The availability of the technology is driving adoption, rather than public demand.
The desire to raise ticket prices 25% is another major factor.
This is the first “technical innovation” in film that has raised ticket prices, unlike color and sound.
You have a bizarre interpretation of the word “free”. The cost of the glasses is covered by the additional $2 to $3 charged by the theater. Also, every theater I’ve seen has had people at the exit collecting the glasses, to ensure an additional sale for the next screening.
Good suggestion. Thanks for solving a problem that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
If they ever have a holographic 3D projection system that doesn’t require any glasses for the audience members, I’ll be happy to see it.
I take it you’ve talked to millions of glasses wearers about it? Or have an independent cite for that?
The thing is, your arguments in favor of 3D remind me a lot of the ones I’ve heard from Flash web designers about creating web sites that can’t be used by the blind.
The situation currently is that there are more 2D theaters than 3D. But AMC has just announced that they plan to make all their theaters digital and equipped for 3D. Again, I say that they are doing this not because of any pent-up public demand for 3D presentation (which we would have seen some evidence for during the long 3D drought between the current 3D fad and the last 3D fad. If the public actually wants something, they don’t wait 20 years.
The studios and the theater chains are pushing for this because, as you’ve admitted, they want to charge more for tickets.
The majority of the flaws in Miyazaki’s work are specifically 2D, hand-animated flaws - the inadequate frame rate, for instance. Other flaws are ones of character design that are expressed in the animation, like the stiff movement of the animals. And of course one giant, glaring flaw through every second - the non-existent lip-sync.
I was pointing out that he is also an expert at compartmentalization. Industry legend is that Lasseter once hired someone on the basis of a single slide - that the image showed that he knew more about rendering clouds than anyone else.
…in the liner notes of a boxed set. It’s a blurb.
I have no idea if Lasseter notices the same flaws I do. I know he is perfectly capable of doing so. To use my example, maybe, like a Dylan fan, he can ignore all the flaws. I can’t. My idea of a great animator is someone who makes every moment in an animated film work, who doesn’t have segments that stick out with noticeably poor animation.
What I’m pointing out is equivalent to pointing out Dylan’s limited vocal range. This is an independently verifiable fact - he can only sing from this note to this one. And at this point in this Miyazaki film, he has too few frames to convey smooth motion. And, something that nobody can possibly deny, he does not even bother trying to accomplish lip-sync, something any beginning animator learns how to do.
It’s a flaw. By the standards of 100 years of animation. Any trade or skill has objective standards that a practitioner is expected to meet. Miyazaki is a carpenter who can make a table out of top quality wood, and apply a nice finish to it, but the legs are all different lengths because he doesn’t bother to use a tape measure.
Quote me saying that. He has talent. But he’s a poor craftsman. And for this poor craftsman to be held up as the paragon of a field I love annoys and offends me.
What is this based on? The vast majority of animated feature films feature excellent lip-sync and full animation. Miyazaki and other anime are the exception, not the rule.
To sum up, I’d like to talk to John Lasseter about Miyazaki. I’m sure we’d disagree. I’m sure I couldn’t talk him out of his apparent love of Miyazaki, but I suspect he’d admit the flaws I find annoying are flaws.
Unless you’re arguing that somehow this would make John Lasseter unable to perceive these flaws, I don’t understand the relevance of this.
How, precisely, does this relate to anything I’ve said in this thread?
So what? Do you think he was lying when he said that?
Here’s the thing: a carpenter who can’t make a level table is an incompetent carpenter. No amount of finish is going to change that, and no one is ever going to defend a carpenter who can’t make a level table as one of the greatest carpenters of all time. So the comparison you’re making here isn’t just that Miyazaki isn’t to your taste, but that he’s fundamentally incompetent. Now, that may be your personal opinion, but I kinda think it’s bullshit. You’ve put yourself forward in this thread as an expert, which is something I’m certainly not. So I’m going to look to other experts in the field, people whose expertise I can verify, and what do you know? Not a single one of them agrees with you. What you’re pointing out may be flaws, but given the level of praise that Miyazaki routinely gets, it appears to be more on the level of, say, having the grain of wood not match exactly - something that most people might agree isn’t perfect, but that hardly matters in the larger scheme of things. That doesn’t “prove” that you’re wrong, but it’s a pretty good argument that I shouldn’t take your criticisms too seriously.
I’m pretty sure that vast majority of animated feature films are anime. How many animated films are made in the US every year? Half a dozen or so? I’m not sure what the volume is in Europe, but it seems like Japan produces that many animated movies in a given week.
I used to know a guy who was a herpetologist. He hated the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where they’re in the pit with all the snakes, because he could tell that none of the snakes were native to North Africa.
The only reason anyone ever used any system other than the circular polarization Disney uses, is because nobody had yet invented a way to make cheap glasses for circular polarization. We now have those cheap glasses, so the only reason anyone still uses any other system is because they’ve got old equipment they don’t want to bother replacing. The circular polarization system is just plain superior.
And I don’t know about your theaters, but I have a couple of pairs of the glasses sitting right in front of me, and nobody said a word when I walked out of the theater with them. The second movie I went to, I asked if I could have a discount for re-using my previous glasses, and they said no, because the extra cost is due to the cost of the projection system. And now, even the on-campus second-run theater has a 3D system, and they can afford to give out the glasses at a $1 ticket price. The glasses are too cheap to worry about.
