What is GOOD animation?

[stlewis75]

All of the animation everyone has mentioned here is good in some way. Though it may not appeal to you, if it's available, it was most likely created by trained professionals who were able to accomplish what they hoped to with it. You may not like the design or the limited movement, but that's what was chosen and what fit the studio's price range for that project.

I teach an animation class, and believe me when I say it becomes VERY apparent what the difference is between good animation and bad animation when you're dealing with students who are giving it a shot for their first time. If you're just flipping through TV channels and watching animated films, you may have never even see bad animation... but I do... every day.

[Zoltack]

It's quite simple to point out bad animation and good animation.

South Park - Bad Animation
Bambi - Good Animation

I think it's quite obvious what the difference is.

[Prince Eric]

Again, I do love some anime. Spirited Away definitely brought across a whole lot of emotion for me. Great film. But again, my personal opinion is for animation to be all over the place. I just love stuff like The Incredibles, The Genie in Aladdin, Hercules or Tarzan.

Then it's really not the medium that's too blame, now is it? Hercules and Tarzan were the least emotionally involving to me. Their animation was gorgeous, but in the case of Hercules, that really didn't amount to much when it came to humanizing the artwork.

[Karushifa]

One thing I really like if it is animated well is atmospherics - weather, clouds, fog, light, etc. Princess Mononoke and Howl's Moving Castle, for example, have some amazing moments where not much is happening except that the environment is changing, and they are some of the most gorgeous scenes I've seen in any film.

[VanessaFan]

I was wondering about something...

In The Little Mermaid... The scene where the animals attacks Vanessa. Example the 3 pelicans who drops water on her. If you takes the frames step by step, you'll see that almost each frame wll have the pelican move but evry
second frame Vanessa moves. Does anyone knows why they made it this way? And what it's called...

[Karushifa]

I was wondering about something...

In The Little Mermaid... The scene where the animals attacks Vanessa. Example the 3 pelicans who drops water on her. If you takes the frames step by step, you'll see that almost each frame wll have the pelican move but evry
second frame Vanessa moves. Does anyone knows why they made it this way? And what it's called...

Sounds like Vanessa was animated "on the twos" (i.e., twelve different poses for 24 frames of film per second) and the pelicans "on the ones" (24 different poses/second). I'm not an animation expert, but it sounds as if the animators were trying to emphasize the movement of the pelicans over those of Vanessa, and wanted their motions to be more fluid. Interesting

[VanessaFan]

[/quote]
Sounds like Vanessa was animated "on the twos" (i.e., twelve different poses for 24 frames of film per second) and the pelicans "on the ones" (24 different poses/second). I'm not an animation expert, but it sounds as if the animators were trying to emphasize the movement of the pelicans over those of Vanessa, and wanted their motions to be more fluid. Interesting [/quote]

Yearh, I guess you're right... I've always wondered why the pelicans were moving on every frame, while Vanessa was only on the seconds... HeH. But I just love that scene.

[Lord Yupa]

This is what Miyazaki said in an interview in 1988:
"There is no limit to the techniques of animation. You can make animation without drawing a picture. If you put a camera somewhere, and continue to film a frame, meaning 1/24 second, per day with the same angle, you can make a movie of about 15 seconds after a year. If you continue doing so in Tokyo, where there are a great many changes, it should be a very valuable work. What kind of film will we get, if we keep filming a nude person one frame per month, from the time that person is a newborn?

There are countless techniques, and classy and excellent short works are still produced somewhere in the world. But we can pretty much say that our popular animation is made in the technique of cel animation.

Cel, meaning celluloid sheet, has become vinyl chloride sheet, but we still use the abbreviation today. In this technique, a picture on paper is transferred to cel (by adhering carbon via heat treatment). Then it is colored with water-based vinyl paint and filmed with the background. By the way, this technique was developed in Japan almost at the same time as in the United States.

