Absolutely! Like with razor blades, we can always add more to make it better. I predict within a few years we’ll be shaving ourselves with 12-bladed razors shortly before we go out to see a 12D movie. Paradise will have arrived.
Disney had a monopoly on 2D animated feature films. Pixar was making more money with 3D than Disney was with 2D, and Disney figured that it must be the new technology that’s the difference, rather than that they’d ceased making decent films.
Animation is still doing perfectly well among those who have decent stories to tell, like in Japan. In fact, over there the reverse happened. They tried to make a few 3D big budget films with no particular script to speak of (see Final Fantasy, Alice, etc.) and based on the huge losses gave up and went back to 2D.*
- They’ve re-entered the territory in the last couple years with movies like Appleseed and Ex Machina. But of course Disney will be making a new 2D movie as well.
Animation is more than fps and lip sync. What makes Miyazaki great is his ability to create an alternate universe and give it life and detail through his marvellous art work. Then he gives you time to settle down and explore that universe often to the wonderful music of Hisaishi. I haven’t really come across any other animated films that do this nearly as well as Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke with the exception of the first hour of Wall-E. Roger Rabit is a pleasant film and I will give it another go some time but IMO it doesn’t come near the level of Miyazaki’s masterpieces.
3D killing 2D has less to do with any aesthetic qualities and more to do with the differences on the production side of things. Feature-quality 2D animation is an immense amount of labor. The work that went into the old Disney movies was staggering, and that was in the days before smooth framerate and high resolution mattered to anyone. Home video didn’t exist, the movie didn’t need to be shipped in both PAL & NTSC versions, it was only widescreen, and so on and so forth.
3D animation, on the other hand, automates a lot of the busywork. The animators get to focus on character and setting design, and the animation…the software handles the tedious work of putting into X frames per second at Y resolution. It produces equivalent or better results with far less manpower, and is more flexible at spitting out the umpteen different display versions needed for the global and home market.
From the production point of view, 2D animation is really lacking in concrete advantages that make up for shooting yourself in the foot by doing it. The only people doing it seriously are those who have a love for the medium, enough financial success to not care about the cost, or both.
There is, however, an interesting midpoint between the two that’s taking off - 2D cel keyframing with computer interpolation. Most of the cartoons seem to be going this route these days. It’s not terribly well suited to feature quality animation due to things like shading, but it takes a lot of the grunt work out.
Mekhazzio = agreed.
In the 2-4 years it takes to produce a quality, hand drawn, 2D film, so much of that time is eaten up in the labor of just animating every frame. Also, if the director doesn’t like a particular gesture. You have to redraw it. CG animation is non-linear, unlike traditional. So, if her face isn’t making quite the right expression, but the rest is perfect, then you can just go back in and only tweak the parts you need.
Also, animators find non-linear keyframing a much superior method for animation in getting motion nailed. They can tweak to their heart’s content, and focus on problem areas exclusively. It’s a much more fluid and organic process, ironically, over linear animation, in the way the mind carries the motion from keyframe to keyframe.
I have a love for all styles of animation. If a completely 100% 2D animation came out tomorrow (with a story that interested me), I’d go see it immediately. But I think the photo-real, nay hyper-real, results of CG animation have a very compelling appeal to most. The colors, lighting and textures, the motion, dynamics, fur and physics possibilities are all stuff we haven’t seen before in animation. It’s exploratory and fun to see these computations come to life artistically. I think we’ve finally seen CG animation come into its own. I love it.
I was has having a look at boxoffice figuresfor animated films to check for comparative figures for 2D and CG films and it tells an interesting story. Earlier in the decade when studious gave up on 2D, these films did indeed seem to cost quite a bit more than CG films while at the same time making much less money at the box office. The biggest example was Treasure Planet which more than any other film killed off big-budget 2D animation. It cost 140 million to make compare to 94m for Finding Nemo and just 60m for the first Shrek: movies which of course made a lot more money .
However in recent years the cost of CG films has ballooned: Shrek 3 cost 160m and Wall-E 180m so it doesn’t appear that CG has a long-term cost advantage. I wonder if it wouldn’t makes sense to make a moderately budgeted 2D film and see how it does. Something like Lilo and Stich which cost 80m in 2002.
