CGI vs. Old Fashioned cell animation

Do you think an old fashioned technology feature length cartoon would do well these days? Think of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves". Old painted cellulose animation as opposed to Pixar type computer animation. I can remember the last non-CGI feature length cartoon that was released, or how well it did.

I don't think it has any chance in theatrical release. Older people don't go out to the movies and younger ones don't like anything that looks old.

Of all the animated films of recent years my favorite is The Incredibles. It's just wonderful. And despite being CGI it is done in comic book style. There is no attempt to make anything look realistic.

Disney is going to try and find out. The have a movie titled "The Frog Princess" (or something Frog) in development. The problem is not cell animation vs computer - it's just that the last few traditional animation films (from the US, japan is another matter) have stunk.

The other thing is that Cell animation goes up in cost, while computer goes down (in a sense, they keep adding more pizzaz for roughly the same price each movie, where cell animation has no choice but to take out pizzaz in order to keep costs the same)

I doubt we'll see many more animated films actuall using the old technology, due to cost reasons. We may well see computer animated films that look more or less identical to cell animation films - but most likely with more detail and a higher framerate than the cell animated films.

the old cell animators were really amazing, having to draw all those
frames by hand ... when CGI first came out I didn't really like it
but it seems to be getting better and better.

There hasn't been a 'traditional' traditional animated film in a dogs age. Everything nowadays has some form of digital assistance, primarily in the clean-up/coloring department, which are no longer done on cells, because it just looks better (and is cheaper) when done by the computer.

Anyways, aside from the recent trend of a lot of bigger name animated films flopping at the box office the last decade (I believe Fox had to close their animation studio because of that when Titan A.E. was finished and bombed), I can't see them making a large comeback when people seem to prefer the graphical-glory that CGI gives them for their eyes to feast on.

Last time I've seen something traditionally (well, with digital assistance) done had to be Kung Fu Panda's intro sequence, which was essentially my favourite part of the whole movie. I actually hope they do a spin-off done in the same style, because it's so fluid and refreshing in this day and age of companies trying to make things photorealistic in a cartoony movie.

cell animation will always be more impressive to me, rather than all this nice, good looking 'synthetic' animations...sure, they are amazing and looking excellent, but still..somethings missing...example of cell animation and animators artwork I saw in old russian cartoon Pinnochio, and stuff was animated sooo well..its impossible to see any single drop frame, or jerky motion...extraordinary smooth, shadows casting, colors...im just shocked..I think russian name was Buratino(or something near that)..

I used to be pretty into CG, particularly 3D movies and would follow 3D app updated religiously. These days I find most CG movies once you take away the technical expertise, somehow soulless.

The main thing that got me into game art was the interactivity, but now that graphics have caught up with the movies, I find the games are all too shallow relying heavily on fancy graphics and FX whilst still having the most basic trigger based gameplay and AI. Almost as boring as the CG movies.

I find myself being more and more excited by traditional media lately. Not that there is much traditional animation done today outside of indie and college art departments.

Don Bluth is an old favourite ! :)
http://www.donbluth.com/

Ah yeah I always like Don Bluth, ever since I played his laser disk games in the early 80's. I almost bought a coin op for 300 with space ace and dragons lair.

hand drawn is always time consuming
even the digital retouching of a scanner darkly took for ever to do, they could have cheated and let the computer do the tracing but they wanted it to look like it was done by hand and the best way to do that was ... to do it by hand

southpark is cgi even though its made to look like craft paper animation, they avoid 3D elements as much as possible

ive seen a degredation in anime over the years, ok some were never hot to begin with but these days shoveling out a kids show on time and on budget means we dont get the quality of akira, no do we expect to, but if cornes must be cut then corners are cut.

as for movie studios wishing to do a movie in a cell painted style asked a traditional studio and a render farm how much the render farm would be way cheaper, perhaps their skills not as good as pencil on paper artists, but the movie studio out to make money as well as a movie (regardless of story content) is going to want the cheapest option

it would be nice if traditional animators work was digitally painted and 'filmed' in software as those are the two avenues of mistakes
a busy screen needs alot of acitates changed and some might get in the wrong order (there was a bloop reel on a transformers DVD showing these kinds of things) and painting requires painting the small front details first then working backwards
again if you miss something out you cant add it later as you would be painting onto the front of the acetate and not the back

but also going totally 3D gives directors the chance to make dramatic camera angles and change the film on the fly, one option hard to make by hand and the other almost impossible without more time

and as for TRON it needed a lot of hand painting of B&W blowen up frames to get the coloured look, a look that now would be totally CG

Space Ace rocked !! :) (dragon's lair too)

I think kids these days wouldn't be that into cell based stuff
they're so used to 3D animation, but who knows ? ....

