CGI About to Boom In Hollywood
FortKnox writes "Because of the success of "Monsters Inc" and "Shrek", many major hollywood studios are scrambling getting on the CGI bandwagon. Looks like we're about to get smothered by CGI movies left and right. For those that like to tinker with CG, it might be a good time to go jobhunting..." Several upcoming movies mentioned. Some ven
look like they might have potential ;)
Don't forget that Shrek (and both Toy Story movies for that matter) was a great movie because it had a good script! If you just put out the same crap (*cough* FF *cough*), it will not be successful.
1. Write a good script
2. Make it with good actors (LOTR) or CGI.
3. Make money.
It is really pretty simple.
Good! The best part about CGI are the bloopers and outtakes. Funny!
Oh, that's sarcasm btw.
_______
2B1ASK1
I certainly hope that the producers of these wonder-CGI flicks understand that the reason that movies like "Shrek" and "Monsters, Inc." did well is that they had funny and original plots; the fact that they were digitally rendered was simply an added bonus.
Don't get me wrong; I'd like to see more CG films, but I don't really want that all-familliar Hollywood trend of copying an idea to death.
I predict that there will be a few good flicks out of this rush, and a whole bunch of lousy, plotless, kindergarten-quality films about wombats and potatoes.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
I just hope they realize that the success of "Shrek" had nothing to do with the fact that it was CGI, and that merely using CGI will not necessarily guarantee them the success of "Shrek."
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
This is very bad !
Real actors often act as projection surfaces for the phantasies of people like Natalie Portman. I doubt that CG actors will do the same, at least they are really artificial.
Also actors act as role model for little children making them bright, healthy and law-abiding citizens.
Without real live actor these will be gone. The only role models for little children will be the other people they see on news on TV - politicians and terrorists.
Would you like George "Duyba" Bush, Tony Blair or even Osama bin Laden to be a role model for your children ?
So all these CG movies are really very bad and might lead to reduction of morale in the free modern western civilization.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
I still live action actors, so maybe a combination (Roger Rabbit, Cool World, etc.) of CG and live action is on the horizon.
Sapere Aude - Homer
Is an Anime-style cartoon from Sav! The World productions, which is french. (So anime-inspired that it's even got a JPop soundtrack) It's entirely CG, although it's flat-shaded so that it looks like traditional cel animation, albeit with spectacular eeffects and attention to detail. It looks neat, but will cost about $300,000 per episode to produce.
You can see an Mpeg format trailer here:
http://www.savtheworld.com/
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Of course, as ususal many studios will slap together formulaic, crummy projects driven by the idea that CGI means a movie on the cheap (no locations! no actors!). They'll tank, and some burned studios will think twice before the next one. And even if the product is decent - I watched "Osmosis Jones" on video this weekend and enjoyed it quite a bit - it may pan because there are no sure things in entertainment.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
MORE CLONES!!
MORE SEQUELS!!!
MORE PIXELS!!!!
HIGHER BUDGETS!!!!
MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE!!!!!
One. ONE decent memorable character. ONE good storyline that wasn't licensed from a book. (Notice where the REALLY good movies come from?) ONE skillful use of setting, or non-canned music, or silence, or symbolism, or metaphor.
All the money in Hollywood, and NONE OF THESE THINGS can be produced, apparently.
But they can spend NINE FIGURES on CG!! Oh, sure. No problem.
Funny. The game industry is trying desperately to be Hollywood, and Hollywood is trying frantically to be the game industry.
Maybe instead of the THX thing, they'll put up a sign that says:
"The audience is yawning"
Movies like Shrek and Final Fantasy (especially Final Fantasy) have done a lot to show what total CG movies can be, but movies like Lord of the Rings and (to a lesser extent, IMHO) Star Wars: Episode One have shown how the effective use of CG can not only compliment human acting, it can bring the immersion and suspension of disbelief to another level.
:)
I don't think anyone is going to dispute that the scenery and cinematography in Lord of the Rings was fantastic. Granted, the perspective (swooping high above in many cases) allows for loss of detail in such a way that you fool the eyes of the audience in a lot of cases, but the close-up scenes have become finely detailed as well, showing that the possibilities for effectively integrating CG in a live action scene are greater than in previous years.
I agree that a bumper crop of CG movies are coming, but here's another trend to watch out for: actors that do especially well with blue-screens and acting with things/people that aren't really there.
Oh, and just a side note...I think all this effective CG stuff is going to really hurt the traditional latex/foam rubber movie monster special effects industry. In years past, things like the cave troll in LotR would have been done with a guy in a suit, or hydraulics or such. But, it probably wouldn't have seemed as fluid or expressive, so, eh no loss, right?
My sigs always suck.