Cel anime is a technique suitable for group work, and the images in cel anime are clear and have strong appeal. The clarity of the images at the same time means their shallowness. In other words, they are pictures with little information. You can easily tell this by looking at picture books using cels. They are appealing and easy to understand at first glance, but you soon become tired of them. A really bad drawing can become tolerable when it is made into a cel picture, and a good drawing loses its power when it is made into a cel. In short, cels make both good and bad into mediocre. This characteristic makes the mass-production (of animation) with many animators possible.

To make cel animation with a certain quality, you need a group of technicians with talent and patience. At the core of this group are animators who give movement to pictures. And how difficult it is to foster a group of good animators! Some say that animators are the same as actors, but if so, an improvised play at a year-end party would be better. The basic laws such as gravity, inertia, elasticity, fluidity, perspective, timing, etc.[3] There are too many lessons you have to learn before you think about acting, and animators get lost in the mountains of homework. It is not too much to say that if there are 100 animators, 100 of them can not make animation acting. If a director of an animated movie demands that characters in the movie act, he will immediately fall into distrusting animators and get frustrated. Rotoscope, which is a technique to draw poses and timing from live action film, was developed in the United States and the Soviet Union because the limits of animators' imagination and ability to draw was clear from early on. However, if you just transplant live-action into drawings, even the acting of a great actor can change into something peculiarly slimy and indistinct. That's because acting is not just movement. It is made of the subtle changes of shadows and lights, texture which can not be expressed with cels, wetness and dryness, and a succession of signs which are faster than one twenty-fourth of second.

Skillful staff members demanded the model actors to act in a more simple style that expresses itself through body silhouette. They thought that the acting style developed for theaters was better suited for cel animated movies than the style developed for movies. That is why the gestures of Disney characters look like a musical, and why (the characters in) Snow Queen [a film by Lev Atamanov] act like (they are in) girls' ballet. There are many disastrous failures in rotoscope. Bakshi's The Lord of Rings could not be a success when it was based on poor live-action. Also, Disney's Cinderella has proved that seeking "more realistic" movements using rotoscope itself is a double-edged sword. The search for "more reality" just expressed a common American girl, and it lost the symbolism of the story more than Snow White did.

In Japan, rotoscope didn't become popular. It isn't just because of economic reasons. I myself hate this technique. If animators are enslaved by live-action films, the excitement in the animator's work would lessen by half. Though we can also say that we didn't have an acting style after which we could model. Bunraku, kabuki, nou, or kyougen are too far apart from our works, and Japanese musicals or ballet which are just borrowed (from the West) didn't interest us.[4] We have been animating with our passion, hunches, and feeling, based on various experiences of movies, manga, and others, as much as time and money allowed us. Gestures (of the characters) tend to be constructed by symbolizing and breaking characters' feelings down to facial parts (i.e., eyes, eyebrows, mouths, and noses) and reconstructing them. But we tried to overcome the decay of symbolization by animating through "identifying with the character" or "becoming the character."

You shouldn't look down on the simple power (of such an approach). It is far from style or sophistication, but if you can capture the true essence of what you should express, a picture with a true feeling has power. I love such power much better than the smooth movement of rotoscope.

Let's get back to Japanese anime. Japanese anime make manga into anime, use character designs of manga, absorb the vitality of manga, and are made by staff members who wanted to be manga writers. Of course, there are exceptions, but I think that this is pretty much the case in general. Before 1963, when the TV series (anime) started, there were other styles of Toei Animation Studio than manga, but the mass production of TV series and manga severed this tradition (of Toei style). Based on manga, Japanese anime started as TV series with weekly production schedules, which is overwhelmingly shorter than feature-length movies. Due to limited time and budget, the number of drawings had to be reduced as much as possible. The lack of staff brought the mass introduction of unskilled and inadequate workers. That wasn't limited to animators. It was the case for all the divisions including direction and script, and there was unprecedented padding and promotion of staff. The horrific thing is that this trend continued for 20 years.[5]

(A TV anime) has to be ready in time for the TV broadcast at any cost. And we have to make the product by using "movement," the biggest characteristic of animation, as little as possible. The reason why such a strange (style of) animation was accepted by viewers was probably because the image language of manga, an older brother of anime, had already penetrated society.