Incidentally the one style which appears super-cheap is stop-motion. Chicken Run cost just 45 million and Wallace and Grommit ,which looked great to my eyes, a measly 30m. Both these films would have made a very healthy profit. Are there any other Nick Park films in the pipeline?
Animation is the creating the “illusion of life” (to borrow the name from Frank and Ollie’s book). And life syncs up. For all the talk about the “uncanny valley” of good CG animation looking almost, but not quite, like life, it’s amazing that some of those same people will accept and praise the work of an animator who, for some inexplicable reason, cannot fathom how to accomplish the most basic act in animation going back to Steamboat Willy. Characters talking without synchronization between their lips and the sounds they are making is off-putting.
I feel about him the same way I feel about the work of alleged director Peter Greenaway - a great designer who really should not be directing. I agree, he has a great imagination and is a talented designer. But there are so many technically bad elements of his work that they cause me to grind my teeth while watching.
For the life of me, I’ll never understand the Japanese insistence on post-dubbing. Presumably they have read the same books that American and European animators have read. Presumably they know how to use a soundtrack. If he ever does learn how, I’ll seek out another of his films - in the original language. Or if he directs a live action film - it’s much harder to screw up lip sync in live action, unless you shoot MOS.
I can’t say I remember the story much, if at all, but the movie Spirithas, perhaps, some of, if not the, most amazing 2D animation I’ve seen. Though I don’t know how much was computer vs hand-drawn, there is this bit of trivia from imdb…
Absolute eye-candy.
This is a pretty silly statement like saying that painting is about creating the illusion of reality. If you want the illusion of life why not just shoot film. Animation can be different things and different animators have different styles. American animation is generally a lot more expressive with emotions often depicted through exaggerated movement; a bit like acting in the silent era. It does work well sometimes particularly for comic characters but often it has a jack-in-the-box quality that I find annoying.
Miyazaki often uses a different style where there isn’t necessarily a whole lot of movement but the mood and emotion is built up through the rhythm of the scene and the artwork as well as music, sound and silence. A perfect example, if you have seen it, is the scene in Totoro where the girls are waiting at the bus-stop. If you don’t like that style, that’s fine but complaining about frames per second and walk cycles is missing the point. Incidentally when he wants to Miyazaki can animate wonderful action scenes as showed many times in Mononoke in particular.
Well 2D is more about aesthetic now than process. Most of the cel-like animation now involves CG in some form or another, whether it’s just coloring, rendering some of the more complex stuff like water, full on 3D backgrounds and models with cel characters, or completely 3D including the characters but everything rendered in cel style.
Blame Frank and Ollie, two of Disney’s “Nine Old Men” who literally wrote the book on animation. “Illusion of life” is shorthand, but an excellent one. A great animator can create the illusion of life in a drawing of a something as alien as a blob or squiggle, getting the audience to empathize with it. “Illusion of life” is as good a definition of the process as I’ve ever run across. If you have another, equally succinct one, I’d like to hear it.
In the same way, Japanese animation has a whole panoply of unnatural, nearly Kabuki-like types of movements that have no relationship to the human race, like the “throbbing eyes” and the bizarre mouth shapes.
I’m complaining that is technically poor animation. I’d complain about a live action film with the same number of technical flaws. The writing might be great, but if the camerawork is poorly framed, the lighting distracting and the sound muffled, I’m going to complain. It’s possible that I’m just sensitive to the cheats (the walk cycles, etc) because I know how to do them and have done them, and hated doing them. And to see work with all those flaws and even more egregious ones like NO lip sync being held up as the pinnacle of the animator’s art annoys me to no end.
You’re welcome to post YouTube clips that will illustrate your claim. But honestly, I’ve never seen any action in any Miyazaki that is as impressive as an early 1940s “Tom and Jerry” cartoon.
I don’t think it’s a good definition to begin with and I don’t think there is a succinct definition of animation that can cover its many different styles anyway anymore than there is a succinct definition of painting. Like with painting, a great animator can impose his vision and create his own version of reality. Even one where, gasp, lips don’t sync perfectly with dialogue.
According to whom? Are you saying that Disney animators in the 30’s laid down the immutable laws of animation and no one is allowed to do anything else?
I’m fond of this onemyself from Mononoke.
