Oh, all right. Also, to assure you, I don't hate or against CGI movies. Frozen is possibly the best CGI movie ever. I just miss 2D traditional animation. And I don't think it's fair to people treating it as a lost art.disneyprincess11 wrote:Seriously, Wade, can you not with these video reactions?
Thank you.TsWade2 wrote:Oh, all right. Also, to assure you, I don't hate or against CGI movies. Frozen is possibly the best CGI movie ever. I just miss 2D traditional animation. And I don't think it's fair to people treating it as a lost art.disneyprincess11 wrote:Seriously, Wade, can you not with these video reactions?
I would love to see Disney do Swan Lake or another Hans Christian Anderson tale. I think they could have done Thumbelina better than the Don Bluth version which although was very loyal to the original story, doesn't hold up well with age. Jodi Benson and Gary Imhoff were perfect if nothing else.filmmusic wrote: I say, get a good story* (eg. Swan lake) + exceptional hand-drawn animation like the classics (eg. Bambi) + great score and songs (think of Beauty and the Beast, Hunchback etc.) and there you go, it would be a success!!
Well, okay. Maybe Spongebob Squarepants sequel will save traditional animation even though I don't like him.MeerkatKombat wrote:I would love to see Disney do Swan Lake or another Hans Christian Anderson tale. I think they could have done Thumbelina better than the Don Bluth version which although was very loyal to the original story, doesn't hold up well with age. Jodi Benson and Gary Imhoff were perfect if nothing else.filmmusic wrote: I say, get a good story* (eg. Swan lake) + exceptional hand-drawn animation like the classics (eg. Bambi) + great score and songs (think of Beauty and the Beast, Hunchback etc.) and there you go, it would be a success!!
Frozen has definitely warmed me to CGI but I'll always prefer 2D because I grew up with it. It's ok to want 2D films - it's a great art and I can really appreciate the years of work that go into them. Whilst I have no doubt that CGI also requires a lot of work, it is easier to be in awe of (good) hand drawn. Every studio can pump out a CGI - no studio has ever done 2D animation with such widespread success as Disney (but the odd film has come close).
I don't think we should accuse anyone who still wants 2D films of being 'old fashioned'. Just like I wouldn't accuse anyone who likes the CGI Disney of being 'unloyal' to the Disney tradition or something like that.
Whilst I accept with a heavy heart that we are unlikely to see a 2D for an indefinite period, I wouldn't write it off completely. With new faces at Disney and at the correct time we will probably see it again. fingers crossed.
Believe me, I understand. Even though I loved Frozen and liked Wreck-It Ralph, I can't say it replaces 2D for me (and definitely wish Frozen had been 2D as originally intended). At the same time, that it doesn't make me upset when Sotiris posts news about the sad state 2D is in.TsWade2 wrote:I just miss 2D traditional animation. And I don't think it's fair to people treating it as a lost art.
Yeah, but it's still not fair for 2d hand drawn animation. I mean, Tangled, Wreck-It-Ralph, and Frozen are great films and a great comeback from Disney, but it's just not the same as you know what medium. So, is Bob Iger a hand drawn hater? Or is the executives including that horrible man Jay Rasulo are the hand drawn haters?Disney's Divinity wrote:Believe me, I understand. Even though I loved Frozen and liked Wreck-It Ralph, I can't say it replaces 2D for me (and definitely wish Frozen had been 2D as originally intended). At the same time, that it doesn't make me upset when Sotiris posts news about the sad state 2D is in.TsWade2 wrote:I just miss 2D traditional animation. And I don't think it's fair to people treating it as a lost art.
Source: http://www.lucknowsentinel.com/2014/01/ ... ommercialsGraham said the computer world now dominates the present-day animation scene. “Hand-drawn animation is almost defunct, so I was lucky I was able to learn on the job,” he said. [...] He said to be an animator, you have to first have a “strong grasp of hand-drawn animation or life drawing.” The challenge between traditional animation and on the computer is also drastically different as well, with varied skill sets. “You don’t have to be good at drawing to be a computer animator,” he said. “Computer animation is kind of like playing with action figures, you can just move them however you like.”