Are people forgetting about Anime? Hayao Miyazaki's movies are just as good as anything put out by Pixar, and he's far from being the only amazing Japanese anime artist.

simsons and family guy are still hand painted (last i looked they hadnt gone the cg looks like paint route)

TV anime ive seen decline film anime however with or without cg enhancements do look lush

>simsons and family guy are still hand painted

...and animated in a third world country at a hundredth of the cost of the animation done in the west.

is korea a 3rd world? iir the simpsons is done there

but as with alot of other things they are made abroad due to costs because joe blogs manufacturing co is willing to make nike trainers for thruppence ha'penny paying their staff a month what you and i might earn in an hour

im not happy about alot of this outsourcing abroad to cheap nations for alot of reasons but the politics of it all are not for this thread

Simpsons is all 'computerised' now. You can tell when an early episode is on because the colour is lousy and the lines are thick and black and horrid.

Not exactly CGI, but its not exactly hand drawn using traditional cell animation techniques, either.

[edit] Oh, and some parts of The Simpsons Movie were blatantly CGI, and I don't care if Matt Groening said it wasn't.

I work in 3D animation, and still think that 2D works better for character work and acting, at least when done by talented animators. It mainly has to do with that you have better control when drawing. You can pose the character exactly how you like, and "cheat" to get the drawing looking right by bending things out of shape. This is harder to do in 3D, which in many ways is closer to puppet animation than drawn animation, and relies on a fixed puppet with a skeleton, with limited controls for "bending it out of shape". :)

I think the problem is the market. Friends of mine, who don't work with CGI or graphics, seem to prefer the 3D look to the 2D. And if they are any sign to how the general public feels, that may be why we're getting so many 3D films.

p.s. I second that the opening sequence of Kung Fu Panda was great. I would love to see a whole film done in that style.

The problem with cell animation is that you need a lot of frames for decent animation. Unfortunately Japanese (and Korean too) animation houses have lowered the quality by doing it as cheaply and quickly as possible by using as few frames as possible.

I'm a great fan of CGI, both 2D and 3D, and is the way to go now.

You're right about animation houses cutting down on animation frames in order to save time and money, and I think that this is an area in which CGI can be used very effectively to enhance the fluidity of the animation (interpolation?). More generally, CGI is able to tweak and enhance traditional animation in a number of ways that improve the visual fidelity. Using CGI to enhance traditional 2d art techniques is a good thing, providing the CGI is employed subtly and in moderation.

early 2000's depending on what time i finished work id sometimes catch the odd episode of digimon (out of boredom than anything else) the CG digivolve scenes were too out of place for me cos it was a CG morph that then resulted in going back to cell and to help with the costs it was over used if there was space in the episode or if time was short it would just be a quick blip of a transformation

> (interpolation?)

I think the term is "Tweening". And there is some computer software coming out to handle that function. If it works it would be very helpful. I also don't mind using a computer to flesh out the "Lines" of a world - as long as the end result looks like cell animation I would still call it cell animation.

Lilo and Stitch came out not long ago at all and it was cel animated and did well.

Alrighty, time for a larger post/rant, since apparently you can only type so much in a textbox on the PS3 (which I used for my previous post).

One trend I've seen lately (which includes a couple animation studios near my place) in TV cartoons is that they're cutting even more corners by nearly dropping the whole hand-drawn aspect as they rely more and more on computers to do all the work for them after they create the 'base' assets for the show.
(and including a couple new layouts and props per episode, while recycling all the old existing content)

Essentially, what they do is create characters that usually have a front-view shot, and a 3/4 shot in a flat-style design so you can essentially do anything you'd want with the character without resorting to creating additional drawings as you can do all you need with the two above. From there, they essentially animate the entire how in the same manner you see on those Flash animations around the web: 'push-pin' the joints and move them about, letting the computer handle all the actual animation/tweening for you.