Japanese animation started when we gave up moving. That was made possible by introducing the methods of manga (including gekiga). The technique of cel anime was suited to obvious impacts, and it was designed so that the viewers would see nothing but powerfulness, coolness, and cuteness. Instead of putting life into a character with gestures or facial expressions, (character design) was required to express all the charm of the character with just one picture.

Strangely, theorists who justified this situation appeared during these times. There were people who said that it was time for limited animation, or that a still picture was a new expression and we no longer need movement.

Not only the design and personalities of the characters, but time and space were also completely deformed. The time needed for a ball thrown by a pitcher to reach the catcher's mitt was limitlessly extended by the passion put into the ball. And animators pursued powerful movement (to express) this extended moment. Depicting a narrow ring as a huge battlefield was justified as it is equal to a battlefield for the hero. Strangely, the way of such storytelling has become closer to koudan.[6] How these animations resemble the depiction of Heichachiro Magaki running up the stone steps of Atago mountain on horseback.[7]

The role of the techniques to move pictures was limited to emphasizing and decorating the extended and skewed time and space. The depiction of characters' action in everyday life, which (Japanese anime) was not good at to start with, was actively eliminated as something unnecessary and out-of-date. Absurdity was strongly pursued. The criteria for judging an animator's capability was changed to (the capability to animate) battles, matches, or detailed drawing of machines, an emphasis on the power of any arm, from nuclear to laser weapon. If there were a depiction of (character's) feeling, the method of manga was easily borrowed to get it done with music, angle, or decorating one still picture, without motion. It came to be considered as a rather uninteresting sequence, a section where the animators could take a rest. Animators became more inclined to judge only on the flashiness of the movement when they considered the value of the sequence they were to animate.

For example, a hero who can only sneer, since if he smiles that would screw his face up. A heroine with huge eyes that suddenly turn into dots without any connection between these two types of eyes. Extremely deformed characters with no sense of existence pretend to be cool in a deformed colorful world by extending time as much as they want-- that has become the major characteristic of Japanese anime.

When this expressionism first appeared, it was justified by "passion" which was in fashion at that time. Indeed, when the audience got excessively involved with the piece of work, and sympathized with it more than the work expressed, this method was overwhelmingly supported (by the audience). Kyojin no Hoshi in the high-growth era was one example[8]. However, as the passion wore out, it merely became the easiest pattern of technique. And to turn around the adverse situation, expression in anime more and more became excessively decorative. At first, two robots were combined to be a robot, then it became a three robot combination, then five, and finally the twenty-six robot combination. Character design became more and more complicated. Huge eyes had seven-colored highlights. More and more shadows were painted in different colors, and hair was painted in bright colors of every possible shade. It makes animators suffer, by increasing the workload of those who are paid by the quantity of animation they drew. The pattern has become prevalent to a frightening degree.

Maybe I, too, am exaggerating (the situation of) Japanese anime. Not all Japanese anime is run by excessive expressionism. I do not say that there was no effort made to establish their own (style) of acting under various constraints. I do not say that there was no effort made to depict time and space with a sense of existence. I do not say that there was no effort made to refuse to be a subordinate of manga. However, most of them followed this trend of expressionism, and many of the young staff have joined the anime industry because they admired this excessive expressionism.

As the formula of "anime = excessive expressionism" becomes widely accepted by society, anime hit a wall. In the same way that koudan cannot meet the needs of today's audience, anime creators lost the support of the audience. They brought it on themselves by losing their flexibility and humility towards the diversity of the world. Even so, many of them are still unaware of the strangeness of their views on anime. They are still convinced that excessive expression is what makes anime appealing.

