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Armchair General

Death of animation?

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The Paperman short is great example of how the industry is moving forward.

 

Let's get a few things down first. Hand drawn art as a form of animation will always exist and be made, just like the range of other ways of animation (live drawing in sand, stop-motion, cut paper, claymation, etc). This is how art students still learn to animate - they're the fundamentals, the basics. Will handdrawn animation ever be commercially viable for big budget blockbusters? I doubt it. Perhaps Disney will turn out another one as a curiosity, or another studio will try their hand at it for reasons of nostalgia, but I don't see a big boom of it, like we had in the 80s and 90s. 3D has taken over, that should be obvious.

 

But 'death', certainly not. Just looking around on Youtube shows that there is still so much handdrawn animating being done. It'll stay that way, and hey, maybe we'll see more cool fusion stuff like Paperman popping up. I'm certainly for that!

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The Paperman short is great example of how the industry is moving forward.

 

Let's get a few things down first. Hand drawn art as a form of animation will always exist and be made, just like the range of other ways of animation (live drawing in sand, stop-motion, cut paper, claymation, etc). This is how art students still learn to animate - they're the fundamentals, the basics. Will handdrawn animation ever be commercially viable for big budget blockbusters? I doubt it. Perhaps Disney will turn out another one as a curiosity, or another studio will try their hand at it for reasons of nostalgia, but I don't see a big boom of it, like we had in the 80s and 90s. 3D has taken over, that should be obvious.

 

But 'death', certainly not. Just looking around on Youtube shows that there is still so much handdrawn animating being done. It'll stay that way, and hey, maybe we'll see more cool fusion stuff like Paperman popping up. I'm certainly for that!

 

I've never considered that handdrawn animation might have a mini-renaissance fueled purely by nostalgia, but makes complete sense. We've already seen a resurgence of 'retro' ways of producing other creative mediums, why not with animation?

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The nostalgic/retro idea is how I see handdrawn animation possibly coming back someday, but even then it will still contain a lot of computer animation. 

 

Also,

 

"We were both blown away..." - Disney.com

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I went to an animation college. This kind of thing came up constantly and was consistently proven false. There's always going to be people animating by hand, it's just that most of the time it's not going to be a major release. And different people draw the line at different places. Is it no longer traditional animation if you're working with vectors in flash? If your lineart is done digitally? If you're painting cels digitally instead of by hand?

 

Also, it's pretty frequently overlooked that CG poly model animation is pretty much an America-centric thing since so few studios outside of Disney, Pixar, and Dreamworks have the budget to do it well. How much CG anime is out there?

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A couple of disappointing European attempts made short work of that.

 

Now that I think about it, there is still tons of 2D animation being done all over the world - way, way more than 3D. Just think of all the cartoons out there, the entire anime industry, but also the arthouse films (Brendon and the Secret of Kells, Persepolis). How in the hell did I forget that when I wrote my above post? It's only when you frame the conversation in terms of 'major cinematic release that cost upward of 20 million dollars' that hand drawn animation has petered out. Everywhere else it's still amazingly present, to the point that asking the question seems absurd.

 

Amusingly, even when we look at video games, hand drawn (or at least 'flat') animation has non-ironically, non-nostalgically been totally revived as a relevant art style.

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This is strange because I feel like traditional animation has already had a major resurgance already in the last 10 years. Even if you are drawing straight on to a PC with a wacom tablet, it's hand drawn, it's traditional. If you are skipping tweens (but even having some, like pans and such as cels were moved without redrawn in traditional features too) and drawing each frame, it's hand drawn. If anything, we have better 2D animators than ever almost because digital programs allow instant feedback. No more of that carefully flipping your penciled pages back and forth on a peg board and hoping your timing works. You can play back while you're working and have great room for experimentation without any kind of dinosaur techniques.

 

The article is just plain daft. It's focusing too much on the inbred animation industry in California and the big studios there who are increasingly becoming irrelevant. They need to have a worldwide perspective, look at whatever countries are doing, look at what students are creating, look at what is gaining a cult following. I mean hell, Japan has the biggest animation industry in whole world and it's still overwhelmingly handdrawn. They produce hundreds of books just containing frame by frame pencil tests of their features for public consumption every year.

