The hand-drawn hits that Hollywood isn't making
animationobsessive.substack.com
animationobsessive.substack.com
One worry of mine is that it won’t make a comeback before the masters who worked at Disney, WB, Cartoon Network, etc all pass away and all of that knowledge and expertise will be lost.
Animation rigging, squeezing and bouncing every part of the character to convince the viewer it's alive, but all it's doing is calling computer routines to wobble each part, instead of actually animating the damn character. Everything is shortcuts now.
Recently, I started re-watching Dexter's lab. It's great. No CGI at all, no computer-assisted calarts. Trying to watch anything modern from the same creator, everything is just unbearable to look at. Everything looks like disjointed parts, and screams low-effort. All the flash animators of the 2000s grew up, and they're now running things. And everything just looks like wobbly flash.
There's some shows that did this modern animation style well though. But not many.
So I come to the same conclusion, repetitive low-effort stuff repels people.
That’s really it. The medium is just a medium and not why people show up.
Anyone who says this method or that method are superior are missing the point. Humans connect with characters and stories, not with meshes or acetate sheets. Oral, written, photographed, painted, sung, performed, filmed, drawn, animated - all these are in service to the message being communicated.
The technique might get immediate attention, but substance is what makes a classic.
I sort of disagree with this.
Sometimes the medium is the message. Or part of the message. Like how LAIKA studios could have made Coraline or Kubo fully in CGI, or live action, but instead chose puppets (for the most part). It matters that these are puppets and not CGI, anime-style drawings or live action people. It matters to them and it matters to me.
Not saying story doesn't matter, but in movies it's sometimes overrated. You can have a gorgeous movie with barely any plot, and it can be engaging.
"CalArts" as a pejorative really has lost any meaning, if it ever had one beyond "animation I don't like". The creator of Dexter's Lab literally went to CalArts and made the first iteration of it as one of his projects while he was there.
The joke doesn’t make any sense on cable TV though, because there’s no real reason for stuff on TV to have ever sucked in that way.
Compare to stuff like Harvey Birdman or Sealab 2021, they make a lot more sense because they were parodying the medium they existed in.
There is a rich pipeline of mangas (comics) to anime (2D animation) that is alive and well there.
The U.S. is obsessed with massive studio efforts that all resolve to the exact same character design and animation style (people want the familiar!) But there is a ton of innovation (including AI and 3D usage) as well as a system to support skill handoff that exists outside of Hollywood.
It’s just unfortunate that its American counterpart is so much weaker. You still see a handful of titles getting released, but it’s nothing to what we were producing back in the late 90s and early 2000s.
American animation also had a distinctive style to it and it’s sad to lose that.
For feature length productions it's pretty much only series special movies for the big hit shows or Makoto Shinkai.
Industry figures over there have been publicly gloom and doom about the state of the industry for years.
Kyoto Animation has a good thing going. They do everything in-house and their currently-airing CITY has incredible production values and was fully finished before it began to air. That model might work for some other studios too.
With modern Internet crowdfunding, a return to the OVA model of the late 80s and early 90s where productions were funded directly by viewers could make a comeback, which could be cool since it’d give more relaxed schedules and unshackle studios from broadcast regulations.
Sazae-san used cels for the openings and endings up until 2013.
Kind of a tangent, but I had a bunch of friends finishing their animation programs at SVA in the early 2000s and they had to do everything traditionally and they all made a huge push to "#Save2D". I personally spent several months helping most of them scan their thesis projects for free.
Despite a lot of willingness the studio support just wasn't there and even with all of them established in their careers now there's just no hope of doing anything that way. I kinda felt bad that they were trained in and judged against a process that's basically dead. Not to say they didn't learn anything but a tremendous amount of their time and money was effectively wasted.
And then so many of them spent their first few years working in industry heavily exploited by the local studios, including years of unpaid work in most cases.
Nowadays with hand drawn stuff you're mostly seeing keyframe work being done and the computer doing all of the heavy lifting with inbetweening with maybe some tweaking here and there by junior animators.
The tools are good enough now where it doesn't even look like shitty Flash animation anymore.
Also don't know what you're trying to show me with this 10 minute video. There's maybe 15 seconds of animation work being done this whole video? I see storyboarding and background painting and audio work but this shows shockingly little animation process...(and what I can see clearly is someone drawing keys...)
I'll admit, though, that while I know and have talked to some people in the animation industry it is not my area of expertise, so I could be completely off base with my observations.
My absolute favorite for japanese animation (and criminally underrated!) is Redline (2009)-- huge recommendation.
The thing about all that extra funding is that most of it goes to the committee, not to the studios and animators working on it. And because the total manpower of the industry is so limited, that means that an excessive number of projects crowds out the labour that it becomes much harder to try out risky, experimental new things as one might have a decade ago. As the director of Code Geass stated; It would be literally impossible to air Code;Geass today. And the industry does suffer for it, because while there may have been many mega hits, they all largely lack lasting impressionns and fail to reach the legends of the past.
