Animation Is Under Appreciated

I did not get to see The Lion King when it was first released in theaters In fact, I didn't get to see it until his rereleased in theatres in 2013 and honestly I'm kind of glad that was my first experience because sitting in a pitch-black theatre was the best way possible to experience this for the first time Chills ran up and down my spine as it almost looked like a real sunset was coming up over a real Horizon in front of me what followed is in my opinion one of the best opening? sequences of any motion picture ever created Every single frame was a work of art the color the designs the light the music by the time the title Bursts on the screen I felt as though I had gotten my money's worth and The Lion King is far from the only Disney movie to have an amazing opening sequence another favorite of mine throughout my youth was the Arabian Nights opening in Aladdin with sweeping shots across Beautiful sunlit dunes in sleeping moonlit cities the creative team behind Aladdin immersed you in a gorgeous world Blazing with heat and shrouded an intrigue as a small child It sucked me in Immediately and I couldn't take my eyes off the screen fast forward just a few weeks ago and I was sitting in the movie theater for the 2019 remake of a lap and as the classic Arabian Nights song began to play the camera zooming through a digitally crafted middle-eastern City I couldn't help but reminisce about the original whereas the originals started out with a beautiful shot of the desert reminiscent of Lawrence of Arabia The new film immediately takes us into the city and shows us around and it's fine But it doesn't suck you into the world like the original did with fibrin oranges and yellows and reds and blue Luring us into a faraway place as the film progressed. I felt myself growing more and more frustrated with the lackluster production in the original film The Cave of Wonders is a giant beast that arises from the sand and holds amazing treasures within in the new film It's just a cave. Whereas the treasure room was lit bright golden red in the original It was just blue with moonlight in the new which makes sense Because if you're trying to make something look realistic Then it would be lit by moonlight rooms filled with gold don't actually glow bright gold but the cartoon looks so much better and that feeling grew with every passing musical number in set-piece the live-action film just couldn't compete with the vibrance and energy and life of the Animation and this got me thinking more and more often Animated movies and TV shows are being adapted into live-action movies, but why? We rarely if ever Hear about a live-action movie being adapted into an animation and it's not like a book or a comic-book Adaptation where something is being taken from one medium into another to provide a different sort of experience animation exists in the same art form with the rest of film telling stories through sight and sound and motion in with films like The Lion King in the Jungle Book the lines between live-action the animation have begun the blur as the entire live-action movies are being created inside of a computer and yet Animation often feels disregarded to me as though they are real movies because they don't feature real people It's easy to scoff at the live-action Disney remakes But I honestly found myself excited at the prospect of an avatar the last airbender movie and then excited about the Death Note movie and then I felt a little sad when I found out that the upcoming Flash Gordon movie was being turned into an animated film instead of live-action as though that was a downgrade as though these live-action adaptations were upgrades like these properties would be better with flesh-and-blood actors filling the lead roles and yet here I was sitting in a theater Watching the new Aladdin movie struck by how much of a downgrade? Literally every it was I don't think until that moment. I ever fully Appreciated animation and I think a lot of people are right there with me Only three animated movies have ever been nominated for an Oscar despite A lot of them being the best reviewed movies the last few decades sure. It's got its own category, but it shouldn't need one we've taken one of the greatest art forms ever invented and regulated it to just being something for kids and I want to help remedy that so let's take a deep dive into the expansive world of animation starting with Animation might just be the purest form of cinematic storytelling That exists if you can imagine it and then in turn draw it, you can put it on screen no budgetary restrictions No, impossible effects. No adherence to the rules of reality If you want a character to have a specific facial expression and a pivotal moment boom done want a shot That would be impossible using real equipment. You can draw it. Literally any way you want by not having to follow the rules of reality animation allows filmmakers to express themselves in an endless variety of ways It was reported that while filming John Carter Finding Nemo director Andrew Stanton was often frustrated with the constraints of working with real locations with real actors and lenses and equipment I don't know if this was ever confirmed but it makes a good deal of sense with animation The world is your oyster You can paint with broad strokes or add subtle little details that live-action may not allow you can defy physics Without it looking unnatural you can create beautiful lighting that may not exist in real life You can perfectly choreograph a musical number You can bring inanimate objects or animals to life you can add in jokes gags slapstick sand movement That just wouldn't look right in real life For example, let's take a look at the new Lion King remake while the CGI is being praised for being insanely photorealistic audiences have also begun complaining that it just looks Unnatural these human expressions on animal faces just don't look right at all many have even labeled live action Pumbaa as nightmare