hand drawn animation vs computer animation

[yoda313]

Hello,

So which is superior???

Obviously computer animation is more robust but it still lacks the romantic emotion hand drawn cell animation produces in my opinion. The old disney cartoons are some of the all time classics and don't wear with time.

What I did like was the hybrids like ALADDIN and BEAUTY AND THE BEAST where they first started mixing hand animation and computer animation. Like the flying carpet in ALADDIN. Things that enhance the movie but don't need to be fully cg.

TOY STORY was groundbreaking but now everything is starting to look a like a knockoff of the other.....

What do you think??? Should they bring back the traditional animated movies????

Kevin

[jimmalenko]

For efficiency / cost-effectiveness, almost everything's computer these days. Makes sense, too. As for my preference, the real old looney tunes cartoons can't be beat IMO.

[yoda313]

Hello,

DITTO!

BEEP BEEP!

Kevin

[MackemX]

computer stuff is superior in options but the good old hand drawn cartoons are cool also 8). I wonder what a youngster would say in 10 years tie. Most of the stuff you grow up with is appreciated more than stuff that was around before your time. Part of the growing up process I suppose

what about the stop motion animation? Anyone remember the orignial King Kong and how his fur would move?

I was watching a program about the development special effects the other day which was quite interesting

[ZAPPER]

As long as the process keep progressing I think that computer generated will blow away hand painted. The trick will actually be in the artists' eye, I mean depending on the subject and ideas and amount of effort put forth the end product will show. Look at Toy story and then Polar Express from what I recall (It has been awhile) Polar Express seemed more life like. (If life like is the goal) What do you expect from animation?
Yes I still have a soft spot for the old classics, and if anyone where to put the effort into a new high quality hand painted movie it could still become a new classic, but I think that CG has so much more to offer to the artist

[Conquest10]

CG has so much more to offer to the artist

No, just makes him lazier and reliant on cliches.

Traditional animation for me. I hate the look of 3d animation. "Wow! It looks real." What I have said is that whenever you are trying to animate a living thing, it will NEVER look real. Case in point: the deer in the Ring 2.

[northcat_8]

I think it depends on the cartoon. The simpsons would not look right in 3D animation.

[Shadowmistress]

I would prefer the look of Cinderella to that of toy story anyday. But I've seen some really cool stuff being done in a tv show called Reboot which just fascinates me every time I catch it while flipping channels. The movement is incredibly fluid and it doesn't try to be "real". It actually tries to be the opposite and I think succeeds in making art come alive. The imagination there is extrodinary and I think that is what CGU is truly meant for.

[yoda313]

Hello,

I agree CG lets the imagination go anywhere but there is something "permanent" about hand drawn animation. You know the time and effort that went into the production. It's a little more "mathmatical" with cg. All the rendering and lighting and timing. They still have to "paint" the characters but it's just not the same.

Don't get me wrong. CG has its place but I think its a crime that they've essentially abandoned hand drawn animated movies to the latest "fad".

Kevin

[Conquest10]

Another thing: I don't hate all CG. Just the ones that look like traditional CG (you know which movies). I do love the use of it in such things as South Park and Futurama.

[Rookie64]

Hello,

So which is superior???

The artist and the artist's imagination.



Ray Harryhausen, George Pal, Georges Méliès, Max Fleischer and Arthur Rankin Jr. all still impress me most.


With use of CGI in films like, "Irréversible" ( http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0290673/board/thread/17510356 ), I think we'll have much more to worry about than animated movies - this might also be the future of porn and sex in the movies

[ChrisX]

I recently viewed “The Incredibles” DVD and obviously was done by computer animation.

Would you think so? Is it better than way?

I don't mind as long as it is great to watch.

Hello,

Should they bring back the traditional animated movies????

Kevin

No, why should they go back as computer animation saves them time and much cost effective for Walt Disney.

ChrisX

[vitualis]

It depends on the artist and their style. AFAIK, even the "hand drawn" cartoons have been computer assisted for about a decade.

Not all cartoons benefit from the "3D" look but that doesn't mean that they can't be down by computer animation. For example, a lot of the newer anime are done by computer but are not 3D.

Regards.

[ZAPPER]

CG has so much more to offer to the artist

No, just makes him lazier and reliant on cliches.

Traditional animation for me. I hate the look of 3d animation. "Wow! It looks real." What I have said is that whenever you are trying to animate a living thing, it will NEVER look real. Case in point: the deer in the Ring 2.

What I am saying is that CG offers the artist a bigger pallet of colors, effects and so on. How well the artist uses it may depend on his talent or vision of the project. Art is one of those things that may look easy to the observer or at least the artist may not look like he is putting much effort into it, but few can even struggle to match the talent involved.

I am sure that if there were a motive, Snow White could be completly redone in CG to a degree that that the human eye could not tell the difference between it and the original. (but why)

3D and extreamly life like may not be your taste or may not be right for some movies, but it is a new medium(SP) and needs to be evaluated on its own merits. To the artist and film makers I say "Bring it on and dazzle the hell out of me!"

[EddyH]

Problem is that CG....

1. Allows any idiot who can knock up a character in Poser to make a "cartoon", regardless of drawing - scriptwriting - animation - or characterisation skill.
2. still has trouble doing "realistic" humans, or even cariactures / modifications of them, unless you throw money at it like the makers of Final Fantasy did (and then, they screwed up the vehicle physics).

