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End Of Fox Animation
RobM writes: "I've found on the New York Times (registration required) that Fox Animation has been shut down after Titan A.E. flopped. What do you think of this film and the reasoning in the article '2D sucks, 3DCGI is the way to go'?"
When they showed the trailers I felt robbed. It looked more akin to Lion King than what I was expecting. I was half expecting the characters to break out in song. To my eye they geared this thing at the same people who religiously watch Disney cartoons (not that there's anything wrong with that, but its not what I'm interested in) who may not really be into science fiction.
I didn't see it, but I had every intention of seeing it prior to seeing the trailer. Good marketing that, changing somebodies mind 180 degrees in the wrong direction.
I don't know where the fault lies, but it just didn't seem like a very compelling movie to win 8 bucks and a couple hours of my time. Maybe the studio forced there hand in the animation and story department. I don't think animation is dead, nor do I think two dimensional animation is dead. It just looked like a single episode of Gundam Wing could involve me more than a full movie of Titan A.E. would.
I don't even know if what cartoon network shows is supposed to be good anime, but I do know I like it more than what I've seen coming out of the U.S.
And what about The Simpsons?
Southpark anyone?
Remember folks, this ain't Japan where animation is considered a highly respectable, serious artform that all ages appreciate.
Too true. What's worse is that generally, when good anime does make it to the American market, its American distributors dumb it down and strip out all of the "naughty bits" so that American parents won't be scandalized by boobs when they take their kids to see a film in a genre that is defined for them by Disney. (The peculiar American delusion that nipples are somehow a threat to civilization is a rant for another occasion.)
I didn't see Titan A.E. It wasn't on account of the trailers, as some have said, since I stopped watching TV more than a decade ago and it's hard to get me to go spend money for two hours of passive low-brow entertainment. It was because everyone I know who is an avid animation fan said it sucked. I have no idea how the animation was -- most of my acquaintances' venom was reserved for the purportedly awful plot and characterization. I was actually planning to see it up until then.
There's plenty of room for 2D animation, especially for parents like me who are tired of seeing Disney recycle the same three plots twice a year. (Anyone ever notice how all Disney films since Walt died revolve around orphans and dead or absent parents? What's up with that?) I'm actually less likely to go see a 3D CGI film, because -- excepting Pixar -- computer animation has only started to outgrow its gimmicky gee-whiz phase.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
How wrong can one person be? CGI is no more the flavor of the month, than sound or color. It has changed the movie industry as a whole and revolutionized animation.
That said. There's no reason that traditional animation studios can't succeed. Disney does it. I didn't see Titan A.E., so I can't comment, but Quest for Camelot and Anna and the King were awful. QfC had a mid-grade Saturday morning quality to it. My daughter, who can sit through just about any movie, walked out on this one after 30 minutes.
No one in the industry really knows why some movies do great and others fail. The secret starts with a good script, and add quality on top of that. With animation, though, it has to look expensive, and most of the time that means it has to be expensive. There isn't much room for dog crap cartoons. Disney has set the bar too high.
Toy Story 2 is Pixar, not Fox...
My journal has hot
I don't think Casablanca was anything like state of the art in terms of production values for its day. Look at Gone with the Wind or some other contemporary blockbuster.
Under the old studio system, they used to churn out films like this like Hormel puts out spam. They didn't have much budget to do spectacular scenes, so they were a bit claustrophobic. To make up for the workman like but mediocre production values they had to have a cracking good yarn. By in large the studios aimed for steady small successes with these movies, but every so often they'd hit the jackpot.
I don't think Casablanca was viewed in its day with the kind of reverence it is today. It came roaring back in the 60s though, because it solved a very big cultural dilemma. To be cool, you have to be jaded, experienced, detached. On the other hand, in the sixties it was cool to stand for or to be against something. So, are you going to be a tough sophisticate or a sensitive idealist? Will it be James Bond or Dr. King today?
Bogie showed us the way: you act cynical but hurt like hell inside.
Nobody could do it like Bogie - to be one thing on the outside and another inside. He could laugh and make it cut like a scream of pain. My favorite Bogie movie was Key Largo. Bogie was low key in that one, but the question was who was going to be tougher in the end, Edward G's sadistic, treacherous gangster or Bogie's soft spoken WW II vetran? What makes it exciting is that there's no way Bogie should win -- the gangster has all the advantages and will stoop to anything to get his way. In the climactic scene, I always get the urge to jump up and shout "Don't trust him, Bogie! He's a goddamn lying snake!"
You can't buy a sincere reaction like that. It takes genius.
The Fox animation stuff I've seen is very well crafted, as good as anything that Disney puts out on a technical level and in some cases visually interesting and original. However, none of it has the creative spark that makes you want to get up and shout at the characters on the screen.
