What was broken about animation that now we think we have to do it with sophisticated computer programs? What was incomplete about reality that we feel we have to mine it digitally?
In the case of animation, the supreme irony is that computer-generated images are now being modified to try to enhance their expressiveness, not to look more “real,” but to look more like cartoons. Expressiveness is implicit in hand-drawn animation, and is, in fact, its main asset. The recent computer-animated blockbuster The Polar Express cost $100 million. High tech sensors were used to model the facial expressions of Tom Hanks, the actor who voiced one of the main characters. Now why go through all that effort and expense, all that time and trouble, when it would have been cheaper and easier and more effective just to have taken all the sensors off Hanks’s face, pointed a camera at it, and let him act?
But I guess when Hollywood is concerned, the wheel just wasn’t good enough – too round and rolly.
The predictable answer to my question is that computer graphics are needed to create the unique world of The Polar Express. Except it isn’t. If our goal is to make a world seem real, why use purposefully cartoon-like computer graphics to do it? Why not use live-action if you want to make it seem real, or traditional animation if you don’t? And if the argument is that traditional animation is too expensive, look at the figures for the film at issue. $100 million could hire a whole lot of animators for a whole lot of time.
It makes neither financial nor artistic sense to use computer animation in this way unless the real goal is to cache the biometric data of enough actors and their expressions that each can be recoded until any variety of characters can be created virtually, thus doing away with “real” actors entirely. It wouldn’t surprise me if this were actually so: movie executives have a surprisingly good habit of missing the point entirely in their incessant desire to turn out “product.”And with the limited number of film formulas the major studios have allowed themselves recently, and the movie-going public’s acceptance of this uniformity, the executives may well succeed.
A simpler explanation is that people go to the movies partly because of the special effects, and if a movie is all special effects, well, that has to be better, right? And partially, I’m sure, the movie executives have figured out that Toy Story and its clones have been incredibly successful, so the solution must be to pixellate. This ignores the fact that a good measure of the success of the Toy Story flicks and Shreck is the good writing, not the style of animation. They might have been successful without the writing, but they wouldn’t also have been good.
And just as there still is a niche market for poems and short stories and paintings and sculptures, so there may be room for academic and/or non-profit sponsorship of traditional animation. Like the rest of these outmoded arts, it will still exist, on life support and mostly comatose, but technically still alive.
I think your reasoning misses an important point: the movement toward CGI in animation stems from its novelty more than anything. The computer is just another tool in the filmmaker’s belt—furthermore, it’s a tool that’s still being improved and explored. We haven’t yet reached a limit to its potential. Naturally, filmmakers want to explore this new technique; it’s something new and novel and it catches attention simply for being what it is, rather than requiring a clever premise or brilliant writing; thus, we get things like The Polar Express, which is both high-profile and tremendously bland.
As for CG’s trend away from realistic characters and portrayals of reality, this has less to do with paradoxical reasoning and more to do with something called the ‘uncanny valley,’ which is a principle that states that the more something resembles a human, the more positively people will respond to it—up to a certain point, when people begin responding extremely negatively.
Computer-generated animation has advanced just enough to place it squarely within the valley; most attempts at escaping the valley on the “realistic” side fall short. (Just look at Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.) Instead, groups like Pixar have moved away from realism, making obviously stylized characters in The Incredibles and nonhuman characters in most of their other films.
Again, I’m not sure this is so much a sinister plot or a failure to focus on what’s most important as simply filmmakers trying to expand their craft in whatever direction seems feasible: there wasn’t much to do with animation that hadn’t been done before. Computers change that. The conclusion seems evident.
I think it’s simply a matter of computer-generated animation being the next new thing. Filmmakers would like to use every tool available to them in the best possible way, and we still haven’t realized CGI’s potential. Hand-drawn animation, on the other hand—what’s there to do, that hasn’t been done before?
One side-effect of this is that because it’s so novel, CG projects don’t strictly need to have a brilliant concept or excellent writing to succeed; witness the vapid The Polar Express. On the other hand, shows like Pixar’s The Incredibles suggest that regardless of what form the animation comes in, we can still watch excellent, thought-provoking movies.
As for the move away from realism, it’s not so much executive cluelessness as it is a desire to avoid the uncanny valley. For now, most CG attempts at realistic human characters are going to fall squarely in the valley (see also Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which also suffered some horrible creative direction from Sony), so stylized people and nonhumans will remain the standard. One day soon we’ll see a jump to hyperrealism, but I don’t expect that will last, either: filmmakers are artists, and artists seem always to be striving to transcend the real.
Try sketching, inking, and painting something that’s supposed to run at 24 frames-per-second and you’ll see pretty quickly why traditional animation is only commercially viable if a) you are Disney or b) you have access to a Korean slave labor pool. You could either spend $100 million burning through acetate and hiring enough talented animators to handle a few seconds of production each or you can hire Tom Hanks. Come on, man! Haven’t you seen the Burbs??? That’s money well spent! Ka-ching!
Typorrhea sort of makes my point. The problem is that if you’re going to spend the money anyway, why not at least spend it on real animation? You lose as much with an over-reliance on computer graphics as you gain in supposed cost savings.
Is real animation real money? Of course. But it’s worth it.
What the heck are these poker people talking about?
Poker for your phone, suckas! Beat that! And guess who helped program it?
Anyway – sorry about the tangent. After much thought, I’ve concluded that CG animation in movies and television is just another case of a new medium immitating the forms of its predecessors. I think the realm in which CG really comes into its own is with interactive content.