fuel compare this to the original animation where artists were able to create caricatures of lions and warthogs and hyenas while also Animating their faces in such a way that it felt human you look at Simba and there's no question in your mind that he is a lion yet when he speaks in his mouth moves like A person it doesn't feel weird in this way animation has a huge advantage over live-action films Animation is often able to capture the essence of something almost Improving on it in some ways Brad Bird the director of The Incredibles in the Iron Giant and ratatouille Recently had this to say about hand-drawn animation. The reason to do it is is caricature that's what animation is great at and caricature is often is a word that's often used derogatorily, but actually it means reducing Something to its essence. Um, if you look at a good caricaturist somebody like Hirschfeld Al Hirschfeld, you know He is know he did the caricatures for theatres in the New York Times for like a hundred years radically Great so he would do a drawing of a person and the drawing of the person would look more like the person than the person did and You're just going how is that? It's because they took what was distinctive about the person and Emphasized it and took away the things that didn't emphasize it. Well animators do that not only with the style of how something looks but how it moves and if you combine that with graphic things that that make you then also say what a person is it becomes this very Concentrated way to look at things and it's its own thing. It's fantastic when animated almost Everything can be enhanced Colors more vibrant the performances more precise the reality somehow more Real when I watch films like Moana or Finding Nemo or lilo & stitch I'm struck by just how beautiful the water is like if I actually took a trip to Hawaii The Blues wouldn't look that blue and the Reds not that red I realized long ago that no Justice League movie would ever stand up to the cartoons I watched as a kid look at the color and design of these costumes didn't compare it to their live-action counter their drab by comparison Batman's eyes will never glow menacingly in the dark like this the sky can't be this eerie red without it looking Kinda weird and no amount of perfect casting will ever replace a perfectly drawn cartoon Designed to look exactly like the characters supposed to look paired with a perfectly chosen voice actor And I'm not trying to hate on live-action superhero movies. I love them But there's no way that the Reds on the best design best lit spider-man suit can really compare with one That's just painted bright red though. I'll admit they've gotten pretty close with fight scenes. You can choreograph Amazing stuff that just wouldn't be possible or look natural in real life There's just something about the life and energy that an animated image has that Live-action just can't compete with neat examples Look at every single one of these famous Disney scenes animated and then live-action And it's not just design or aesthetic it's Storytelling many stories like inside out or isle of dogs or The Nightmare Before Christmas couldn't be told in live-action or at least not without being very strange on the other hand the infamous first ten minutes of up don't necessarily require Animation. It's just two people living their lives together No talking animals or toys in here and yet I don't feel it would be the same without Pixar's gorgeous animation as another example take a look at a film like a silent voice a Japanese animation this film focuses on a young man who bullies a deaf girl in his youth only to seek forgiveness for his past sins years later this Movie is pretty straightforward. It's just a drama. It doesn't need to be animated. There's no fantastical elements to it but the animation allows the film to get away with certain things that you might not be able to in live-action with Exaggerated facial expressions slightly over-the-top moments of drama not to mention beautiful artwork that draws you into its world Animators are able to add subtle and sometimes not so subtle Nuances the scenes that might not be readily available in live-action for yet Another example in The Incredibles when Bob and Helen are fighting she grows three times as height as she's making her point This is a great bit of visual character work that I don't think would work Well in live-action Plus the unreality of these scenes might be the thing that helps us connect to them Lee Unkrich The director of cocoa and Toy Story 3 once said live-action movies are someone else's story with animation audiences Can't think that their guards are down because we can clearly see that these things that we're watching aren't real it weirdly helps us to empathize with them more and it's not just pick start working their magic films like How to Train Your Dragon Your name the lego movie The Iron Giant and countless Disney movies have gotten me incredibly emotional in ways that few Live-action films have another area. You can really see the difference animation provides in the world of comedy so many sight gags lying Reads and punchlines exist only in the world of animation without the constraints of reality a new world of humor was unlocked to us Kaleidoscope I got you at the airport. What a kaleidoscope I'm not five shapes and colors the likes of which I've never seen Slab stick can become incredibly Violent without actually being violent utterly absurd situations can now be treated as commonplace without believability as a factor creators can take jokes and deeper crazier weirder darker places than they've ever been able to before And oftentimes these comedies seamlessly blend themselves together with potent drama One moment zany and goofy the next deadly serious in a way that you can Often only get away with utilizing the power of animation Of course, there's plenty of examples to the contrary and I'm not saying that every movie should be animated The departed probably doesn't need an