When you contrast it with something hand drawn like the very best of Disney, Warner Bros, various french/japanese studios (Ghibli, Pierrot, DiC etc) then CG doesn't stand a chance --- though personally I think it's because making a hand drawn feature is such a massive undertaking for anything over 10 minutes, you're determined to get the best people and spend time / effort / cash / thought getting it right.... rather than firing up renderware and knocking something out in a half hour plus rendering, encoding and dubbing time.

Pixar of course (and Brad Bird's previous ventures before he joined them) are a good example of how to get it right. For starters, they get a story together and even hand-animate / storyboard fair chunks of it before even finalising character designs or booting the computer up to see just how many hairs they can stuff on a monster. The storyboards and concept art for Monsters Inc and Finding Nemo* suggest that they would have worked equally as brilliantly as hand-drawn features, but they chose to take a conceptually great film, with good scripting and characterisation, and add extra shine via CG. And WHAT CG, too, might I add - they didnt just knock it together, but ended up writing whole new programs to get the look that they wanted and make things move just *so*, in order to get the right expressiveness, and fluidity and comedic (or subtle..) special effects that you might otherwise have lost moving from an intently studied hand-drawn bit of work.
(again i feel tempted to refer back to studio ghibli and hayao miyazaki's incredible attention to detail and motion, the hyper-fluid 20s thru 60s disney features, or "rubber characters" warner brothers toons)

Remember that the Incredibles is the first Pixar film to include people as anything but incidentals (Andy & family / neighbours appearing for about 5 minutes in total in the first one, ditto the humans in TS2 and, apart from Boo, Monsters Inc... even in Finding Nemo there wasnt much human action)........ and the people in it are far from realistic, being much, much more like typical cartoon cariactures, playing to the unique strengths and weaknesses of the modelling and rendering software. It's come out looking fantastic - if they'd tried to make "real" people (such as in the questionable-taste remake of Captain Scarlet that's come around) it might have bombed because it just wouldn't have worked.

So..... uh.... yeah........ hand drawn has a huge history of greatness (and more than a few awful things, of course) and can still do great shakes. CG has had a bit of a shaky start but promises brilliant things for the future - so long as it doesnt entice animators to get lazy.
(for the record, Ghibli's 3D adventures have gone pretty badly, not sure why, but they switched to electronic colouring of cels scanned into computer instead of hand-painting... and all went well... but then they tried to merge 2D hand drawn and 3D CG to make things look "better", more quickly and effectively than watercolour backgrounds could -- as in Beauty and the Beast -- and it all went to heck, not even gelling as well as the CG robot and hand-drawn everything else in the Iron Giant. The reason is open to question, but really, if you don't know what you're doing with the renderer, don't touch it... avoid the temptation and just get some drawing practice in!)

* The finding nemo concept panels ended up in a "big book of disney stories" i saw, where about 20 of their films are boiled down to 12 illustrated pages each, and look gorgeous even though the style is very cartoony and far removed from the actual CG.... characters still recognisable, however.

[Conquest10]

What I am saying is that CG offers the artist a bigger pallet of colors, effects and so on.

How so?

It depends on the artist and their style. AFAIK, even the "hand drawn" cartoons have been computer assisted for about a decade.

Yes, most if not all animation nowadays is hand drawn and scanned into a computer. Then the ink and paint is all done digitally.

Art is one of those things that may look easy to the observer or at least the artist may not look like he is putting much effort into it, but few can even struggle to match the talent involved.

Believe me, rigging up a character, adding lighting, and animating it and the camera is a hell of a lot easier than drawing every frame and simulating a camera motion out by hand. I'm not saying its easy or its not a lot of work involved but it sure isn't a lot of hard work compared to traditional animation. The problem with most animators is that they keep trying to make it look life-like. I'm sure that will never happen (maybe in 50 years or so).

I am sure that if there were a motive, Snow White could be completly redone in CG to a degree that that the human eye could not tell the difference between it and the original. (but why)

I'm sure I'll be able to tell. Unless you process the video rendered out, 3d has a certain look to it.

3D and extreamly life like may not be your taste or may not be right for some movies,

That's the point, it is NOT life-like.

[mrtristan]

Although each has their set of advantages, it all boils down to the artists and production team involved. I think there will always be room for both.

[Super Warrior]

Hello,

So which is superior???

Obviously computer animation is more robust but it still lacks the romantic emotion hand drawn cell animation produces in my opinion. The old disney cartoons are some of the all time classics and don't wear with time.

What I did like was the hybrids like ALADDIN and BEAUTY AND THE BEAST where they first started mixing hand animation and computer animation. Like the flying carpet in ALADDIN. Things that enhance the movie but don't need to be fully cg.

TOY STORY was groundbreaking but now everything is starting to look a like a knockoff of the other.....

What do you think??? Should they bring back the traditional animated movies????

Kevin

I prefer normal cel animation. Most of the time i find that CGI crap to be stale looking,blehh.

As for gaming. When it comes to fighters, 2D fighters are the best IMO. Capcom fighters to be specific.

[glockjs]

hand drawn. computer ani looks cool and all but it doesnt have the same intimate feeling as hand drawn does.

[spiderman2k1]

I still like hand drawn. But CGI is getting better all the time.