Personally, I find that it looks extremely cheap (which it is), and I hate it, but I can see why they do it givin' the actual cost of animation these days, as well as the number of shows I'm seeing that are adopting that setup. (most recent one being a show my sister watches called 6teen)

For me, I'm currently enrolled in college to get a major in traditional animation, and I really, really, don't want to come out of there to essentially work at a studio with a mouse and keyboard in hand. I want to draw the animations in a fluid manner, not have Flash/Toonboom/Maya/Etc programs do it all for me as I just position some joints of drawings some other guy did at keyframes and let it do all the tweening for me.

I just really miss my childhood days where *every* cartoon was essentially badass (from my childhood opinion, as to these days we'd all likely consider corny, but in a good way considering the baby-safe crap this generation of kids/early-teens get to endure) and animated very well all traditionally.

What exactly happened since then anyways, did the cost of animators just shoot through the roof or something, or was it just a case of companies giving their men lower and lower budgets, forcing them to actually take all the shortcuts they do as of today?

I think they've been cutting costs for ages. It probably started in the Hanna Barbara days ... It's also a matter of taste though, some people like
the simpler type animation. For alot of us we'd probably appreciate
Walt Disney stuff more since we're into graphics and stuff.

Genexi2: You're brave, embarking on a very difficult career. Getting a job doing traditional 2D animation straight out of school is not that easy these days, especially since a lot of very talented traditional animators with years of experience are looking for jobs too. Many places still do the rough animation on paper, and sometimes cleanup, but from there on it's all computer for color, shading and so on. I studied animation too, but it was more of a all kinds of (or experimental) animation, from 2D, puppets, cut-out, 3D and more. :) Loved all of it.

Software such a Anime Studio (aka Moho) uses vector based drawing that are then rigged with bones, like in 3D, for animation. You can also do different shapes, and interpolate between them. This is really just a modern form of cut-out animation done on the computer (like in Monty Python). If not done well, which takes time and skill, the animation can look very soft and ugly. Though, it is possible to get very nice results with this technique, especially when combined with drawn animation, to create replacement shapes for hands, facial features, turning the characters and more.

As a side note there is a software called Synfig Studio (www.synfig.org) that works in a similair manner, but is open source. It still lacks bones, but has some additional render features which can give you nicer looking images than Anime Studio (at least out of the box). If any of you know C++ and feel like contributing to an open source project, this one really needs more developers. :)

UPA is where a lot of the limited animation started. Use multiple cells, and only draw the mouth and eyes to save on animation. Very start stop movements, and little or no secondary animation. A lot of anime is done like this too. Computers just make this even easier than before.

My personal preference is for combining CGI and traditional animation, letting each shine at what it's best at. A very good example would be Iron Giant. Where the mechanical things, like cars, planes, bicycles, some effects and the Giant himself are done in 3D, while the rest is 2D. In my opinion, mechanical things work better in 3D, while characters and acting work better in 2D.

i dont know how much was cost cutting and how much was lazyness in HB's case

flintstones had the same running loop along the how long is their house in nigh on every episode where fred had to run, perhaps it was a deadline short cut as they might not have been as ahead as shows can be now
the backdrops were rough and sometimes unfinished, but it also added to the charm (well when your still a kid watching it against your adult self)

i dont want animation to turn into a clip art show with cut and paste animation, it would be the cartoon equivelant to the latter airwolf's and the story would be driven by what images they had already and not created to fit

"sorry we havnt got any artic back drops youll have to change the story"

That ToonBoom Studio looks pretty cool actually. For only $299 it looks like, with some time and dedication, you could make a nickelodeon quality (think spongebob) cartoon with it. Hmm...