 

And I must say, besides the style, Paperman was the same old cookie cutter short that did nothing new and was ultimately a waste of time to watch. The character designs were so bland and uninspired it hurt. The story was just doe eyes and childlike behavior that reflected adults acting like 8 year olds in "love" instead of adults in love. The animation in the U.S. has a lot of growing up to do and it's not going to happen anytime soon. The 3D part is just because there is now a pipeline set up here to reuse assets and churn things out faster for the sake of McDonald's toys and sequels, not to experiment or ever have anything meaningful created from CalArts originating studios.

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Everything I wanted to say when reading the article, Gerbil already said. Looking at Hollywood and declaring traditional animation to be dead is no different from looking at retail AAA gaming and declaring the PC market to be dead. One can only do so by ignoring people in other industries and other countries not conforming to the big-business model. It's lazy.

 

How much CG anime is out there?

 

My anime history's pretty shaky, but I think that anime experimented with full 3D in the first half of last decade. That was when you had shows like Vandread that used CG for the action sequences. By 2004 or 2005, the technology had progressed to the point that 3D models could be convincingly hand-animated as 2D and almost immediately the crappy CGI was nowhere to be found. When 3D is used in anime today, like in the Rebuild of Evangelion movies, it's only used to coordinate complicated and time-intensive scenes between hand-drawn figures.

 

The only recent anime to be full 3D are 009 RE:CYBORG and the new Berserk movies, for the sake of cost I hear, and everyone has been decrying them for their ugly art and stiff animation. It seems as though there's too much of an uncanny valley to abandon hand-drawn animation altogether.

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My anime history's pretty shaky, but I think that anime experimented with full 3D in the first half of last decade. That was when you had shows like Vandread that used CG for the action sequences. By 2004 or 2005, the technology had progressed to the point that 3D models could be convincingly hand-animated as 2D and almost immediately the crappy CGI was nowhere to be found. When 3D is used in anime today, like in the Rebuild of Evangelion movies, it's only used to coordinate complicated and time-intensive scenes between hand-drawn figures.

 

Right, but using CG to consistently animate complex objects in otherwise hand-drawn animation has been a regular thing since The Great Mouse Detective (you can go back nearly to the beginning if you take into consideration similar techniques like Stromboli's stupid traced stop-motion cart from Pinocchio or the rotating physical sets from seemingly every Fleischer cartoon for a few years). Making everything top to bottom as a CG polygonal model is pretty rare outside of America though.

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Right, but using CG to consistently animate complex objects in otherwise hand-drawn animation has been a regular thing since The Great Mouse Detective (you can go back nearly to the beginning if you take into consideration similar techniques like Stromboli's stupid traced stop-motion cart from Pinocchio or the rotating physical sets from seemingly every Fleischer cartoon for a few years). Making everything top to bottom as a CG polygonal model is pretty rare outside of America though.

 

Sorry, I wasn't clear. Shows like Vandred and HeatGuy J in the early 2000s had entirely CGI sequences for vehicles, vistas, and cityscapes, like something from ReBoot, but they weren't very popular, probably because they looked like something from ReBoot, so there never was a tipping point like Toy Story in America, when full CGI became accepted as another mainstream form of animation. Anime went back to using computer-assisted action sequences, which had improved during the intervening years, and even CGI anime movies today made on the cheap invest a lot of resources in cell-shading to hide the 3D look.

 

I'm totally blanking, there were a couple of video game movies in Japan that went entirely CGI and retained their popularity, so maybe it's a source material thing? Movies based on manga should look hand-drawn, movies based on games can look computerized (but often prefer not to).

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Golgo 13. Now there's a piece of shit.

 

That scene is brilliantly recreated in Kane & Lynch 2 though.

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I mostly remember Golgo 13 as the NES game in which Nintendo censors caught mecha-Hitler and the resurrected Third Reich but not a graphic sex scene ten minutes from the beginning.

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Not alot to add that hasn't already been said but, It's a shame that there might not be any more Disney feature lengths, but traditional animation will still survive in shorts/cartoons etc.

As pointed out already, the line between CG and hand drawn is already blurred with flash/Toon Boom etc and that stuff is still thriving from cartoons, games etc. Moving to 3d is just a different set of tools to achieve the same effect (as pointed out by John Lasseter in that article), all the same principles are used. Just watch and listen to any of the commentaries on any disney or pixar film and the animators are both talking about the same things.

 

Interesting discussion though. I love all types of animation, but especially disney. I got asked at work this week if the stack of 8 disney bluray on my desk that got delivered were for my niece. People wouldn't have batted an eyelid if they were ghibli films.. although that's a different discussion :(

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