Source: http://variety.com/2014/film/internatio ... 201065308/Q: Why did you opt for a more hand-drawn animation over CGI or any other type of animation? What do you think it adds?
Jacques-Remy Girerd: Animation the world over has definitely veered towards 3D. Most animated films in the world today go for the use of that tool. Folimage and a few other companies, among them Japanese Ghibli Studio, have chosen to stick to traditional animation. It’s not that we’re trying to be clever, or that we’re backward. It’s simply that this type of 2D animation gives us extraordinary graphic freedom. We love that. At Folimage, we deliver prêt-à-porter merchandise, mixing tradition and modernity, because even though all the drawings are done by hand, and the sets are painted with a brush, everything is then reworked along the digital chain, and enhanced by the very latest software. We create the synthesis between both. For us, CGI is just another tool that allows us to make movies. It isn’t our priority tool in that respect. The important thing continues to be the ability to create beautiful stories. Technique or formatting should not guide the choice of spectators. Diversity is necessary, and must be defended. If all films looked alike that would be sad, wouldn’t it? I’ll also say that hand-drawn films possess a special sensuality, a gentleness and heat that computers can’t render. That’s what we love and appeals to us more than anything else.
Source: http://www.shanghaidaily.com/sunday/Fre ... aily.shtmlQ: You use traditional animated techniques, such as hand-drawing, instead of new technologies and CGI. What are the advantages of 2D animation?
Jacques-Remy Girerd: 2D animation is more versatile artistically. It’s also related to our studio’s history. Everyone involved with Folimage loves 2D animation and we do what we are most familiar with. But for 3D animation, the doors are not closed.
Source: http://www.animschoolblog.com/2013/12/a ... arlos.htmlQ: What are your perspectives for the 2D animation industry, in Brazil and worldwide?
Carlos Luzzi: The industry right now is very small for hand drawn animation in features, that have been crushed by CG animation. That is nothing new, but there is always a movie coming up. I’ve heard about features in development, and there are always smaller projects coming up like ads and short films. I think the interest for good animation comes from the public for the most part, regardless of the final form, be it hand drawn, CG or stop motion. I’ve always been available to migrate to CG but the funny thing is that hand drawn, storyboards or visual development projects are always coming up and don’t let me leave the drawing board.
SourcePixar Makes Painterly CG: New Research Could Change The Look of Their Films
Last summer at SIGGRAPH, Pixar presented a paper offering some clues about one of the major new directions that CG feature animation is headed. The paper, “Stylizing Animation By Example,” explored how filmmakers could achieve more expressive rendering styles that disregard the perfect boundaries of computer graphics rendering and mimic traditional painting techniques.
[. . .]
With this new technique, an artist can paint 2D illustrations over a handful of the CG keyframes (“one every 10 to 20 frames”), and the software will fill in the hundreds of inbetweens while maintaining temporal coherence and the desired painterly style. The move away from photorealism has been a longstanding goal of animation artists. David Gainey directed Fishing at PDI/DreamWorks in 1999, and more recently, John Kahrs won an Oscar for Disney’s Paperman, which explored a similar set of ideas as the Pixar paper. All kinds of rumors are being tossed around currently about upcoming Disney features that will use non-photorealistic rendering styles, and my guess is that we’re 3-5 years away until a major studio feature is released using such techniques. As for Pixar, they’ll most likely create an animated short using these rendering techniques before incorporating the technology into a feature-length project.