There’s plenty of good American animation too, though. Disney movies were always top class, as were most of the Looney Toons and Tom & Jerry among other TV animation. Donald Bluth movies also come to mind.
Personally I'm really sad this kind of technique never caught on more in Western films, Treasure Planet was panned at the time but I think it's actually a bit of an overlooked classic. The art style works really well, take Long John Silver for example whose body is traditionally animated but his cybernetic limbs are CGI - this looked fantastic in 2002 so imagine what could be done now.
Especially as investors fund Llm shops generating art instead of artists drawing art.
But I would agree that Adult Swim is an anomaly.
Not a single recent new show in sight.
THE BALANCE!
It's no replacement for hand-drawn and animated movies. But on the other hand (pun semi-intended) our ability to draw by hand these movies will never go away, and we have the ability to make new ones anytime in the future that someone has the passion and energy to do it (commercial success be damned!). The important thing is that all of the tricks, shorthand, and other collective learnings of a century of animation has not gone unappreciated, and is being absorbed into the new medium. That's pretty neat!
Sure they’d be happy to answer if you called one of these old animators up to explain the process but there is probably plenty of details they themselves forgot over retirement. Maybe the animators passed away already and that door is closed. Either way there is plenty that isn’t written down.
And as evidenced by the long history of independent 2D animated movies put out by auteurs, it doesn't seem like there is any problem innovating new recording or movie making techniques.
The same story can be told in 3D or 2D, but it seems mainstream studios always pick 3D now. And I miss the 2D days. I love 2D.
[1] Though there's something to be said about spectacle over substance. Not everything needs to have an actual story, sometimes the visuals are the story, and that's fine.
Take Arcane for example. It's 3d animation but it's gorgeous. It's art. Studios switching to 3d are a symptom of not putting in enough effort, not the cause of it.
I completely agree, but that wasn't my objection. My objection is that I miss 2D, which is seldom picked by major studios anymore, because I love 2D, not because I think all 3D is bad.
Arcane indeed looks wonderful. As do the latest works by Sony animation, like Spiderverse or K-Pop Demon Hunters!
> Studios switching to 3d are a symptom of not putting in enough effort, not the cause of it.
What's interesting is that, as mentioned by TFA -- based on interviews by Pixar employees, former and current -- 3D can be more expensive in terms of time and effort than 2D. This surprised me, I always thought 3D was picked because it was easier to work with, but Pixar employees argue otherwise. So I guess it's only badly done 3D that's easier? Like, my daughter was watching Disney's "The Adventures of Puss in Boots" (2015. A show, not a movie) and holy crap was it bad -- terrible models, terrible animation, terrible everything. Or something Skylander... Skylander Academy? Awful, minimum effort, cheaply done. I wonder if these things wouldn't look better in 2D. Or maybe they'd be just as crap.
2d on the other hand has the effort more spread out: you don't need to do much up front, but you need to do a drawing for every single frame.
I can see how 3d would be worth it, even if more effort total, if you expect to make sequels.
I think another issue is there's too much design by committee going on, too much aiming for "sure things", too many studio notes. Not enough trying to make something good. It's hardly surprising that if you don't aim to make something good you won't make something good. That's not a dig on the animators etc involved, I'm sure they are giving their best but they are operating in a system that does not have as goal to make art.
I love how Kpop Demon Hunters is having a moment right now and Hollywood is scratching its head. Great original story and the soundtrack is filled with bangers.
That's not strange at all. It's not rational, exactly, but it's business as usual.
Hollywood doesn't really do small movies, be it hand drawn or not. The article mentions that Nobody is done at a $10 million budget, I don't think that's really interesting for corporate Hollywood. Sure if it becomes massively successful, it's great, if not it was a lot of work for very little or no profit. That's fine for smaller studios, but if you expect all your movies to gross $1 billion, then trying to do it with a $10 million budget seems unrealistic.
The smaller studios and independent movie makers can have their little project, and if they happen to make something good, Hollywood can just buy them and have them make a squeal at 10x the budget and milk the fans.
There’s also the issue of Hollywood accounting. The people and studios funding the movies don’t see an all or nothing P&L because they own the companies actually producing the film (that’s how the zero net profit accounting is legally implemented in the industry). An EP like Spielberg putting down $10 million might see $8 million of that back before the film even releases because the project will use their studio for VFX or to shoot part of the movie.
That leaves the costs that are spent outside the industry like advertising and marketing. If you have to spend $100 million on marketing anyway, it just doesn’t make sense to worry about production losses on a $10 million vs $100 million movie.
For the purposes of reporting financial figures to the SEC or calculating tax liabilities, the businesses still have to follow GAAP and other property methods of accounting.
