Why has the advent of CG/3D animation seemingly killed Drawn/2D in movies?

Cafe Society
1

I say “in movies” because 3D animation* still seems to be a novelty on television and I can only name a handful that use it (and even less that are still on a regular airing schedule that do).

Now, I can understand (albeit reluctantly) why CG effects have all but replaced animatronics. I personally think mediocre animatronics look a hell of a lot better than mediocre CGI, but really well done computer effects blow physical ones out of the water. Nonetheless, I can see why you’d use CG all the time instead of blowing it on wiring a big puppet that might be choppy.

I can even understand why it seems to have killed Claymation, I personally think full-Claymation movies look like a poor-mans CG in the first place, Claymation may have a little charm, but it’s not substantially different in feel from CG in any way that I can’t see one being any more than an easy substitute for the other in a pinch.

But what I can’t grok is why it seems to have killed 2D feature length movies**. They’re entirely different in style and feel. It’s not like they’re different ways of accomplishing the same thing, they’re styles. Comparing the two is like comparing The Lion King and The Secret of NIMH (or if you prefer something from overseas to punctuate really different styles, My Neighbor Totoro), they’re both animation but they have different feels. That is to say, The Incredibles wouldn’t have the seem feel if animated like Snow White or Alice in Wonderland, but conversely they wouldn’t have felt the same if made as 3D flicks.

Is there something I’m missing here? It just doesn’t seem like one should necessarily trounce the other, to me it feels like if Oil Paintings were killed by Watercolors.

  • To be clear, I’m talking about things like The Incredibles, Bolt, or Toy Story. I’m not only talking about things like Monsters vs Aliens that are 3D in an effect you need glasses for. I suppose what I’m talking about is more properly called “CG animation,” but if gaming sites get to contrast Zelda: A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time as 2D vs 3D regardless of both of their statuses as flat images I’m doing the same.

*That aren’t adaptations of something already established in 2D

2

You’re not getting it, we’re talking about 3D and 2D here. 3D has more dimensions than 2D!

3

There’s nothing special about Monsters vs. Aliens in that regard. All computer-generated movies are being released in 3D now-- Monsters vs. Aliens just happens to have been one of the first movies released since they decided to start doing that (though Bolt was also in 3D).

4

So 4D or 5D would be even better, right?

5

Well, you don’t see anybody seriously mourning the loss of silent films or black-and-white films, do you?

(Of course, every once in a while some does a silent or a monochrome, but only as an experiment or some kind of artistic statement.)

There does seem to be a big push towards 3-D animation (probably made by people who are hoping to make it their bread and butter); the previous ghettoization of 2-D animation as kids stuff probably doesn’t help the “traditional” style - as a matter of fact, the Japanese have all but gone digital, doing their “cels” on the computer.

2-D animation will probably still be viable for a while in the low-end, as it’s still cheaper to produce than 3-D, but big budget movies have this shiny new toy to play with and they want to be able to show it off as much as possible.

I for one, hope that they’ll grow out of the whole “ooh, look, 3-D” thing as soon as possible and give us stuff with actual plot. (HA!)

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By the way, we should mention that in Japan, they still make hand-drawn animated movies.

Spirited Away is still one the greatest animated movies I’ve ever seen, and it’s only 7 or 8 years old.

7

Disney’s upcoming The Princess and the Frog (scheduled for December 2009) goes back to “traditional” 2D animation. I expect it to be a success. A lot of us miss that style. One isn’t necessarily “better” than the other, but I am among those no longer impressed with 3D worlds and characters.

8

I give 3D animated films five years. It failed in the past and will fail in the future – for the exact same reasons. It’s the same process that didn’t work in the 50s, and why people think it’s suddenly going to work (when it also failed in the 70s and the 80s) is beyond me.

Computer animation is here to stay, of course, but stop motion animation is far from dead. Ever hear of Nick Park?

There’s also not particular reason why traditional cell animation stopped. There was a switch to computer animation, of course, but the biggest problem is that there were no particularly successful cell animated films after Tarzan in 1999. If someone does a good one, it will do well, though the process will never come back to prominence.

