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    #26
    Snow White

    Heh... watching some clips of Dumbo, and I have to say I've never realized the correspondence between Timothy Q. Mouse and George Constanza. Or is it just me?

    Re: Ice Age. You'll know the scene when you hit it. The sequels haven't been a patch on the original one. (Though the second has a brilliant Oliver! reference.)

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      #27
      Snow White

      these are ultimately just different beasts, being products of entirely different times and aesthetics. And one is built on top of the other.

      A question of emphasis (and cost) more than times or aesthetics I'd say. Traditional animation puts storytelling at the service of visuals and digital vice-versa. Very occasionally you still get a classically animated feature film that reiterates the qualities of the medium, The Triplets of Belleville was probably the last major one. Watching it back to back with a contemporary Pixar flick would illustrate what I was trying to explain upthread better than I've been able to.

      BTW: I hate everything about Disney, except the early shorts, with a passion. I particularly would never use their sterile features of the 60s onwards to defend hand-drawn animation.

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        #28
        Snow White

        Amor, seen earlier:

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          #29
          Snow White

          Nah, I'm less svelte and debonair than that.

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            #30
            Snow White

            I like Disney, although not so much the formulaic musicals of the last 25 years.

            It should be noted that even "flat" animation has been done with computers since the 80s, so Pixar may not have changed the process as much as it would seem.

            I think Pixar's stuff is more like old fashioned puppetry. One group of craftsmen make the puppets and another brings it to life.

            I'm interested to see this new film Rango. It appears they've taken a step forward in textures and skin. The characters look really good.

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              #31
              Snow White

              I agree with Amor's complaint that there's a lack of distinction with digital animation that the traditional cel-animation had in spades, but perhaps the recognisable aspect of today's CG-animated films as far as any directorial touch is the storytelling. Pixar hold the upper hand in this respect, and it's more likely that anyone would recognise their brand of animation purely for the way it feels in structure, character and tone rather than any artistically recognisable flourishes.

              Maybe it's just me, but any other CG-animated film that isn't from the Pixar stable doesn't really impress, because that company have laid down a rigidly imaginative framework for their stories with such assurance that any other attempts from any other animation house - by comparison - pale and become Pixar-lite, and have very little in the way of distinction. By being at the top of their game at the off, John Lassiter and company have perhaps hamstrung lots of other animation houses by raising the bar a little too high for them to reach, and so we have lots of wonderfully-rendered features with oodles of colour and movement but with none of the wit and charm that Pixar plough into their movies - and this is the script, not just the design process. With others, you feel, there's just flimsy story and few one liners, with just some attractive visual fluff to wow the eyes and deceive the mind. Makes me sound like a spokesman for the Pixar corporation, I know, but they've hit upon the magic formula - story first, eye-candy later. That, perhaps, will become the way that CG-animation will demonstrate its greatest qualities.

              After all, if those behind traditional cel-animation had done what Lassiter had achieved then perhaps we wouldn't be seeing the fading out of a century-old art-form. Traditional animation came near to dying out not because of the nature of the form itself, but because the stories it used to convey were lame, unimaginative and boring shit written by people whose own imaginations were nowhere near as vibrant as the medium they demanded illuminate them.

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                #32
                Snow White

                Traditional animation came near to dying out not because of the nature of the form itself, but because the stories it used to convey were lame, unimaginative and boring shit written by people whose own imaginations were nowhere near as vibrant as the medium they demanded illuminate them.
                I don't think that's true at all.

                Like I said upthread, "traditional" animation hasn't been done in the traditional way for at least 25 years. Hand drawing cels died out, for the most part, because it's incredibly labor intensive and not cost-effective.

                It's been done on computers, mostly, for a while. Even South Park, which was originally done with construction paper is now done with very powerful computers, which is why they can turn it around so fast.

                If what you mean is 2D animation, there isn't much of that going into features from Hollywood these days, that is true. Kids have come to expect the 3D style in much the same way that kids in the 1960s eventually came to expect everything to be in color rather than black and white. An interesting exception was The Princess and the Frog which I saw with my niece and nephew and thought was very good. But it was more like an homage to the old movies, rather than a sign of a comeback for that style.

                But for the most part, I think what has replaced the animated features of old is not the Pixar 3D animation, but live-action-plus CGI stuff. People often forget that the first films of Lord of the Rings were Ralph Bakshi's animated ones in the 1970s. I really like those, but a lot of people didn't. But back then, that was the only way you could do a story like that, really. And if you think about some of the old Disney films, like Snow White or Peter Pan or the Max Fleisher Superman classics or even some of the more recent things like Beauty and the Beast, or Pochohantas, most of the characters were drawn almost "realistically" - not quite but almost - and the backgrounds were all supposed to be lush and beautiful and pretty much look like the real place they're supposed to be. Only some of the characters were really drawn as cartoons. If Disney or anyone wanted to make a film like that now, musical or not, they wouldn't do it Pixar style, they'd hire live action actors and toss in some CGI talking animals.

                Interesting animation of the traditional kind has been happening in Japan and Korea for a while now. And the imagination going into stuff on TV - Sponge Bob, Dexter's Lab, Samurai Jack, Phineas and Ferb, Justice League, I could go on and on - is 80 billion times better than the really half-ass cheap toy-promotion shit that they put on Saturday mornings and schoolday afternoons when I was a kid. Indeed, one reason it is so good now is because the people making it grew up on the godawful shit I'm talking about and are now my age and in a position to direct better stuff.

                This newer wave of stuff makes a virtue out of the "flat" style and is good cartooning in addition to being good animation and storytelling (cartoons do not equal animation, contrary to popular American language). It couldn't be done by putting CGI animals in a live acation film and it probably couldn't be done as well with 3D animation.

                I'm not being coherent. I got two hours sleep.

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                  #33
                  Snow White

                  Reed John wrote:
                  Like I said upthread, "traditional" animation hasn't been done in the traditional way for at least 25 years. Hand drawing cels died out, for the most part, because it's incredibly labor intensive and not cost-effective.
                  Very few cartoons are broadcast live. It puts a terrible strain on the animators' wrists.

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