The “Real” Fake Worlds Of Pixar

animation is a medium that is in many ways inherently detached from realism by design this is often a great thing by forgoing the suspension of disbelief that live action filmmaking often requires you open up your audience to ideas worlds characters that they simply wouldn't otherwise connect with you find the humanity in your story not necessarily in the way it's visually presented but what happens when an animation studio plays with reality when a studio becomes a believer in what we already see hey they like the super this sequence and ratatouille probably didn't strike you as particularly interesting the first time you saw it but at a glance what is the first thing you know about linguine he's human and that's of great importance because his story is about how a human interacts with a rats pixar knows we need to believe he's human to believe in him and his and remy's relationship they know that's a lot easier when we can see his humanity so pixar literally dumped their animators in water in this exact outfit and graphed how water interacted with the material in the body where it's stuck where it dripped where it was loose linguine has 115 000 hairs rendered on his head the average human has 110 000 hairs the food real so real in fact the animators learned how to cook them before trying to animate them this store yep a real store in paris you can go there see it for yourself see realism in ratatouille is a supplement it's the sauce that pairs well with your steak that elevates the dish beyond what you cooked at home last week it makes the world feel more alive but toy story treats what's real toy story 4 is an example of this realism being an integral piece of the story being told toy story 4 is a lesser film if anybody but pixar tries to make it pixar took a very singular approach with toy story 4 in a world that is parallel to our own in almost every single way the studio built the film around the idea that we should not just recognize but visually connect with everything we see and that manifests itself both in its world and how it's shot let's start with the latter pixar as evan pushak once pointed out uses digital cameras to establish its shots essentially the movie is shot like a live action film in a virtual space with pretend cameras as evan pointed out this is most evident in shots like these a split diopter which is used across many of your favorite blockbusters but uniquely live action and so pixar treats lighting and their environments with the same fundamental principles this is real and we should see it and view it as such because they're treating it as such we need to believe that this world is ours and these toys could be as well this is the conceit of a movie with regular humans interacting with something that is particularly inhuman so pixar did this okay let me play it again still no maybe that's a good thing you shouldn't notice it you should notice that these toys have specific wear that directly relates to how children interact with them while handling real toys of similar kind or that the lighting used here highlights the dust particles floating realistically through the air as if the toys kicked them up off these rarely touched shelves by the way an entire bit of cold algorithm was designed to create this dust and where that dust settles how their feet push through the dust as they walk adds to that reality see there are over 10 000 items in the antique store and to the toys this place is a dirty allergen-filled prison and we should feel that too it took pixar two years to create the antique store studying how antique objects age how to texturize them even going as far to create a software program that creates artificial spiders who spin webs throughout the store to try to replicate real insect and cobweb residue when you leave the store as insider pointed out pixar knew exactly what they needed their carnival games and its prizes to look like as well these things would be constantly packed moved and reassembled in different cities and places so these guys are roughed up but their game has literal welding marks to show us that where that aging how long they've been here or better yet visually articulate their journey see unlike ratatouille and toy story 4 pixar's pursuit for what's real is a quest for needed immersion not into the human world but into the minds and souls of the toys to see our world the way that they would sun dust and all we have to believe their perspective to believe in their journey but there is such a thing as too real in this scene for example they had to dial back their water and reflection tech to maintain the film's look a lesson they had already learned with finding nemo come here let me see that don't touch it don't touch it you just want to look hey how come it didn't sting you it did finding nemo was maybe the most visually articulate of pixar's very singular approached animation they made a film about a fish ecosystems and environments that are simultaneously very real but equally foreign to us the fewer in these circumstances a lot of studios in fact i'd argue most others would take the shark tail approach and treat this world as pure fantasy and that isn't because they're lazy what pixar accomplished in finding nemo is maybe the most astonishing feat in their catalog they built that something real as it exists while creating a connection between it and the audience this particular balance is an absurd challenge make this world too real and will fail to connect with its talking fish we'll know it's an imitation make the world too artificial to cartoony and we won't believe in the stakes and emotions our characters are experiencing as if they were our own we won't be able to quite as easily relate so to find this balance pixar spent months studying how light interacts with water how water surfaces move and how the scales of fish interact with both of those elements and then they went to work creating water scenes so realistic that pixar had to scrap them entirely because they were too authentic the middle ground they finally did find involved creating all new animation processes one example being transly a new process that was used to create realistic translucency in the jellyfish of this scene with finding nemo pixar pursued something that transcended the way we typically interact and engage with animation and that was slowly rewarded 1 24th of a second took four days to render due to the complexities of the animation in this film but when it finally did pixar had created an ocean that managed to do what maybe no other animated film had ever accomplished create a world so believable so imperfectly real that it felt as though it could exist right below our boats this approach to animated balance makes finding nemo a film that quite literally could not exist in any other medium or process of film not live action cgi not 2d animation it's a film that maybe only pixar could make for all of their missteps there's a reason that pixar films still retain their magic a reason we're so attached to nemo to a wheezing penguin to an ambitious rat a reason that you leave a pixar movie feeling punched in the gut and i think that's because what pixar does better than maybe anybody else isn't just write good characters or craft great stories but instead it's find the magic in reality and then mold and shape that reality transmute it into something worth believing in to transcend the barriers of our screens and become a part of this world that doesn't make their movies better than anyone else's but ask yourself this how many times have you thought about the way you treat your old toys since you first saw toy story i'll teach my kids to care for their toys not because they cost money but because the toys deserve it that's the reality the world that pixar has created for me that is it for today's episode of nostalgic guys if you enjoyed this video press that like button down below if you haven't yet 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Channel: Nerdstalgic

Views: 440,990

Rating: 4.9775839 out of 5

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Id: kxrpHCHuW1k

Length: 9min 30sec (570 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 25 2020