9

Because it’s new and flashy, whereas 2D is old and crappy.

Which is nonsense, but the entertainment industry is almost 100% made up of nonsense, so that’s nothing new.

Disney famously made a big song and dance about them deciding to give up on 2D altogether, saying it was no longer their focus. Then Michael Eisner was sent packing and they got back on track, with the aforementioned Princess and the Frog marking their return. Though Enchanted included some hand drawn animation too.

3D does have some advantages over 2D in what it can do, but I don’t think that 2D will ever die. Its stronghold in TV means it will always come back to the big screen or straight-to-DVD titles. Plus, other countries still embrace it.

10

As for this, these films are appealing to the studios because they’re difficult to pirate, they can charge more per ticket and they’re something of a novelty that attracts people to the cineplex. (FYI, all of Dreamworks Animation movies are going to be in 3D and James Cameron’s new film, Avatar, will be as well.)

11

Huh? 2D cheaper? Only if you’re talking about something like this. I’ve done both, and the 3D animation is drastically cheaper to produce and getting cheaper with every generation of software and faster computers.

Not even Park works entirely in stop motion. The IMDB trivia page for Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit states that:

The movie contains a considerable amount of CGI of all kinds, from drifting fog through to the bunny rabbits in the Bun-Vac. In all, there are over 700 shots that contain some kind of digital effects work.
…and…
Special software had to be created in order to photo-realistically recreate the texture of genuine Aardman plasticine in the computer. The software had to create the possibility for slight imperfections, e.g., fingerprints to appear on the fake plasticine bunnies and ripple effects of the characters moving their plasticine arms and legs.
Park made his career with Aardman, and their excellent (though not financially successful) Flushed Away proved that it is possibly to perfectly replicate the look on stop motion animation in 3D computer animation. Park has an “in development” credit on IMBD, and if it’s not his first CG film, his one after that will be. Stop motion animation is just too expensive to do. Very simple reason - the cost of human hours keeps going up while the cost of computer hours keeps going down. Aardman found, as Pixar did before them, that a talented animator can work in any medium. Better results are obtained by teaching artistically talented people how to use a computer and building tools that are easy for them to use than to try to teach computer geeks how to be artists.

Yes there is. It became too expensive.

2D animation has been dying by degrees for decades. Windsor McKay drew every frame of Gertie the Dinosaur, but Steamboat Willie required a much larger group of people, and the animation of Loony Toons required dozens if you include all the ink & paint people. But after a peak in the 40s, the cost of all those people became too much. Producers looked for short cuts. Xeroxing cells. Limited walk cycles. Limited perspective changes. Sending ink and paint to other, cheaper countries. Replacing ink and paint with computer systems like CAPS.

I don’t consider Tarzan a cell animated film. It’s a composite film with 3D computer animated backgrounds and scenery with 2D characters. Personally, I don’t think the combination is particularly appealing.

I agree with the last part, but I don’t believe that anyone will produce any more pure 2D films. They’ll produce CG films that will mimic the look of 2D cell work, but the days of feature-length 2D animation are over.

12

I prefer the look of hand drawn animation. CG is basically claymation 2.0, and I’m hoping the fad will die down pretty soon. Well-designed, non-human CG characters look great, but the rest tend to fall somewhere in the uncanny valley and creep me out (see Polar Express).

13

To give another perspective, think of it from the side of the artists involved. CG animation gives the artist tools they otherwise didn’t have in traditional hand-drawn. A lot of times, limitations where disguised as stylistic choices back in the day, but now, with the advent of CG animation, creating a film or production of this sort, gives the artist almost infinite choices both technically and stylistic.

Not only that, but cell animation’s workflow is unattractive to many artists and animators, relatively speaking. Hand drawing every frame of a scene can be a very arduous task. Combine that with the complexity of making a feature film, and it’s an amazingly tedious job.

