Is traditionally drawn animation dying?

But just watch Dragons Riders Of Berk, dude! Man... that... almost looks just like the movie!

You know, The Great Mouse Detective didn't look much better than the TV shows Disney was putting out around that time. I'm not saying that Disney has to give up on making fantastic looking 2D animation for their movies, but I wouldn't mind them making a movie where they didn't give 100% on their animation. After all, Cats Don't Dance has pretty cartoony animation compared to what Disney was releasing at the time and I still think it looks fantastic.

But Disney has to compete. They have to compete with all their rivals who are all trying to do the same thing because they also try to compete with everyone else, who are all trying to compete with each other! This is why I personally hate '''competition'''. Yes it makes you evolve..... but if you can't adapt, you die! And you lose sight of why you made movies in the first place! And put every other older tools and way of animating in the dusty closet full of cobwebs! And can't focus on perfecting one skill in one tool for several years anymore because one day some other schmuck will come up with NEW technology which will force you to abandon everything and learn this new tech over again so you can only compete with them!!!!

edited 28th Mar '14 8:57:06 AM by kyun

The Great Mouse Detective was on TV show quality for Disney Standard...compared to what the other studios dished out during that time (safe for Don Bluth, naturally), it was positively divine.

BTW, I don't have exact numbers, but I believe CGI is cheaper than traditional animation...and because it is cheaper in general, they have an easier time to make it look good. Especially for shows like the Dragon rider of Berk. They only have to reuse the models and algorithms they already created for the movie. It's a little bit like Disney reusing old animation during the dark age, only less obvious.

I feel the same way about the competition on the market. I know that it's good for business and that it would help improve the techniques needed to help your products sell well, but sometimes, whenever the market tries to try out new things, sometimes they lose sight of what made them popular in the first place and then when the next new thing comes in, they drop whatever they did to go along with the new trend (such as the situation with traditional animation vs. CGI animation).

edited 28th Mar '14 9:57:54 AM by Rabbitearsblog

In my experience, 2D and CGI is no cheaper or expensive than the other by default. It's all a matter of how people go about setting the budget.

I both love and hate John Lasseter. You're a f***** genius, ya idiot! He and his team single-handedly shaped the misfortune I have lived in my life since 1995!

edited 28th Mar '14 10:08:12 AM by kyun

2D animation can be cheap for the same reason 3D is. You can make models store them, then paste them into the right situations. This is sometime I an amateur made with pony creator.◊ Pros need significantly more art to animate each step but once the art is made it's a matter of pasting the right models in the right order. Still time consuming but imagine how much longer it would take if the character would need to be redrawn each time?

I'm all for tech wizards programming CGI to mimick hand-drawn principles, but I just think that if they want to do it that way, why not just go back to hand-drawings anyway.

I don't think that it is that easy...I somewhere read that the technic they used for Paperman is still too expensive and not developed enough for a full-length-movie.

And I guess we just have discovered the reason why CGI characters from the same studio tend to look and move somewhat the same...because they reuse already existing programs. I suspect that the whole thing is a little bit more complicated for something which looks hand-drawn.

I wonder if there's any animation studio where if you look at all the crowd shots in all their movies, it's literally the same people just dressed differently.

This is one thing that annoys me too. Are ALL of Disney's CGI fairy tale movie characters going to look exactly like the ones in Tangled and Frozen now? It has to be something more than just their software programs.

I wonder about this too. I hope that they don't start using this technique in all CGI animated Disney films or else, everything would start looking the same and it would become tiresome for the audience.