animated adaptation But I feel little credit is given to the copious amounts of advantages that come with choosing animation as your medium animation feels Superior it provides you with more freedom. It allows you more control however in the same way that the value of animation is often unrecognized the impossible amount of hard work that goes into it is likewise ignored which brings us to Here's a fun fact guess how much the average animator at Pixar animates in a week two minutes a minute 30 seconds How about three seconds? That's right for three whole seconds of animation An animator slaves away eight hours a day five days a week to create a full feature Hundreds of animators are required to work for years. So even crappy animated movies like the emoji movie are gargantuan Accomplishments of teamwork by hundreds of people in dozens of departments and that's what we can accomplish today with computers way back in the day artists used to have to hand paint characters on to Transparent sheets of celluloid that would then be placed onto a painted background, which could then be moved? they take a picture move the background slightly and place a new piece of Celluloid with a slightly new position for the character and then take another picture wash rinse repeat Since most movies are filmed in 24 frames per second. That means they'd have to do this 24 times to get one second of film that is a lot of drawing a lot of painting and a lot of Celluloid later came the invention of the multi-plane camera Which would have multiple layers of background painted on glass which could be moved independently of one another This helped create a feeling of depth to the shots. And let's not forget claymation. The often overlooked art form that requires Humongous amounts of time and effort with hand-drawn animation every frame must be sketched inked and painted by hand But with claymation you have to sculpt an entire Beautiful sculpture along with an entire environment and then do it again and again and again making a stop-motion film requires tremendous discipline because Everything you have to build everything, you know, nothing exists as a virtual object in a computer that you can then just download You know a new file and then you have another set or whatever. It happens to be You don't have it, you know infinite number of characters You actually have to build a puppet and that only you can only use that on one set And so if you want another set, yeah puppet, you've got to build another puppet You've got, you know make a new costume. You have to build a new set if you need another set It's such hard work it almost seems silly but you've got to give the artists at companies like like a-- and aardman credit for the beautiful worlds and creatures they painstakingly create animation stayed mostly the same for decades animators worked incredibly hard handcrafted every single frame of film from scratch But then eventually in the 90s computer-generated animation began to emerge used to assist when the limits of hand-drawn Animation were reached such as the wildebeest in the Lion King or the Huns in Mulan then along came a little company called Pixar which changed the game entirely with the release of Toy Story the first 3d Animated film the animation landscape would soon change drastically to the point where 3d Animation would become the primary form of animation in America cinema, which is a shame But let's not forget to appreciate the amazing animation We have today you'd think Animating something in a computer would be easier and in some ways it is but in many ways it's a hundred times more complicated With entire departments devoted to concept art then modeling then rigging then designing the surfaces on the objects on screen Then the actual animation of the characters then the lighting and there's even an entire department devoted to animating crowds That's right. These movies have to create their own extras from scratch There's an entire department devoted to just effects which is basically any time a character interacts with anything in its environment every detail of these worlds have to be crafted with the finest of detail and with these advances in animation have come some of the most stunning films ever Created some of which look almost as photorealistic as live action films what other art form has so many people working on one Product so closely and so directly with the sheer amount of people involved It's astounding that any animated movie ever comes out even remotely coherent much less Astoundingly good what's more the art form is not finished evolving with every passing year We see new styles new advances that craft stories and new ways The elaborate design of the lego movie that looks like it was made with real Legos The life and vibrance of Japanese animation that seems to grow more beautiful with every passing year the unique Styles of animated television shows that create new and distinct worlds the incredible blend of 2d and 3d elements that made spider-man into the spider-verse feel like a moving comic book and the countless Disney and Pixar shorts that break new ground in what we thought animation was capable of Animation is still one of the most exciting art forms that shows no sign of slowing down and I hope that it continues to grow And continues to gain the respect it so rightfully deserves

Channel: Center Row

Views: 666,069

Keywords: The Lion King, The Lion King 2019, Live action Lion King, Live Action Pumba, Live Action Aladdin, Aladdin 2019, Aladdin, Animation, Brad Bird, CGI, 3D Animation, 2D Animation, Live Action Disney, Claymation, Center Row, Is CGI Getting Worse, Pixar, Animation Behind the Scenes, Your Name, A Silent Voice, Frozen 2, The Art of Animation, Hand Drawn Animation, multiplane camera, Up, Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse, Lion King uncanny valley, Lion King faces, mulan, mulan live action

Id: CYUCzG8CgLw

Length: 18min 58sec (1138 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2019