The idea that there is a technical fix -- going to 3D or some such thing -- for creative deficiency is ridiculous.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Well...
SoftImage|DS is a $150,000 editing studio that includes full cel-animation facilities. There's a program called ReTimer (NT/Irix only, I think) that does some kind of dense-field inbetweening that (in the ads) looks bloody *fantastic*. Most professional 3D programs (and even Blender has been able to do this from the get-go if you know how) include "ink 'n' paint" facilities to simulate 2D animation.
But we all want volumetric 3D 4-billion-polygon eyecandy. Which has its place, see www.finalfantasy.com.
Of course, I think that animation's problem lies in its content rather than method. If only they'd make, say, a Watchmen animated movie, with John Malkovich as Dr. Manhattan... mmm...
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
But look at the new players. Centropolis. Pixar. Aardman. Mainframe. Plus all the effects houses that don't do entire features.
One of the most interesting efforts from an industry perspective is the Starship Troopers TV series. Flat Earth Productions cranked out weekly half-hour episodes of this near-photorealistic animation with a budget and team comparable to that for a typical sitcom. This project is about two orders of magnitude cheaper per minute of content than most CG feature animation.
We're going to see more work at that price point, and it will get better. This is where the action is. The high-end CG films with the $100 million and up costs can kill a studio if they aren't huge successes. That's what happened to Fox.
If a movie sucks, it doesn't matter if it's animated with cardboard paper, claymation, computers, or live action. It still sucks. Titan AE had no real clear market, no "core constituency" of people who'd see it, like it, and spread the word. It also had to go up against MI:2, which was essentially a cartoon done with live actors (a John Woo trademark), and that further sealed it's doom.
One of the many problems in Hollywood is that a studio will release something original, thoughtful, and creative, and that triggers a huge wave of "me too" copies. Disney has success with animation? Let's all get into animation!
Since "Chicken Run" was a hit, there'll probably be a huge wave of Claymation films coming up. Nobody understands why Chicken Run was a hit - they just understand that it made a lot of money. Duh.
Remember this mentality when we complain about the utter lack of clues that groups like the RIAA show. This is how they think. They can't see any farther than the first dollar signs, and reflexively avoid doing anything different. As soon as someone stumbles across a way to make money using digital technology (like MP3), every studio will jump on board. And if they come up with a way to make money selling unencumbered DVD's, they'll all shift within days.
In Hollywood, it's all about two things: not risking your job if possible, and, of course, the Benjamins!
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I'm sure many studios said 'Black and white sucks, colour is the way to go' but Highlander II is still a pile of crap and Casablanca is still a masterpiece.
A good story well done will (normally) do well regardless of technical issues/methods.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
The reason the Phoenix facility was closed was that after 3 films the returns were just dissappointing. Fox is a business and this was a business decision, plain and simple.
-danimal
*disclaimer* these comments neither represent Fox or Blue Sky Studios, they are mine alone.
All animation is still just that: animation.
The vast majority of all animated films that have come out in the last ten years have been a flop; with the glaring exceptions of some monumental Disney flicks.
The newest cgi movie from Disney, Dinosaur, was technologically astounding but was an utter disgrace when it came to the acting and the story. I was almost crying it was so bad (no, not really).
Now, had Disney decided to make the entire movie a classical music feast with cgi visuals, it would have been both innovative and amazing. The reason that they did this is very, very simple: you can't market class and good taste. A talking Dinosaur sells, a Classical music epic does not. While I would take my kids to a viewing of The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, or Aladdin, I know that if I took them to the original Fantasia, they would be both bored and annoyed (or annoying..). The reasoning behind this is because children (and the vast majority of all adults and adolesents) today are media slobbering brain-washed babboons that not only don't want something better, they don't even realise that there COULD BE.
So, this isn't about the animation (plenty of good animation from toystory to wallace and grommit and back again) but about making bad pop-culture movies that have no story/plot and no intrigue to pull an audience in.
Fox Studios doesn't seem to be able to make those kind of movies, I will not miss them.
Rami James
Guy who like cartoons.
--
rJames.org - illustration
We've been raised for generations to believe that animation is for little kids and that live action somehow is for adults. Most of the kids at my high school (I'll be a senior this year) don't even for the most part respect anime thanks to the marketting bastards that have made many americans think "sailor moon/pokemon==anime".
Most of americans won't even watch serious anime like the guyver series, nge, macross II, ninja scroll and akira. So I say that there isn't much hope for serious animation in general here in the US if most americans won't even willingly give some serious anime like the series listed above.
Remember folks, this ain't Japan where animation is considered a highly respectable, serious artform that all ages appreciate. You can find R rated anime in theatres in Japan and it can do quite well if it is well done, but here in the US it will be lucky if it is successful in ANY form at all.
"2D sucks, 3DCGI is the way to go" == "painting sucks, sculpture is the way to go"
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