increased computer power to make the character more responsive to the real live actor (particularly in the face). Some bits of Gollum at the time were mocapped but then discarded and reanimated using Serkis only as a reference.
I’ve seen what the guy in the OP mentions, but it’s less a matter of soul, and more that there seem to be more styles in hand-drawn art. CGI is either really realistic, or cartoonishly done, with nothing in between. I’ve yet to see CGI have the level of personalization present in really good hand drawn animation. I’ve yet to see the CGI equivalent of an animated art film. I’ve yet to see anything that doesn’t look 100% pristine, while I’ve seen messy hand drawn animation that works, and works well.
I’ve also yet to see any modern flat animation looks as good. It seems we’ve given up on making CGI be able to handle traditional animation. Cell shading is good enough. I’ve even often hoped to see a video game that actually looked like a cartoon, but I’ve yet to see it.
Just go look at a film like Disney’s The Jungle Book, and give me a CGI movie that is analogous.
Still, I think it’s because of the relative ages of both media, and that CGI will eventually be able to rival hand drawn animation. But it hasn’t happened yet.
I agree, I’d love to see this as well. Sometimes there are things that get close, like Limbo, but generally it either looks 3D semi-realistic, or cutesy Super-Mario, rarely anything else.
One vital tool of every animator is a mirror. They look at their own face in the mirror, making the expression the character they are animating needs to make. The only difference is that the face in the mirror is Andy Sirkus’s. The digital Gollum is a collaborative effort combining the talents of the animator and Andy. Calling it a costume is giving short shrift to the very talented animators interpeting Andy’s acting. This has been going on for the entire history of animation - Bela Legosi was used as reference for the demon in Night On Bald Mountian in Fantasia, Merce Cunningham provided dance movement , etc.
Maybe, but that was one of the thing about Avatar that I didn’t think worked as well as it could. The element added by the animators to Gollum added something that was missing in the Avatar characters - the were far too human. Look at the Sirkus/Gollum reference, and notice how different they are at times. The animators didn’t rotoscope like Bakshi, they referenced.
I have seen every single one you mention, but then I have attended a number of SIGGRAPH conventions, going to both the big Electronic Theater show and the small screening rooms. I’ll generally see 20 or more hours of state of the art CG at a show.
It’s funny that we’re mentioning video game animation here. All the old 2D fighting games were traditional cell animation. Around the 32-bit/64-bit era, things became complicated. Cartridges have much faster access time than CDs, but cartridges weren’t large enough to hold all that info. That’s why the N64 never got any of the 2D Capcom or SNK fighting games and instead got half-assed 3D fighters. The N64 was a champ at rendering graphics. So the 2D fighters were largely kept to Saturn and Playstation (blah don’t feel like getting into SNK’s hardware), where they had their own issues. Sega added an extra memory expansion cartridge to the Saturn which gave it an edge because it could hold more data at a time. The tag-team fighting games of the era were much better on the Saturn than the Playstation because the Saturn had enough memory to hold the animation frames for 4 players (core fighters + tag team members) whereas the PS couldn’t and the feature was crippled.
Have you ever looking into that genre? Fanboy wars have broken out over games having frames removed from animations because the transition from arcade -> console meant something had to give.
Not all. Watch the DVD making of for the movies. It was a struggle between animation and capturing his original expressions. What you generally see is his expressions, but they also animated when they felt they could do better.
It’s on one of the Two Towers special features discs, where they discuss the “battle” between animation and motion capture. They settled with a combination.
[QUOTE=BigT]
I’ve seen what the guy in the OP mentions, but it’s less a matter of soul, and more that there seem to be more styles in hand-drawn art. CGI is either really realistic, or cartoonishly done, with nothing in between. I’ve yet to see CGI have the level of personalization present in really good hand drawn animation. I’ve yet to see the CGI equivalent of an animated art film. I’ve yet to see anything that doesn’t look 100% pristine, while I’ve seen messy hand drawn animation that works, and works well.
[/QUOTE]
I take it you (along with everyone else) didn’t see the film 9 then. It didn’t help that there was a mediocre musical released around the same time with nearly the same name.
My earlier response was typed on my iPod Touch, so I couldn’t really look stuff up. If you want to see CGI “art films”, pay for an admission to a SIGGRAPH conference. It is held in the LA area every other year, Vancouver this year. As I said earlier, the big, two hour “Electronic Theater” is the best of the best in Hollywood CGI, and also scientific visualization and demos of the state of the art in CG development. The various Computer Animation Festival programs are all the good stuff that didn’t make the main show. I guarantee that if you watch the “Long Shorts & Student Animation” one, you’ll have your fill of the “animated art film” genre. That is all Cal Arts seems to produce. We’d hear groans in the screening room when the Cal Arts logo appeared on the screen, warning us the what was to follow was going to be dark, gritty and confusing.
9 is still “clean”, though. Look at this image. Yes, it’s showing something “dirty” but in a very realistic manner where the texture of the burlap is cleanly ‘drawn’ you can clearly see the worn details on the buttons, etc. It’s a pristine representation of something dirty.
I assume BigT meant something more like this or this or with even rougher lines.
I re-watch Jurassic Park occasionally, and IMO the T-Rex still looks good - better than her counterparts in King Kong, actually. The only dinosaur that I think looks a tiiiiiny bit dated is the brachiosaurus at the very beginning. IIRC this particular dinosaur was all-CGI (the T-Rex and others were part-puppetry, part-CGI), and it probably would have looked a little more polished with today’s technology, but still. For 1993, it looked damn good.
As for the column in the OP…oy, where to begin. I’m not sure what Barrier is expecting to get out of a medium that he apparently has decided to hate, or what he expects of the Pixar staff (or others involved in the field). I strongly disagree with his presumption that CGI animators don’t work to advance their field. If you put a movie like A Bug’s Life beside Up or TS3, you can tell that refinements have been made to the textures, movements, and many other things. I remember watching a making-of film about Monsters, Inc., and one of the animators was talking about the effort they put into getting Sully’s fur just right. It didn’t sound like “cheating” to me, it took a tremendous amount of effort, re-design, and tweaking to get the lifelike quality they were looking for. Barrier is probably doubly-offended by WALL-E, a character both animated AND voiced by computers.
Comparing the leap from Steamboat Willie to Snow White is kind of silly - I might argue that the animators of Snow White were “cheating” or “manipulating the audience” by using color to provoke a stronger emotion, because we relate to color subjects better than we do to black-and-white ones. And why did Disney put a bunch of songs in the movie? Did they think the characters weren’t strong enough to stand on their own without singing a song every once in a while to perk up the audience’s mood?