So we’ll conclude that you don’t have one?
No, I’ve seen the extras on the DVD of Spirited Away where they cast the little girl to voice the part after the animation was done. That’s not an artistic decision, that’s ass-backwards.
They showed how to do it, and that’s the way everyone other than Japanese animators do it. It works and the viewer doesn’t get distracted by the noticing that the lips are clearly just flapping.
That’s your example? The stiff-legged walking of the wolves from 0:10 to 0:15 is a perfect example of the poor animation I was talking about. The incredibly jerky movement from 0:19 to 0:23 due to inadequate frame rate - a wolves head doesn’t move on a fricking ratchet! The boys face from 0:35 to 0:39 is completely motionless except for his lips, which are just flapping between two positions! And the crowd of characters from 0:41 to 0:47 is just horrible, seriously horrible! No two characters move at the same time - one head shifts, then another, then another, then another. This is just bad animation, and a poor “illusion of life” in that no crowd, anywhere, has ever moved like that.
That’s your example? Seriously?
After reviewing the video and reading your analysis here, I have to conclude that you have impossibly high standards. No, perhaps it’s not as fluid as it could be, but it’s leaps and bounds ahead of Tom and Jerry.
And the crowd does not move one at a time. It does move in parts, but multiple people do react simultaneously. You’re factually wrong there.
How is this any different then saying “they don’t do it the way I like, so it sucks”?
I would submit that most audiences are not particularly bothered by this. Certainly, Japanese audiences appear to be totally unconcerned by it, otherwise there’d be more effort to lip-synch in Japanese cartoons. Non-Japanese fans who prefer dubs to subtitles are obviously even less concerned.
I’m honestly surprised to see that scene described as “horrible” animation. I suppose I can see what you mean by calling the wolves animation “jerky,” but I honestly couldn’t say if that was due to a technical limitation, or stylistic choice. It doesn’t look “wrong” to me at all. And I don’t even understand your criticism of the crowd scene. Admittedly, I’m very far from an expert on the subject. I’m just a fan of animation, and most Western animation at that. Miyazaki excepted, most anime doesn’t really do it for me. So you definitly have the more informed opinion. On the other hand, folks like John Lassiter positively gush when talking about Miyazaki. So without meaning to dismiss your opinion, it does seem to be a distinct minority even within the community of professional animators.
No, just the standard that was achieved early in the development of animation. The animators at Termite Terrace managed to produce fluid, beautiful work day in and day out.
You’re kidding, right? Have you never seen any of the early 1940s Tom and Jerry cartoons? Here’s the very first one. The whole series went to shit in the 50s and the stuff that was produced in the 60s are horrible. Any Tom and Jerry where they are friends is breathtakingly horrible.
Oh dear, I have to look at the wretched thing again? OK.
From 0:41 to 0:47: Generic character in maroon moves forward. Once that movement is finished, generic character in brown, behind maroon, blinks. Then Brown’s head moves to look right. After that, two identical white turbaned characters move forward at the same time. As they are colored the same, move the same amount at the same time, I don’t know if I want to give you that. OK, yes, at 0:45 more than one character at a time moves! A breakthrough. My apologies.
Nice to see you’re not being biased about this at all. :dubious:
I disagree with gaffa’s opinion about Miyazaki, but he’s absolutely right about Tom & Jerry. Any T&J made by Hanna & Barbera are superior pieces of animation. There’s no comparison with what came after they left MGM.
Thank you.
The thing is, the MGM Tom and Jerry cartoons were not attempting to be art. They were just something to fill 3 minutes of screen time. Miyazaki, on the other hand, is constantly presented as art. Any discussion of the artistic limitations of Anime inevitably, I mean every…single…time, Miyazaki is mentioned (oh, and “Grave of the Fireflies”). He’s supposed to be the topper, the indisputable genius of the medium, and (apparently) the redeemer of every lessor work. But it’s clear to me, and to anyone who looks at it critically, that this “genius artist” doesn’t rise, technically at least, to the level of any 1940s studio cartoon.
That crowd is composed of generic characters. If I were to make a screen grab of the characters in that crowd, converted it to monochrome, then cut each character out do you think you could identify each one? Other than the colors of their robes and turbans, they are the same character.