Animated feature films

[kid cue]

Originally Posted by Sean

And in fact, if you watch the special features "making of" stuff on the Open Season dvd, you'll hear some talk about how we set up the show to allow us to incorporate more of the traditional, 2D artistic principles into it than was previously possible in 3D films. It's something we're always trying to push towards because it affords us more artistic creativity whereas cg animation tends to have inherent artistic limitations to it.

What are these "inherent artistic limitations"? I was thinking that the point of most cg animation, whether in "animated" features like Stuart Little or used for special fx, is to appear seamless with live action. 2D animation is full of an illustrative quality that screams "cartoons" and "kids" to people who aren't familiar with underground works and anime, as if it's frivolous and fake.

[Sean]

Originally Posted by kid cue

What are these "inherent artistic limitations"? I was thinking that the point of most cg animation, whether in "animated" features like Stuart Little or used for special fx, is to appear seamless with live action. 2D animation is full of an illustrative quality that screams "cartoons" and "kids" to people who aren't familiar with underground works and anime, as if it's frivolous and fake.

I'm under a tight deadline so I can't go too in depth at the moment, but where character animation is concerned, in traditional hand drawn animation, you have the artistic freedom to design each drawing in whatever way you need in order to create the caricature of emotions and performances you're trying to achieve. Essentially, you can keep shapes simple, clear and appealing in order to keep the delivery of your performance simple, clear and appealing. For example, in cg, you're typically restrained by the fact that you're working with an animation rig that's based on realistic physical limitations. All you can do is rotate a joint wherever it exists on the rig, and the results of rotating the joint as you need to is what you're stuck with. So say rotating an arm up to point at something creates an unappealing bump on the character's shoulder....well, that bump is stuck there, even if, from an artistic point of view, it breaks up a clean line you're trying to create in order for the point to read as clearly as possible. In traditional animation, you would simply draw that clean line to get a more appealing shape that reads clearly.

What you're referring to is more an issue of what your particular goals are. For special effects, or integrating a realistic animated character into a live action film, of course cg will get you better results, but even so, if you're creating an animated character performance in any film, you're still limited by the technically created artistic shortcomings of the computer as a tool. On Stuart Little, there were many occasions where I wanted to do something that would have been artistically appealing and simple to achieve in 2D, but couldn't because of the rig's limitations.

[the mongoose]

With movies like Sin City, 300, and Grindhouse....the line is beginning to blur.....I think.

But it's like, my friends started watching A Scanner Darkly, got confused/frustrated/bored by it, and told me to "turn the stupid cartoon off and put on a real movie".