I’d like to have other people’s opinions on why Frozen looked as good as it did.
It seems to me that they did a particularly good job with the characters, most of all Elsa and Anna. They completely avoided the uncanny valley.
Through what means of all kinds did they accomplish that?
By making the eyes so grossly out of scale that you never venture near a realistic human look. The “uncanny valley” only comes into play when you get close to realism.
It did remind me of anime. The heads were also quite large, much as you would seen in anime.
The uncanny valley seems to occur when something is presented as realistic but falls short of expectations e.g.: The Polar Express; The characters are meant to be photorealistic but the light and textures are wrong. The rendering quality isn’t up to what the style promises.
In Frozen, they did the opposite; The style was anime/cartoon so the audience’s brains never expected them to look photorealistic. The rendering quality was more realistic than what the style promised; It seems to have made extensive use of global illumination and subsurface scattering.
Frozen looked good? Seemed like same-old-same-old for recent (and not-so-recent) Disney princess movies.
As to the portrayal of “humans”, plenty of very unrealistic jaws, noses, body proportions, etc.
This. Frankly, it left me cold.
+2
What amazed me is not how good the animation quality was—they have untold gazillions of $$$ to throw at the state of the art. No, what amazed me is how they got live-action Georgina Haig in season 4 of Once Upon a Time to look so much like the animated Elsa.
Something about the eyes just isn’t attractive to me. It’s almost as if they aren’t focusing correctly.
“I see what you did there.”
I can see what the OP is saying. Pixar movies tend to just make their main characters cartoony, and so don’t have any trouble with the uncanny valley. Disney went another route, and made the female leads in Frozen more realistic, which seems like it should have the uncanny valley problem. But they don’t, Disney seemed to do a good job finding the line between realistic and too realistic.
I got the impression they were trying to mimic something of the style of older, animated Disney Princess movies, e.g. Cinderella. These in turn, were fairly realistic relative to other animated characters (the main characters anyway, the secondary characters were usually more cartoonish, which was true in Frozen as well).
So maybe trying to mimic someone trying to mimic reality, rather than going for reality itself helps dodge the uncanny valley? Instead of our brains seeing them as slightly off real people, we see them as really good animations of people.
Not really. This is a cartoon. This is a realistic drawing.
Personally speaking, I don’t think the animation in Frozen was anything particularly special, at least in regards to other major releases from Pixar, Dreamworks, or even other recent Disney films like Wreck-It Ralph. That’s not to say it isn’t good; quite the contrary, pretty much all three of those studios put out consistently excellent films. That said, besides the aforementioned avoidance of the uncanny valley, they did do a good job of creating a consistent aesthetic.
What I mean by this, to use video games as an example, is how some 2-D games on the SNES, as old as Super Mario World still look good, whereas some games even as recent as a few years ago don’t. Realizing the limits of the technology is an important aspect of the character design, so that they can be designed to make the most of it and hide the flaws, but particularly avoid showing things that either create breaks in that consistency or compare them to things that they know will improve as time comes.
Consider a film like the original Toy Story. For the most part this film holds up remarkably well for the same sorts of reasons, despite that the technology is much older. However, if you rewatch it, as soon as the kids show up on screen, it looks horribly dated.
That’s one of the awesome things about modern animation is that, if it’s done well, we notice it looks better as things like sub-surface scattering, or more realistic texture effects, particularly for hair, are improved, but it’s usually in a way that we can “feel” but not particularly identify. This is something, I think, that Frozen did well, aware that the uncanny valley is still very much a real thing, they designed the characters around that with much better hair and skin than we’d seen even a few years ago, but were still distinctly animated enough to stay on the good side of that cliff.
The problem is, no matter how good CG gets, we can still always notice it for people. Consider how easily the CG apes disappeared in last year’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, but even in a film like this year’s Avengers or the recent Hobbit films, there’s something a little off when they CG something that looks more human. Animation can make aesthetic choices to avoid showing more human characters, live-action has a harder time doing it and often has to result to odd color palettes, lighting effects, pan smears, fast cuts, etc.
“more realistic”. Compare Anna (in Frozen) to The Incredibles, the main characters from Up, or even the less cartoonish lead females from Brave or Inside-out.
Pixar seems to try and keep to a somewhat unified aesthetic with their characters that’s somewhat cartooney. Disney presumably wanted to get a different look for their CGI, non-Pixar films, and so tried to recreate the look of their older animated films, where the animators were, for the main characters anyways, trying to give the characters a realistic feel.
Obviously neither were trying for anything like photo-realism.
Funny, my kids just watched Frozen over the weekend for the first time in months. And once again I was thinking, “what’s so special about this one?” Even the music is just Ok for me.
And as several others have answered, they avoid uncanny valley by making the people cartoony.
Reminder on the uncanny valley:
Could there be such a thing as a kawaii peak which is the opposite of the uncanny valley?
I’m doubt the concept of familiarity should be central to the uncanny valley. It’s based on Freudian psychology and he put them as opposites it seems.
Yet, something can be familiar and offputting e.g.: violence to those used to it.
Also, human likeness isn’t central to it, just a very good example of a factor unless one defines “likeness” in a particularly broad way. Something can be uncanny without having anything to do with humans; a badly made non-human animal could be uncanny if it tried to look photorealistic and fell short e.g.:
The things which are the most opposite of offputting tend to be things that where we can find Thing-like characteristics even though they don’t at all pretend to pass off for that particular Thing. The Thing which tends to have the greatest impact is humans but it’s not limited to them. E.g.:
It can get quite abstract e.g.: are those human faces they represent or just faces?
In this one, there’s two aspects which make it the opposite of uncanny: 1) the cat likely has perceptions, cognitions, emotions and actions we can empathy and even sympathize with 2) the second “cat” is obviously not trying to pass off for a real cat
To those who didn’t like the way Frozen looked, do you think it would have been better with realistic body proportions? Did you get an uncanny valley effect when watching it?
To those who thought it did look good, could you go on abut specific elements that had the most impact?
Caveat: I have only watched snippets of the film, and thus may have not been exposed to the extraordinary parts.
From what I have seen, Frozen looked and sounded exactly as a modern Disney film would be expected to look and sound. Could have been created by some gigantic corporation trying to sell tie-in merchandise or something. This is not to say it was in any way bad, just that it is calculated.
The music was better–actually catchy like older Disney. (Do you hear anyone singing The Princess and the Frog songs?) And the story and moral resonate with the zeitgeist today.
You can see the culmination with “Let It Go,” which just so perfectly fits in both categories. You can’t get it out of your head, and it has something that everyone today wants to do: let go and stop hiding who you are. It’s an extremely cathartic song.
(And, to think, it was almost a villain song–ala “Gravity” from Wicked. The casting of the original Elphaba was not an accident, nor was the naming. You take what works.)
EDIT: Yes, I know that Elphaba was not a villain per se in Wicked. It’s still a villain song.
Eh, cold never bothered me. Anyway…
It’s not just they made the people more ‘cartoonie’, they made them more in the proportions of a child, which would seem to relate to children.
The first time I watched it I think I spent more time looking at the background scenery and listening to the songs (it was on video FWIW), so I didn’t even notice the character appearances. It was extremely well done animation in all regards.