Will the end of the movie feature Astroboy lying to the computer as he files his report just so he can have some fun with the audience? Or will this be fleshed out to reveal a deeper mistrust between superior, smarter AI entities and their more mundane, inferior counterparts in the information sector?
ian.
ian
Does it mean a lot to have a 'name' when it is just a voice? Not really, there are plenty of other lower profile (and cheaper) actors who can do the voices.
The current star system is getting a little bit out of order and this could provide an excellent antidote.
Unfortunately, I guess this will go the say of modern SFX. Wow, great, it looks good, lets have lots of it! Whoops, shame about the plot, direction and acting. Those good films like Shrek came about because some people (i.e., Dreamworks in this case) did a lot of work. Pixar are good too, but let us hope that the industry does not become led by the idea of turning out CGI dross.
See my journal, I write things there
a friend of a friend of a friend works for the company producing this:
http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/ice_age/
it looks funny as hell..
It's based on Games Workshop's Warhammer 40K universe, and looks like it has to possibility to be exciting (atleast to people who follow the hobby) Check out the Exile films site for some neat preview animations and renderings.
Would you like George "Duyba" Bush, Tony Blair or even Osama bin Laden to be a role model for your children ?
No, yes, and no, respectively.
Please make Ender.
Ender's game that is.
Probably one of the FEW novels that really NEED CGI in order to get it done (try finding a few hundred kids, who can act, and stay young enough for the sequels).
Too bad OSC allowed the screenplay to get ruined.
"I think CGI is starting to phase out traditional animation," Swallow said. "But I think that is very much because of a generational divide. For a generation that is used to seeing these kind of digital images in video games, this is what they start to expect."
Hmmm... Apparently these guys are talking about Dizney and Dizney alone. The animation houses in Japan have done a great deal to convert over to digital CG production without sacrificing the look of traditional animation.
Take a good, close look at 'Love Hina', 'Excel Saga', or any newer anime and notice that the cels have all been 'painted' in Photoshop. On some of the closeup shots, you can make out typical Photoshop resizing residue and common filter effects.
CG may be killing the fatiguing process of 'pencil-paint-photograph', but not traditional animation.
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Tranitioning a bunch of CG tools from one OS to another is pretty low on the to do lists of major CG production houses. It isn't like they're going to hit up pricewatch and then debian.org and get themselves a bunch of cheap computers to make a movie with. The expensive part of CG animation are the animators themselves. Prosumer grade stuff like Maya and Lightwave ain't free though it wouldn't be too difficult to port them to some other OS besides what they currently run on. If more production houses go with Linux it isn't like some big win for anybody in particular. Alot of people use Windows NT workstations with a bunch of high priced hardware and software in them. Moving to Linux saves you the 50$ Windows NT OEM fee. Big whoop.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
CGI is a tool that allows you to make scenes impossible to do with conventional models.
People like interesting epic stories that stimulate their imagination... go figure...
This was probably said already, but I wanted to repeat it.. we've been spoiled with good CGI lately.. I really hope we're not in line for a truck load of crap.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Yep, just throw lotsa four letter words in, and you're good to go.
Let's face it, that's how most live action comedies are made.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Many CG studios have gone through some rounds of lay offs the last year. .. another studio making a feature length CG movie is Big Idea doing an adaptation of Jonah. (Got to throw a plug in somewhere ;)
And Shrek was not that good of movie. The script was so-so and the character movemnt was only believable on the donkey... and sometimes Shrek.
Monsters, Inc on the otherhand did an excellent job. Pixar does a good job of making things look right.
Also
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
I'm pretty sure he was lamenting Hollywood's inability to produce new, good stories. Many of the best movies are licensed from books (eg Silence of the Lambs). Of course some movies based off books end up sucking regardless (eg Hannibal).
The enemies of Democracy are
Gee do ya think Shrek is going to save the Princess and fall in love with her? Gosh what a surprise. It had some cutesy side jokes, and Cameron Diaz's avatar was certainly a render-o-babe, but that was about it. Diaz's reading was terrible, and Mike Myers talking in a Scottish accent is funny only if you know that he is actually Canadian (although that accent was actually his own idea I gather and a late change in the movie). I can picture some film execs watching this and cracking up each time Myers says "Donkey!" and Eddie Murphy does his thing. But they are only meta-funny, not actually funny. Just the fact that you think of the characters by their human voicers as opposed to their CG selves shows one of the problems.
- adam
I wouldn't say that yet, some of the LOTR stuff looked suspiciously close to stuff from Braindead, a truly excellent rubber and latex splatter film. I wouldn't be suprised if it brings on a whole new wave of films that use *more* FX because the director knows anything is possible.