The elephant in the room that needs to be addressed at some point is whether changing the style of CGI to mimic traditional media is a step forward or backward for the art of computer animation. As much as some computer artists desire to eliminate the digital origins of their work, a clear and troubling division exists between CG processes devised to replicate traditional media, and a film director like Aleksandr Petrov who uses actual oil paints to create animated films. When Petrov animates in oil, the plasticity of the materials directly informs the movement of his figures. In the Pixar process, the decorative surface style is incongruously layered atop a pre-existing piece of animation. In other words, the use of different media in computer rendering doesn’t result in different animation effects because the animation is already created; it’s an utterly arbitrary aesthetic embellishment.
This dissonance between visual technique and animation remains central to the aesthetic discord in non-photorealistic rendering. While there is a certain empty attractiveness to rendering in an illustrative style, the surface seductiveness has no influence on either the film or the animation besides reducing the emotional authenticity of the artwork by distancing it further from its digital roots. Perhaps that’s the goal, but it seems to me an aesthetic dead-end.
Now this is sounding like great news when it comes to CG improvement. "Oil painting like CGI", should look great in not only Pixar films, but for WDAS as well.Warm Regards wrote:There was an interesting article on Cartoon Brew the other day:
SourcePixar Makes Painterly CG: New Research Could Change The Look of Their Films
Last summer at SIGGRAPH, Pixar presented a paper offering some clues about one of the major new directions that CG feature animation is headed. The paper, “Stylizing Animation By Example,” explored how filmmakers could achieve more expressive rendering styles that disregard the perfect boundaries of computer graphics rendering and mimic traditional painting techniques.
[. . .]
With this new technique, an artist can paint 2D illustrations over a handful of the CG keyframes (“one every 10 to 20 frames”), and the software will fill in the hundreds of inbetweens while maintaining temporal coherence and the desired painterly style. The move away from photorealism has been a longstanding goal of animation artists. David Gainey directed Fishing at PDI/DreamWorks in 1999, and more recently, John Kahrs won an Oscar for Disney’s Paperman, which explored a similar set of ideas as the Pixar paper. All kinds of rumors are being tossed around currently about upcoming Disney features that will use non-photorealistic rendering styles, and my guess is that we’re 3-5 years away until a major studio feature is released using such techniques. As for Pixar, they’ll most likely create an animated short using these rendering techniques before incorporating the technology into a feature-length project.
The elephant in the room that needs to be addressed at some point is whether changing the style of CGI to mimic traditional media is a step forward or backward for the art of computer animation. As much as some computer artists desire to eliminate the digital origins of their work, a clear and troubling division exists between CG processes devised to replicate traditional media, and a film director like Aleksandr Petrov who uses actual oil paints to create animated films. When Petrov animates in oil, the plasticity of the materials directly informs the movement of his figures. In the Pixar process, the decorative surface style is incongruously layered atop a pre-existing piece of animation. In other words, the use of different media in computer rendering doesn’t result in different animation effects because the animation is already created; it’s an utterly arbitrary aesthetic embellishment.
This dissonance between visual technique and animation remains central to the aesthetic discord in non-photorealistic rendering. While there is a certain empty attractiveness to rendering in an illustrative style, the surface seductiveness has no influence on either the film or the animation besides reducing the emotional authenticity of the artwork by distancing it further from its digital roots. Perhaps that’s the goal, but it seems to me an aesthetic dead-end.
Oh, and the PDF in the article has a lot of images showcasing this inbetweening technology.
This may not help my 2D hand drawn obsession problem, but it's very interesting. In fact, I heard Disney's upcoming movie Moana is going to be in Painterly CGI. I think this will be interesting.Warm Regards wrote:There was an interesting article on Cartoon Brew the other day:
SourcePixar Makes Painterly CG: New Research Could Change The Look of Their Films
Last summer at SIGGRAPH, Pixar presented a paper offering some clues about one of the major new directions that CG feature animation is headed. The paper, “Stylizing Animation By Example,” explored how filmmakers could achieve more expressive rendering styles that disregard the perfect boundaries of computer graphics rendering and mimic traditional painting techniques.
[. . .]