Only because you continue to repeat patently false and unsupported statements. And you can hardly disclaim equal responsibility for the hijack. It takes two to tango.
This is the crux of our disagreement, and once again, I think you have it exactly backwards. In the previous versions of 3D (as I explained at great length in the other thread) everything about 3D was too expensive to be sustainable in the long run, without doubling ticket prices. The films were popular, but not enough of them were good enough or popular enough to build a widespread and permanent 3D infrastructure.
Now all the costs associated with 3D are much lower, and the 3D experience and films are much better. The permanent ability to show 3D is now being built. I have shown that 3D films are immensely popular, and that when people have the choice, they overwhelmingly choose 3D over the same film in 2D.
I claim that the popularity of virtually all the digital 3D films of the last four years is exactly the “pent-up public demand” you say doesn’t exist. Your notion that Hollywood is somehow forcing people to take something they don’t want or aren’t interested in is ludicrous.
Once again, you speak without knowledge. The glasses of the RealD system, which as I said are by far the most popular, are discarded or recycled, not reused by the theaters. You are allowed to take them home. (Of the systems in multiplexes, only Dolby 3D glasses are collected and reused. They are a very small minority now.) And yes, the glasses **are **free. You are paying the extra money for the entire production and exhibition infrastructure, not *just *the glasses. Otherwise they would waive the extra fee if you brought your own glasses. Try that sometime and see if it works.
In the mythical Gaffaverse. Shame we all live in the real world.
So I take it that rather than calmly accept my simple solution, you’d prefer to moan and whine that the world isn’t precisely as you’d like it to be and that therefore the rest of us should give up 3D?
Is it your contention that there were no glasses wearers among the millions of people who’ve been to 3D movies and not complained? Got a cite for that?
Finally! You got something **half **right! AMC has announced that it will 1) convert all its theaters to digital, and that 2) one third of them will be 3D. It will take at least three years before 1,500 of AMC’s 4,600 screens are 3D. And there are other chains that will take longer. It’s unlikely that all North American movie theaters will be 3D capable in less than a decade, if ever. And I predict that it will be many years before 3D-only releases are common.
Until then you won’t have to avail yourself of that little piece of black tape that is so unbearably awful for you. And the rest of us will be watching 3D movies, whether you like it or not.
Possibly, Lasseter looks past the flaws. I don’t know why he, or any competent animator would, or could. They are glaring, huge flaws.
That would requiring knowing John Lasseter’s mind. But blurbs are notorious for being effusive praise. Anything less is not generally included in the notes for a boxed set.
Exactly. Jerky animation is a shaky, wobbly table.
Right. I’m the guy pointing out that this over-praised animator is a poor craftsman.
No, I’m saying that scenes in his films contain glaring, off-putting flaws. This would go a lot easier if you and other people in this thread would avoid inaccurately re-stating my position. And, even more annoyingly, avoid acknowledging that you have done so when it is pointed out. I have said that he is a talented storyteller. I called him a “great designer”. I said “the design and storytelling almost (but not quite) overcame the poor animation”. I said “Miyazaki’s films are filled with technically bad animation. Animation that detracts from the story and design of otherwise good work.”
I never said he was “fundamentally incompetent”. Argue with what I said, not your re-interpretation.
No, these are things I noticed in animation many years before I had ever animated a single frame. When I was ten I didn’t watch “Scooby-Doo” because the animation sucked. One doesn’t have to be an expert to notice these flaws. They are obvious to anyone honest enough to admit they exist. The Hamster King loves Miyazaki’s work, but acknowledges the very same flaws I’m pointing out. I suspect he and John Lasseter share the same point of view, that the good outweighs the bad.
Show me where one of them has been asked about the flaws I see.
We’ll disagree on that then. The Wikipedia article on animation opening paragraph:
Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. It is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in a number of ways.
That is pretty succinct. An I say that, a lot of Miyazaki’s work fails to do exactly that. It is an inadequately “rapid display of a sequence of images” and fails to accomplish the “illusion of movement”.
You can’t get more basic than that.
It seems more likely that you just don’t wish to and will look for any excuse to dismiss my criticisms.
If you’re churning out poorly animated films, you can do it quickly and make a ton of them.
I remind you of an expert? OK, I can accept that. But as I said above, I was noticing bad animation when I was a pre-teen, before I had acquired any professional expertise. Three frame per second movements and two frame flapping lips are just crappy animation no matter how fervently you and Miyazaki’s other fans might wish otherwise.
They may not be that great, but come on! There is some very expressive and convincing character animation in these scenes, “frame rate modulation” notwithstanding. These clips are from Miyazaki’s newest film Ponyo, which does not use any CG, in contrast to his previous three (Mononoke, Sen, Howl). Plus, those clips above are the fullest you’ll get when it comes to Japanese animation–isn’t that a disappointment. Those guys, those damn J*ps, they need to take a physics course or something…they can’t seem to replicate reality like us Americans do…how dare they…
To think that there are animators and animation buffs who can only tolerate the Disney paradigm, with no room for Norstein, Grimault, Atamanov, or Miyazaki…it’s a shame. It’s like condemning the paintings of Kahlo, Picasso, or Duchamp for their lack of convincing realism.
gaffa, are you asserting that Miyazaki is* incapable* of doing lipsynch, smooth motion or the various other “flaws” you see in his work (and, apparently AFAICT, all anime), rather than not doing so as a stylistic choice?