It's not necessarily like that everywhere, though. Disney helped destroy the artform in this country when Michael Eisner sold off all it's drawing equipment. Studio Ghibli has continued to champion hand-drawn animation, and has had great success with it, including in the US. Japan has no shortage of people expert in what we've come to call STEM, but they haven't tried to banish all their traditions.
Saturday, June 15, 2024
Call it a draw
One of my readymade Old Man complaints is the unwelcome standardization of the animated film. It's with some alarm that I realize that a generation or two has grown up with computer animation and virtually nothing else. And with a few exceptions the animation on offer has been ugly and unimaginative. Nonetheless, for kids now that's your first taste of cinema.
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One of Jer's pet peeves is the fact that much the same has also happened to video games, but so much faster since animated films have been around much longer. Video game animation was often simple in the early days, simplicity enhanced by clever puzzles, interesting characters, and distinctive stories. Eventually, while it became possible for the studios to develope more realistic appearing characters and backgrounds it was at the cost of the elements that made the games enjoyable for him and me too, come to think of it.
He tells me that a number of the people on the game boards have very fancy computer equipment that use the most expensive video cards. These guys complain if they see the slightest hint of screens refreshing or if there's any drift in scene changes. And God forbid if any character looks the least bit 'uncanny valleyish'.
Happily, there are places outside the US that still nurture film animators and their works. Animation Obsessive has a good article about several fascinating productions. I really enjoyed the bits of 'Hoffmaniada' made in Russia over the course of seventeen years. Now that's dedication.
Video game development is kind of a paradox. The first of these games came out in the early 70s, and for the next 10-15 years everything was pretty much either a rectangle or at least made out of rectangles. Now they can show detailed woodgrain in a creaky old staircase and knights in very reflective armor. This evolution came about as a result of a lot of artists and programmers putting in long hours and wrestling with all these challenges. You have to admire that, but in some ways it might cut down on their options as well. They have to go in now with much more planning and money than they used to.
Gaming has become much more wired over the past 10-20 years. It used to be that you could only play with people who were in the same room as you. Now young guys play video games with strangers who live many miles away. That's not a bad thing in itself, of course. I do see how it could lead to a certain kind of perfectionist attitude, though.
Hoffmaniada looks gorgeous, with some great chiaroscuro effects. I'm glad the animator stuck with it for the time it took to come to completion. That's another thing about animation here. Just try to sell any big studio on an ETA Hoffman adaptation.
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