I agree that comparing cell or stop-animation to CG animation is comparing apples and oranges, but in one way, it’s the difference between hand-setting a novel with movable type, and using a word processor.*

At the tail end of it, Pandora’s box is open. There’s all kinds of shiny new shit we can play with in this particular sandbox, from what the artists can do, for how much that costs for the producers, to the glossy end product and the way it’s delivered (100% digital, 3D, blah blah blah).

All that said, there are good and bad examples to both, which shouldn’t have to be said. I think 2D-cell will come again, but it won’t be the same, it’ll be assisted by CG. Want to hand-draw an incredibly complex pirate ship with an epic sweeping camera move around it? Dummy that bad boy up in CG, and essentially trace the frames to nail the perspective and detail. You catch my drift. In fact, this sort of thing has already been done in some 2D films in the 90s, if not full-on mixture of CG and cell animation.

*Grossly overstated, CG is hard work, I know… it’s what I do… but I’m loath to think of producing the kinds of short films I’m trying to make using stop-animation, or (egads!) cell.

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When put in front of audiences, audiences overwhelmingly vote for 3D with their dollars. There is no turning back.

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Before this discussion goes too much farther, let’s clear up some terminology, just so I don’t get confused.

2D = traditional, hand-drawn, cell animation

Stop Animation = Pose and Snap style animation like Coraline, James and the Giant Peach or The Nightmare Before Christmas. Someone up-thread called it animatronics, but that’s a different animal.

CG = Computer Generated (sometimes CGI; Computer Generated Imagery). This is sometimes called 3D, but not in the stereoscopic sense (only in the sense that the artist is working in a 3 dimensional environment [x, y, z], that gets rendered into 2D images), hence the confusion for me, and I’d like to avoid it, if we’re not talking about a stereoscopic movie.

3D = Stereoscopic; requires glasses. The most effective movies also happens to be of the CG animated variety, because it’s much easier to produce this way, but this is not always the case. There are a handful of live-action movies like the stinker Journey to the Center of the Earth, and the hopefully mind-blowing (fingers crossed) Avatar that’s coming out in December. Granted, movies like those have copious amounts of CGI in them, but it’s still considered live-action, and the principal has to be shot with special cameras.

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And FWIW, I love checking out 3D movies now that they’re so effective. If the trend finally sticks this time, and most of my favorite blockbuster movies start getting produced in 3D, I’ll be putting together a 3D TV set, player, emitter and glasses in my living room before too long.

17

Quoth RealityChuck:

Because it’s not the same process. The 3D movies in the 50s used colored glasses, which meant that gaining the 3D cost you most of the color information. The 3D movies in the 80s replaced the colored glasses with linearly polarized glasses, which let you preserve the colors in the movie, but which meant that the effect was destroyed if you tilted your head slightly. Now, though, they’ve figured out how to make cheap circular polarizers (effectively, at least: They’re a bit more complicated than that), so now you can get the 3D effect, in full color, and while tilting your head a moderate amount.

Plus, if you’re making a computer-animated movie, it’s only slightly more difficult to make it 3D, whereas in times past, making a movie 3D was significantly more expensive. So moviemakers now are much more free to use it as a technique among others, rather than just a gimmick.

18

Even though it’s not animated (well, I suppose that’s arguable too) I think the advent of 3D (stereoscopic) movies will hinge on James Cameron’s Avatar. If it works as a process in his movie in the way he’s championing, then it might begin a real onslaught.

19

Not really germane to the conversation, but personally 2D hand-drawn animation’s peak was Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Brilliant character animation realized at a full 24 frames per second, compared to the 12 FPS of every other animated film; 2D characters with shadows animated onto the real world they are composited into; 2D characters with hand-drawn 3D shading; Jessica Rabbit. Richard Williams is animation’s greatest living genius.

And no, Spirited Away is not better - it’s pretty, but there’s no lip sync even in the original Japanese (yes, I’ve seen both) and the frame rate appears to be even less than 12, and it has some of those awful, stiff Japanese walk cycles. I can’t respect an animator who can’t even figure out how to animate to a soundtrack.

20

I agree–I only saw Roger Rabbit recently and was blown away that what I was watching was hand-drawn and not computer-generated. It was amazing.