steamboatmouse: (Sleeping Beauty)
IT'S a long, tiresome, and repetitive fight in the animation field, and one that many people are already sick of. And yet, at the same time, it's a topic that very few people know about when it comes to discussing it more deeply. Many who do talk about it know nothing about the process of making an animated film. Even some people interested in or working in the animation industry know very little. Thus, we have all this build-up on the idea that 2D animation is not only just dead, but gone, forgotten, and entirely useless for animators now.

This is entirely untrue, and I guarantee you all the workers in Pixar will say the same. We've entered an age where everything can be easily accessed and portable. A copy of Maya on your laptop is convenient to carry around, while carrying a camera, scanner, paper, pencils, erasers, lightbox, and peg bar is not so easy. But this is where we get the problem - people generally think 3D is easier to do, while 2D only takes longer and costs much more.

In many ways, 3D can be easier to animate in, but this is an area often incorrectly talked about. It is more than just getting the computer to do the movements for you. Putting too much faith in the computer's ability to animate will leave actions stiff, robotic, and overall looking lifeless. Sure, 3D is supposed to look more realistic, but nothing looks more realistic in life than believable actions and movements. Pixar's John Lasseter studied the old Disney techniques religiously for the ability to make characters seem realistic through their acting. The medium does not matter.

Mike Disa couldn't have said it better: "The people who are in 3D animation now, if they don’t get very familiar with 2D animation techniques—proportion stretch, spacing, timing, silhouette, that kind of stuff—they won’t have jobs in five years. Knowing the software won’t be enough. That doesn’t mean that a 3D animator needs to know how to draw—not at all. But they need to know classic 2D animation techniques well enough to translate....And what’s going to happen is, they’re not going to work. They’re going to end up doing effects. They’re going to end up doing particles and stuff."

Animators are actors showing expression through art. The techno-savvy young animators polishing their modeling and layout skills will likely find themselves doing nothing but effects for the rest of their days if they don't take time to try out ways of expressing personality and thought.

This, however, is only the petty side of the argument. It is no longer about medium used; that is not important. So what is?

"Story, story, story," is what animator John Canemaker says. "A story well-told can be done with flip books."

Paper and pencil, computer, cut-outs, clay, whatever - nothing grabs the audience better than a good, solid story. WALL-E required thousands of hand-drawn storyboards before it got even close to the computer. What's been adding to this 2D-3D stigma is the rise in studios like Pixar and Dreamworks while Disney's 2D films went on a sudden downhill slope in the new century. With Disney's 2D department faltering in delivery, people immediately assume that 2D has lost its luster if even the original king of 2D animated movies can't keep up. DreamWorks had a brief shot at it with The Prince of Egypt, The Road to El Dorado, and Sinbad - and then quickly made up for all their losses by releasing Shrek (El Dorado, for example, only made half of what it cost to make).

Here is where we enter the biggest problem. Disney's early 2000 movies lacked much in story while DreamWorks and Pixar sped ahead with fresh 3D films. The idea started up that there was no longer a market for 2D, thus making 2D films almost completely scarce from the movie screen. 3D takes advantage of this extra space, grabbing lots of techno-savvy youth to fill in the new career slots to quickly pump out 3D films, regardless of whether or not they understand what makes an animated film great.

The one thing they forgot to include was storytellers: writers, artists, and animators who know exactly what it takes to truly grab the audience.

So let's end this idea that 2D animation is dead, or else all future animation will look dead as well. There is room for all forms of animation, but how that animation is told, not drawn or modeled, is the deciding factor on its success and impact.
steamboatmouse: (Default)
THE fact that Wall-E has taken the Oscar for best animated feature probably isn't too surprising for most people, even if you aren't a huge animation aficionado. It's no easy task to get your audience interested in an inorganic box of metal, and to grow sympathy for him at the same time. But Pixar has yet to disappoint us after nearly fifteen years, and they've certainly escalated to new heights making us think that this metal box is, simply, adorable.

What intrigued me most, though, was beyond this cute robot named Wall-E and his determination to stay with Eve. What I find even more intriguing is that no person brings this subject up when I'm talking about Wall-E with them: the fact that humans have completely trashed the Earth and must now live in a spaceship where they don't even notice their own surroundings.

It's a bit of a foreboding message, and certainly one under much heated discussion these days. The film starts with a pan past the satellites cluttered around the Earth and swoops into a dusty brown landscape, showing a result that may not be too far from our own future. There are more buildings made of trash than actual buildings left standing, and, of course, cockroaches remain superior.

But exactly what caused the Earth to turn into this barren dustbowl is probably why many viewers are focusing more on Wall-E and less on the scenery. It's never directly said, but the presence of the mega-corporation called Buy 'n Large is difficult to ignore. We see quite a lot of it in the film, from the huge store left standing on Earth, to the glowing ad structured on the moon, to how children on the spaceship are being taught their ABCs using words that only relate to BnL. Everything revolves around the company, and from its name, it's safe to say that their policy is to make things big and sell in large bulk for an extra-low price.

It's a bit uncomfortable because many large corporations in our modern day share this policy, and many of us have participated in it. Consumerism and mass production is a right we have, but its effects are starting to catch up to us. Cheap means easily disposable, but not everything that gets thrown away can just disappear.

With selling lots for as little as possible, you also have monopolies, and Buy 'n Large is definitely the only business left in this future world. Some may think that a single company poses no danger, but that single dominating company possesses quite a lot of power, to the point of brainwashing. They set the trends and there's no alternative to say otherwise and give some variety. It's not too surprising to see that all the remaining humans on the ship are wearing the exact same outfit.

There is where we get to the second critical point. Wall-E knocks off a woman's screen by accident, and only when that's gone does she notice all the lights and displays around her. She sees a pool and the outside stars for the first time now that she's no longer fixated on talking to a screen. This could certainly point out how we're spending an awful lot of time on technology these days, but I think it goes much deeper than that. In the film's world, technology makes all the decisions. The cleverly-named Auto-Pilot takes on most of the Captain's responsibilities, until the Captain finally makes the decision to do what he thinks is right, not what the technology thinks is right. Perhaps it's ironic that it takes an inhuman object to make the humans realize this, though Wall-E's desires are much simpler than those of the newer robots.

Of course, these implications on what we could become are a bit shocking, especially for seeing them in what appears to be an animated film. It does question our way of life. Still, it's a message that we can't ignore forever, and there's no guarantee that a spaceship will take us away from all our problems. But, there is still hope. A small green sprig has lived through it all, so perhaps there will always be a chance to make things right again.

Thus, the message: only our honest, human decisions in what we do will determine the future of the Earth. And a cute little robot can be a big help, too.

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Steamboat Mouse Animation

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A journal on a young animation student's thoughts on animated films, shorts, and the industry above it.

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