Actually today in 1987, excessive expressionism has been forced to retreat as it loses share with the end of the anime boom. The remainder has moved to videos, but the market remains small although it (the video market) has been hyped a lot as a new medium. It has been pigeonholed as a market for anime maniacs by anime maniacs in typical reduced reproduction. Rather than feeling pity, I cannot help being reminded of the frog with a ballooned stomach in Aesop's fable. Meanwhile, there is now a strong trend in the TV anime world to return to works for children, as we regret that we have raised the age of the targeted audience too much. However, none of the conditions that created the expressionism of Japanese anime have changed. Because the conditions which leade to anime using few moving pictures haven't changed, many animators think that it is just a degradation, rather than think that they are making anime to please children.

There is a phrase, "Saturday Morning Animator," in the United States. On Saturday morning, TV is filled with animated programs so that it can babysit while parents sleep late. It is a self-mocking phrase of the animators who make such programs. After the boom has ended, it is likely to be very difficult for Japanese animators to rediscover their work as a craft that they can put their love into."
http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/interv ... anime.html

Also, read what I had to say on another thread on this forum:
"If all you care about is how many images they use per second, then you're pretty shallow. The quality of the animation has little to do with how many drawings are used.

Anyway, as a student of animation, this is what I can tell you:
DIsney films are done on 1s (24 drawings per second) much of the time because they use rotoscope, which is tracing over live-action footage frame-by-frame. Hand-drawn animated films from Studio Ghibli (which never use rotoscope), in comparison, are done on 2s (12 drawings per second at 24 frames per second), 3s (8 drawings per second at 24 frames per second), and even occasionally 4s (6 drawings per second at 24 frames per second), going to the 1s only during action scenes or scenes with really subtle and detailed movement because that's their style, and each different motion rate has its own unique and wonderful feel. It's a more abstract, impressionistic approach to movement compared to the realism of Disney, Don Bluth, or Ralph Bakshi, and is extremely similar to the work of the Fleischer Bros., Warner Bros., and UPA in their stylization of the medium."
http://www.ultimatedisney.com/forum/vie ... 473#225473

[Karushifa]

Excellent and very interesting article, Lord Yupa

I really liked the point he made about how Japanese animators' frame of reference, so to speak, was classic Japanese theater styles, all of which are highly stylized in various ways. So the fact that Japanese drama itself is very impressionistic is an interesting reason why many Japanese directors have not embraced the rotoscope approach.

I suppose for them the task of trying to imitate life without directly reproducing it is a great challenge, and truly makes animation an art form that takes much dedication and skill to master. How very cool

[Artlad]

DIsney films are done on 1s (24 drawings per second) much of the time because they use rotoscope, which is tracing over live-action footage frame-by-frame.

Actually, in every interview i've read with the nine old men and others at Disney they all made the distinction that what they did was NOT rotoscoping. they filmed live action reference and studied that as a guide for their animation. much as a student in a life drawing class would study a live model in front of them and draw them on the paper. I was just reading and interview with Milt Kahl in the book "Walt's People" where he says that when they tried rotoscoping, it came out awful because it didnt have the life in it. Cinderella seems to be targeted with this the most because it was the first film that walt actually shot an entire live action reference film for. But it was for reference and the animators did not trace over the live action.

[Jules]

Exactly! Artlad is right. DISNEY DO NOT USE ROTOSCOPE. WHEN WILL SOMEBODY LEARN THAT!?


Let me tell you this. Recently I rented an animated film called 'Heavy Metal' (1980). It's an adult-themed film and is rated 15.

In 'The Making Of Heavy Metal' featurette, the producers comment on parts of the film where human animation is done in rotoscope.
As if to hide their shame, they suddenly say "Disney use this aswell in their movies."

Oh! For goodness sake this can't go on! DISNEY HAVE NEVER USED ROTOSCOPE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


(Did I apply enough exclamation to my previous sentence?)