I own ToonBoom Studio Express 2.5. :) It's not the latest version, and lacks some of the cut-out features they've added since. It's a nice little program, though I don't like animated directly in it. I would rather use it for cleanup and coloring. I find it hard to draw rough animation in vector graphics, when all the lines are equally dark. I need a more pencil like feel. Plastic Animation Paper, seems great for that (or just normal paper and a scanner), though I've only used the demo. The express version of ToonBoom is much cheaper btw, and the limitations are not that restrictive.

I'm not really into many of these CG films, but my firm favourite is 'The Iron Giant' Most of it looks like cell animation, but the Iron Giant himself is computer generated.

Old fashioned cell animation can still look very impressive, like some great anime's (Princess Mononoke is a good example). But computers will probably be used more for newer cell animations to make animations look smoother and with better proportions.

i wonder if comics are going to go this route at some point

would we get to the stage where marvel release a comic using poser created characters in a 3ds max environment as a mainstream concept and not just a niche one off serise

i remember many years ago there was a 3d batman hard back book that was quite large and thus expencive so i never read it, but prior to that there was one superman comic that had polygon elements that the artist said he got a computer friend to print out and he just pasted them into the page (tron it wasnt) ... now a days colouring and sometimes lettering are done via pc's, perhaps the artists themselves also draw on graphic tablets too (a minority of them id guess so far)

working with a digital image allows for quicker editing, i got the TPB of wanted and in the back it had how some pannels were changed, in the old days that might have needed a total page redraw, now it was just scan in new panel and paste it over

CG colouring also allowed for more gradients, when comics from marvel were printed by marvel UK in the larger almost A4 size the colour dots became further apart and ugly, almost like looking at the pop art posters that were intentionally large, but the US originals the dots worked
advances in printing meant that the dots got closer and then pc's offered better washes that inks alone couldnt

also (this applies to animation and comics) due to the medium against live action movies and TV some stories just wouldnt or couldnt be told unless done with paper pens and inks, alot of people ridicule comics slating them as childish never reading imprints like vertigo yet they would be the same people that watch endless soaps like east enders and corination street with their 'believeable' story lines

i dont think any tv show would have taken on transmetropolitan, nor do i see a tv adaptation coming out of it
the logistics of a zombie serise vs a movie are a bit too much, yet a simple B&W comic doesnt need hundreds of extras in make up booths for hours on end

the expanded universe of starwars, again too much time and money involved in live action for all stories concerned, but a monthly comic with quarterly TPB = stories get told

My favorite lately is "Flushed Away" (im a big aardman fan). Despite being rendered it still has a claymation feel to it (i guess its a mixture of both). Its a great film for those who have not seen it and is dripping in classic english humor.

aye although ive not seen it it does have the trademark aardman look and feel of character design, showing that they could easily do a cosgroves hall (didnt they spin off from them?) and cell paint the next wallace and grommit

claymation/stop motion is probably more labour intensive than cell animation* due to all the models involved so migrating to CGI although a bit of a sell out is somewhat easier when you look at some of the busier scenes (in the trailer)

*yes i know it can be argued the other way but with 'onion skinning' you can spot bad frames and compensate, with something as a busy prop scene one over/under moved character and it can all go wrong, even if it may be a less dominant character, but it could ruin the magic
having said that the photographer not changing an acitate or layering it wrong gives off the same effect, but thats not the animators fault
but with claymation it would be

Ginger Tea: I don't think comics will go the same way. Most of them anyway. Simply because it's generally faster to draw it than it is to create it in 3D. There are quite a few 3D comics around, but many of them are done using Poser, and just don't look right.

Though using computers to aid in creating comics is already very common, especially for color, tone and text. I'm currently using Manga Studio Ex for drawing a comic directly on the computer. It's a brilliant program for black and white art. I also use one 3D model I created as reference for one set which I have to draw over and over again. I don't actually render the model, I just use it to trace after. Everything else I draw by hand, but on the computer.

Cutting and pasting in comics is older than the computer though. It's quite common to just use scissors and cut out a panel to replace it with a new drawing. When reproducing it, this won't show up, at least for black and white comics.

Comics using rendered graphics aren't new, I remember seeing such a comic in the beginning of the 80's, which was done using an Atari computer to produce uncoloured 3D with hidden lines removed. The problems, of course, were that it was B&W with poor resolution and the story wasn't that catching... But it worked.