The first of its kind

Sorry, but the only BS here is your post.

I know what it is, because I have read a lot of articles about it already, including the one you are linking to. It is what it says it is; handdrawn animation with the stability and depth of CGI. And the technology and look is something new that has not been seen before. The animators can also twist and change their lines after they have drawn it. From another article:


"It’s not like a texture map. It’s just like painting on the surface of the CG. It actually moves on a 2d layer that’s driven by the CG. And the greatest thing about the tool is that all of that drawing is right up front with the hand drawn animator; right there in their space so they can see what they’re doing. They don’t have to send it off on some blackbox that processes it and then it comes back. It stays right in front of them and they can see everything that they’re doing.

And as much as I loved Tangled – and I feel like we’re in a golden age right now with CG – all the studios today are competing with a stylized form of realism. I have to believe that’s not the only way that animation can look. I feel like 2D needs to come into the place where it can compete with a big blockbuster movie that has tons of cg and so forth. We have to push the processes and techniques and see where we can take them.

In Paperman, we didn’t have a cloth department and we didn’t have a hair department. Here, folds in the fabric, hair silhouettes and the like come from of the commited design decision-making that comes with the 2D drawn process. Our animators can change things, actually erase away the CG underlayer if they want, and change the profile of the arm. And they can design all the fabric in that Milt Kahl kind-of way, if they want to."

That sounds like something new to me.

If you didn't notice it and just took it for granted, then I think it has achieved its goal. Disney probably hope people are gonna feel that it'something natural. Maybe it's that Glen Keane meant a couple of years ago when he said "What I’ve spent my time doing is taking what I like about hand-drawn, and putting it into the computer. I’d like to take some time and take what the computer can do, and put that into hand-drawn." I'm curious to see what a feature in colors using this technique will look like.

I would really like to see Disney do some experimentation with it. For instance; first make a 30 seconds scene using the old techniques, and then remaking the same scene with the Paperman technique. Will there be any differences other than a more dimensional feel? Will the first test be able to show something that the second can't?

Andreas Deja and John Lasseter about the production of The Princess and the Frog:

"I always thought that maybe we should distinguish ourselves to go back to what 2D is good at, which is focusing on what the line can do rather than volume, which is a CG kind of thing. So we are doing less extravagant Treasure Planet kind of treatments. You have to create a world but we're doing it more simply. What we're trying to do with Princess and the Frog is hook up with things that the old guys did earlier. It's not going to be graphic..."

"And there is a way that Louis moves, we call squash and stretch, with the bounciness of all his fat and the liveliness of him. And when it's done in traditional animation, there's a believability to a character moving around like that. If you were to do it in computer animation, it would be done totally differently, and I think having Eric animate him the way he did it, it's so perfect. It's the squash and stretch. It's the weight. It's the believability of this large character being able to move around quite like that. And the same way Dopey, you know, there is a flexibility, a squash and stretch bounciness that he's got that I think is so perfect."

But this was before Paperman. But it would still be nice to know if there is something that more traditional hand drawn does better than the style in Paperman. Take the short Nessie as an example. What would this cartoon look if made in the same way as paperman?

It was once said that a computer would never be able to replicate the way the dwarfs are dancing in Snow White during the Silly Song. Would it be possible today? Then there is the opening scene in Pinicchio, the morning scene when it's Pinocchio first day at school or when we see Gepetto on his own inside the belly of the whale, which are good demonstrations of the multiplane camera. The difference between more classic animation and CGI is that the backgrounds were just a flat and simple in the old days (with the exception of some Fleischer cartoons). When the multiplane camera was used, it was numerous layers of flat images. But doing something that the computer have made possible today, was impossible back then. So what would the opening scene in Pinocchio look like if they had present day computers back than?

Then we have old cartoons like Mickey's Trailer. Anyone who remembers how Goofy's car moved on the road? It looked as flexible as rubber. Making a CGI movie with cars who moved like that would look weird (the cars in Cars moved in their own way). Because computer animation looks more realistic in many ways, the objects have to be more realistic as well. But could it work if the new tools had been made to make some old school stuff? I guess they then had to add hand drawn lines on non-living objects as well, like bikes and other things. But it would have the hand drawn feel to them. And how would Hayao Miyazaki use the technique. In Ponyo on a Cliff, everythins is drawn by hand from what I have heard. But the colors of the characters is as far as I know done with computer. Also the scanning of the images and such is done with computers. So the studio clearly use them where they make good use. Which is why I, as mentioned, would like the see how the Japanese director would use some of the modern digital tools.

Of course, there are some styles that wouldn't require CGI, like the old UPA and Hubley cartoons. But that kind of animation has been absent from the theatres for a long time now.

Either way; if original hand drawn animation has something special to offer that the new style doesn't do as well or maybe can't do at all, they should show us what it is, and then maybe make a feature where these elements are some of the main foundatiosn for the animation style. It would also serve as a reminder for the audience why it is important to keep all the animation forms alive, including the oldest ones.