[Escapay]

DISNEY HAVE NEVER USED ROTOSCOPE

While Disney never used rotoscoping of the live-action reference footage they shot for their films, take a gander at the entire dance sequence of "The Phony King of England" from Robin Hood. You've got sequences from a few Disney films being rotoscoped with different characters:

1. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (parts with an unusually tall Maid Marian dancing with several animals)
2. The Jungle Book (parts with Little John and Lady Cluck)
3. The Aristocats (parts with Maid Marian, Robin Hood, and the animal band)

Even at the end, there's a carriage that takes Robin and Marian away...and it looks like something out of Cinderella...

Escapay

[Jules]

I know what you mean. I've noticed it loads of times. But then, Robin Hood isn't one of Disney's best films , is it?

Anyway, thank you for pointing it out Escapay!

[Escapay]

I know what you mean. I've noticed it loads of times. But then, Robin Hood isn't one of Disney's best films , is it?

Anyway, thank you for pointing it out Escapay!

No problem.

I'd agree that RH isn't one of Disney's best, but it's got more heart and fun than some of its predecessors, at least IMO. I think at times I actually ranked it above the likes of Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio, and even Snow White...

Escapay

[Jules]

Well, I wouldn't rank it above Sleeping Beauty.

But believe or not, those two movies are linked!

George Bruns took out the climactic music of the climax in Sleeping Beauty in the fight between Prince Philip and Maleficent and re-used it in The Sword in the Stone in the battle between Merlin and Madame Mim.

He would later use it in Robin Hood, in the fight with Robin Hood and the Sheriff, and when the tower catches fire. I don't think it was wise to re-use it so many times but that's the way it is.

[MerXAN]

just look at The Little Mermaid

[mcduck]

Good animation: when a person or a persons make more than a thousand times the same drawing and still the same (Ghibli S. Pixar S.)


Bad animation: when a company push hard a person/s to draw just for the profit (last 10 years Disney S.)

[Elladorine]

Wow, interesting thread.

IMHO, what divides animation between what's good and what isn't is the amount of appeal it carries. As many said here, it's more than just number of frames per second, the design, etc.

So the real question should be "are you looking at moving pictures or are you looking at pictures that move you?"

[FantasiaMan]

I've been an animator for years & after learning from some of the best in the business, I know that GOOD animation isn't about movement or fluidity or even how beautiful the drawing is, it's all about sincerity & believability. The audience has to believe the character is real & care for them.
Some characters such as Daffy Duck or Beavis & Butthead aren't very believable. Do you care if Daffy Duck is hit on the head or if Beavis &/or Butthead fall off a house? Right, no, because they don't act or look believable. Characters such as Snow White, Cinderella or Chihiro are believable because they act & feel real. You care for Snow White & Chihiro's well-being when they are in danger or if they are upset. Animators are technically actors with a pencil, they have to know how the character feels in a certain situation & be in there shoes.

Appeal is a whole other story. Beavis & Butthead's crude & ugly design, along with the fact that they aren't characters you would care about, makes them unbelievable. The Simpsons, crude as they are, are actually somewhat believable. The Simpsons go through the same emotions & routines as we do. They care for eachother & go through believable situations such as divorce or death. Even though Chihiro's design is beautiful & realistic, it doesn't mean that she is believable, it's her personality & her similarities to us that make her believable. She feels human.

[Elladorine]

I've been an animator for years & after learning from some of the best in the business, I know that GOOD animation isn't about movement or fluidity or even how beautiful the drawing is, it's all about sincerity & believability. The audience has to believe the character is real & care for them.
Some characters such as Daffy Duck or Beavis & Butthead aren't very believable. Do you care if Daffy Duck is hit on the head or if Beavis &/or Butthead fall off a house? Right, no, because they don't act or look believable.

There are different levels or types of believability. . . characters like Daffy or Beavis and Butthead our basically extensions of our ids which is why some people find them appealing. . . but yeah, sincerety is what I was attempting to grasp with my previous comment, people have to find a way to identify with them and thus care for them.

Of course, not all great animation is character driven or even story driven-- just look at some of the segments of Fantasia.