Escapay wrote:What your stance is on films that incorporate both? Do you adjust your degree of hatred based on how much or how little CGI is used within a production? Or, because it has CGI at all, you must hate it and criticize it? Is
The Black Cauldron a better film than
Tangled simply by virtue of being primarily hand-drawn? Would you have to hate
Beauty and the Beast because the ballroom sequence features hand-drawn characters in a computer-generated environment? Or, to use a new-age Disney film,
The Princess and the Frog, which features hand-drawn characters against digitally-rendered backgrounds throughout the majority of its presentation? An artist wasn't drawing every little leaf in the bayou, they had a computer help with it. What becomes of the film now? Of any animated Disney film since 1985? Virtually all of them has featured computer-based elements in its production, some apparent, some not so apparent. Where do we draw the line, if such a line even needs to be drawn?
Well it's not like I've always had this bitter vendetta against CG movies. My stance with CGI in Disney films is that I was always happy with it back when Disney used it to
enhance their 2D films, not
replace them. It was always understandable how CGI could help in things that couldn't easily be done just with hand-drawn animation. Things such as the carpet's very elaborate pattern in
Aladdin, the stampede in
The Lion King, or the fight with the Hydra in
Hercules where it had to grow so many heads every time Herc chopped one off. I even favored the experimental type stuff like Silver in
Treasure Planet having a CG robotic arm. CGI in those movies was always used as a tool for very specific things, but never something used to take the place of an entire art form or the need and artistic value of drawing characters by hand. The problem with studios like the Disney of today is that they're threatening to make computer animated films into the very definition of "animation", and it is absolutely absurd that every single animated character now has to be a computer model in order to be considered acceptable to the studios or the general public (and not just for very specific characters to be blended into a 2D film). In fact out of the many CG movies out there today, I'll bet you could find quite a few with no real argument story-wise for why they
couldn't be hand-drawn, except that they have to be so by studio demand. That said, I still believe that
Frozen should not have been forced by Disney into being another 100% CGI film when the CGI could be restricted to the things that absolutely need it.
All-in-all, I'd probably be enjoying the animation world so much better if CGI were still taking a back seat to 2D animation. Would I hate CG films so much if the original
Toy Story had been the only one of it's kind, or Pixar the only studio of it's kind. No, but I hate them now for consuming the animation market with their imposing threat of self-superiority that wants to make 2D animation as a film making art go the way of black and white movies. When black and white cartoons went to color, it didn't replace the art of hand-drawn. It only enhanced it. That's what CGI used to do for hand-drawn as well.
Escapay wrote:
The Black Cauldron (1985)
The Great Mouse Detective (1986)
Oliver & Company (1988)
The Little Mermaid (1989)
The Rescuers Down Under (1990)
Beauty and the Beast (1991)
Aladdin (1992)
The Lion King (1994)
Pocahontas (1995)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)
Hercules (1997)
Mulan (1998)
Tarzan (1999)
Fantasia 2000 (1999)
The Emperor's New Groove (2000)
Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)
Lilo & Stitch (2002)
Treasure Planet (2002)
Brother Bear (2003)
Home on the Range (2004)
The Princess and the Frog (2009)
Winnie the Pooh (2011)
That's a pretty accurate listing of what my own personal Disney canon for animated features has been (minus the ones from Walt's days).
Escapay wrote:Blanket statements like "if it's CGI and it's from Disney, it needs to be criticized" do little to foster positive discussion on this forum; if anything, it serves to further alienate members. Surely we can find a common ground in which we embrace what we love about Disney, without having to constantly slam and belittle anything that does not fit within one's questionable, inconsistent criteria for what constitutes "Disney" at all. And even if such a discussion/debate regarding factors of the company that people dislike were to take place, it can be done without some of the juvenile attitudes in question.
Well I'd be more than happy to be involved in more positive discussions with people that fit with the things I agree with and like. Only problem is, there are a lot of things about animation today that I
don't like, and a lot of what I like about animation now seems to be in the past. And wherever I go on the internet, all people ever want to talk about is today's New-Age Disney and their CG movies, and I guess here is no exception.