If a business like Disney or Sony contracts with Spielberg, they aren't going to be fooled by him contracting out to his other businesses, they are going to know that is part of the terms. And surely, by this point, all the actors and other contractors are sophisticated enough to know the game also. Even the wikipedia page for Hollywood accounting cites actors telling everyone to only settle for percentage of gross.
> Expenditures can be inflated to reduce or eliminate the reported profit of the project, thereby reducing the amount which the corporation must pay in _taxes_ and royalties or other profit-sharing agreements, as these are based on net profit.
First and foremost it’s a tax dodge because nobody falls for points net anymore unless they’re brand new to the industry and people dropping millions to finance a movie are rarely that uninformed. But that’s the why.
I’m describing the how: Hollywood accounting is GAAP accounting where the financiers direct a significant fraction of the capital towards businesses they have an ownership stake in. They have both control over the client and how much the vendor charges, driving profit in the topline organization to zero and sending it downstream.
The people/studios financing the films are okay with it because they own the downstream vendors. Neither the studios nor Spielberg are under any illusions about how this works - they structure it that way on purpose. They can’t just zero out their profit and say too bad to the taxman and all the contracts on net profit. No judge would let that slide if it came to a lawsuit (and it frequently does).
None of this is a mystery to anyone who has worked on the financial side of the industry but because of how that money moves around within a production, it creates economic incentives that favor expensive productions rather than smaller budget ones, at least within Hollywood.
The point is the revenue and expenses for an individual film can be altered, for the purposes of screwing someone who agreed to a share of the profit, but the revenue and expenses for all of the businesses put together cannot.
If a business made money, it has to show up somewhere, in someone's account.
If you want more info on how this all works look into single-purpose production LLCs (aka SPVs, which is where the accounting happens) and federal consolidated groups for how its taxed. That this all allows screwing over anyone ignorant enough to accept points net in their contract is just a bonus that happens to have cemented itself in Hollywood pop-history.
Then some unexpected hit will pop up out of nowhere and make a ton of money and studios will fund all kinds of off the wall things trying to create a new success formula. Along the way we’ll get a lot of fun movies again, but eventually they’ll figure out what is getting people into theaters and beat that concept until it’s dead. Repeat.
Pixar was successful because they mastered that via a culture that wanted to make the best of a new technology for movies. It’s the same for Studio Ghibli with traditional animation.
The issue with “Hollywood” (and American business in general) is that accountants seem to eventually take over and they don’t see the forest for the trees.
The visuals and the medium matter as well. The same story told as 3D vs 2D animation, or in photorealistic vs stylized fashion, or in live action, or color vs black & white, is not the same.
In some works of art, the story doesn't even matter.
Tons of hugely successful CG movies came out in the past few years that are not mentioned in the article (Inside Out 2, Frozen 2, Mario movie, Moana 2, Spider-man, etc.) - all of those movies had a higher box-office gross than every hand-drawn animated movie ever except for the Lion King in '94. I'm not saying they're _better_, but rather that box office numbers aren't a great reason to argue for hand-drawn animation, I don't think Disney and other companies are very concerned about the flops when the successes rake in so much money.
Or Polish ones:
Or Czech ones:
If even the poorly reviewed CG films do well, of course the executives only funded that. People, unsurprisingly, prefer a guarantee of making money to a chance of making money.
Focusing on theatrical releases creates a bit of a false impression. There are clearly still cartoons in production, it's just that it's intended for TV or streaming. I suppose Spongebob Squarepants getting a 15th season isn't very romantic, but I'm sure the artists working on it appreciate the work.
Imho the big failure of AI for real artists (besides IP rights concerns and the fact that it automates art instead of tedium) is mostly a UI one right now. The first studio to figure a good workflow for doing inbetweening using AI or the ability to feed character sheet and storyboards to get back rough keyframes will have a total game changer.
I haven't watched any of that trash in about 10 years and I don't feel like I missed anything.
All other filmmaking studios outside of Hollywood (hand rubbing sounds) are putting out great pieces, many of them consistently.
Such as?
Folivari is another good one.
There's plenty of them all around the world.
:D
1: https://www.polygon.com/24183308/mars-express-director-jerem...
WAN 2.2 FFLF2V (first-frame last-frame to video) could get you close to the tweening between key-frames today.
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Opinion discarded.
He was an important figure in the 80s and 90s feature animation world but I don't think he's really relevant to a discussion of current feature 2D productions.
CGI and 3-D were simply off-ramps to nowhere.
"Human vision is fundamentally a two-dimensional process where the retinas in our eyes capture flat, 2D images. The perception of three dimensions, or depth, is a complex mental construct, really an illusion, created by the brain using stereoscopic vision, which compares slight differences between the two 2D images from each eye, and other visual cues like shadows, motion parallax, and relative size."