With this new technique, an artist can paint 2D illustrations over a handful of the CG keyframes (“one every 10 to 20 frames”), and the software will fill in the hundreds of inbetweens while maintaining temporal coherence and the desired painterly style. The move away from photorealism has been a longstanding goal of animation artists. David Gainey directed Fishing at PDI/DreamWorks in 1999, and more recently, John Kahrs won an Oscar for Disney’s Paperman, which explored a similar set of ideas as the Pixar paper. All kinds of rumors are being tossed around currently about upcoming Disney features that will use non-photorealistic rendering styles, and my guess is that we’re 3-5 years away until a major studio feature is released using such techniques. As for Pixar, they’ll most likely create an animated short using these rendering techniques before incorporating the technology into a feature-length project.
The elephant in the room that needs to be addressed at some point is whether changing the style of CGI to mimic traditional media is a step forward or backward for the art of computer animation. As much as some computer artists desire to eliminate the digital origins of their work, a clear and troubling division exists between CG processes devised to replicate traditional media, and a film director like Aleksandr Petrov who uses actual oil paints to create animated films. When Petrov animates in oil, the plasticity of the materials directly informs the movement of his figures. In the Pixar process, the decorative surface style is incongruously layered atop a pre-existing piece of animation. In other words, the use of different media in computer rendering doesn’t result in different animation effects because the animation is already created; it’s an utterly arbitrary aesthetic embellishment.
This dissonance between visual technique and animation remains central to the aesthetic discord in non-photorealistic rendering. While there is a certain empty attractiveness to rendering in an illustrative style, the surface seductiveness has no influence on either the film or the animation besides reducing the emotional authenticity of the artwork by distancing it further from its digital roots. Perhaps that’s the goal, but it seems to me an aesthetic dead-end.
Oh, and the PDF in the article has a lot of images showcasing this inbetweening technology.
Or the more willing they will be to milk the same thing over and over again. Look at Frozen, they are releasing the karaoke version in theaters soon.unprincess wrote:But that's why we need Disney to keep having successes like Frozen. The more confidence they gain the more the suits might be willing to allow riskier projects.
In 1,000 theatres no less.Warm Regards wrote:Or the more willing they will be to milk the same thing over and over again. Look at Frozen, they are releasing the karaoke version in theaters soon.unprincess wrote:But that's why we need Disney to keep having successes like Frozen. The more confidence they gain the more the suits might be willing to allow riskier projects.
But I like your optimism better.
(Side note: As I mentioned in the Frozen thread, I really want to see that Princess Kaguya movie. It looks fabulous.)John Lasseter Talks About Hand-Drawn Animation With Japanese TV Crew
Last month a Japanese TV crew traveled to Pixar where director Isao Takahata was treating the studio’s artists to a screening of his new Studio Ghibli film The Story of Princess Kaguya.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyyl5DsShz0
The TV show clip includes comments from screenwriter Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine, Toy Story 3) and John Lasseter. Considering that Lasseter has never expressed his feelings about the qualities of hand-drawn versus computer animation, I find little moments of unrehearsed dialogue such as this to be quite revealing. In the video, Lasseter says:
“Often times when you see something that is so hand-drawn, you’re always noticing the artist and the artwork, and it’s something inbetween you and getting caught up in the story. But not this film. This was amazing how you just get swept up in the story.”
It would be irresponsible to read too deeply into the comment without more context, but it’s a fascinating statement that, on the surface, would suggest that Lasseter believes removing the hand of the artist from a production increases the audience’s identification with the story. I would love to hear him expound on these views at length in the future. Lasseter, who started in hand-drawn animation before pioneering computer animation storytelling, would have an intriguing perspective on the topic.
That's why he changed the painterly style of Tangled and the CG/2D colored hybrid of Moana to generic CG blandness.So you're saying that John Lasseter is a liar and betrayed hand drawn animation?Sotiris wrote:^Lasseter is just reiterating his narrow-minded view that an audience can't engage with a film that's stylized. Apparently, he finds anything that's not generic "too distracting" for mainstream audiences.