And I still find that CGI spaceship models do not have the same impact or feel as a well done model. I say they will compliment each other's strengths.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
What the article fails to mention is that PDI and Pixar both have been working toward these CG animated films for 20 years; the article makes it sound like Dreamworks was able to make their first animated film very quickly and easily -- it could only do so because they bought Pacific Data Images who had been laying the foundations for these films beginning in 1980 (disclaimer -- I was at PDI from 1983 'til 1995).
Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar, has been trying to make animated films since the mid-70's, starting at the University of Utah, then going to the New York Institute of Technology's Computer Graphics Lab, then to Lucasfilm; whose computer division was spun off to become Pixar.
The film that did seem to happen amazingly fast was Jimmy Neutron; Boy Genius. While Pixar and PDI have used proprietary, in-house systems to do their animation; DNA used pretty much off-the-shelf software (although today's commercial software is very customizable, so the line is blurrier than you might think at first glance). DNA was able to make the jump from hand-drawn 2D animation to a 3D feature very quickly indeed. And while the characters are goofy and the rendering is not (even attempting to be) photoreal -- it is still amazing to me that a small group of people actually can pull off an animated film in a reasonable amount of time.
Jimmy Neutron will not be the box-office smash that Shrek or Monsters are; but it is the more revolutionary film.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
"In years past, things like the cave troll in LotR would have been done with a guy in a suit, or hydraulics or such."
How soon they forget Ray Harryhausen. In years past he would have done the cave troll and it would have looked..... about like it did in LOTR. That thing had a definite Golden Eye of Sinbad vibe to it.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
Ishtar
Last Action Hero
Method of processing duck feet
Disney laid off nearly a third of its animators and cut the pay of much of the rest. Dreamworks/PDI had layoffs. Didn't FOX/Bluth close down their studio? Very little recruiting and parties at the 2001 World Animation Convention & SIGGRAPH this year. Forty resumes for every job offer on the SIGGRAPH employment board. Five years ago if you knew how to use SoftImage or Alias you were guaranteed a cushy job. Hope success turns things around.
I see Ice Age (completely computer) and Peter Pan II (mixed computer and art) have been announced.
Pixar and Dreamworks/PDI are taking a rest after immense successes in 2001. Both are working on animal movies for 2003. What else is in the works?
CGI: (n) Common Gateway Interface. Used primarily as a means of getting and responding to user input via a Web interface.
CG graphics: (n) Computer Generated images. Typically used to describe animations created completely through computers, as opposed to images created through photography or traditional cel animation.
SGI graphics: (n) Refers specifically to those CG graphics created on SGI workstations.
Pick the right term and use it. Thanks!
Nathan
The last part of CGI that depends strongly on humans are the voices. When will they be computer generated?
However, you forgot one thing that director Peter Jackson said about the Cave Troll: it was designed specifically as an homage to Ray Harryhausen, perhaps the greatest stop-motion special effects artist ever. That's why the motion of the Cave Troll is not completely smooth--it copied Harryhausen's style.
If Jackson had wanted more smooth action from the Cave Troll his CGI team at WETA Digital would have copied the movement style of the go motion figures that was first heavily used by Industrial Light and Magic for the movie Dragonslayer.
From the first time I saw tron that CGI was not just a passing fad. Tron should win an award in groundbreaking CGI. It paved the path for the future.
There have been many stories about computer animation switching to Linux boxes because of cost savings and availability. I wonder if the adoption of Linux is helping the industry and in turn will this growth help Linux. Either way here are some Computer Animation\Linux articles to read:
Linux Goes Hollywood
Linux Goes To The Movies
Linux takes Hollywood by storm
Maya ported to Red Hat
http://www.kubuntu.org/
In a french film, Amelie, there's probably the most subtle, yet effective CGI I've seen in years. Too often, IMHO, CGI is gaudy or simply overused to generate eye-candy. In a few years people will be so accustomed to CGI that, like the introductions of Sound and Color, it'll have to survive on more than just novelty or eye-candy appeal. If you get a chance, see Amelie and note how effective a little CGI can be, particularly the bed table creatures. ;)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...wait until they start using servlets!
Breakfast served all day!
Now compare that with Bug's Life. How is Flik going to save the day? What happens when the identity of the circus bugs is exposed? Or when the bird catches fire? Of course these movies all share the basic ending of good triumphing over evil but Bug's Life takes a lot more twisty route getting there.
Then you have the Toy Story movies which actually have a quite interesting idea behind them, and are also cleverly done. What truly baffles me is how something so simple-minded as Shrek is supposed to appeal to adults. I can see why kids like it but can such a simple plot really capture an adult's imagination, unless they are simply watching the animation?
The other thing about Toy Story/Bug's Life is that they could not have been made as live action movies, unlike Shrek (whose basic plot has been made countless times). I haven't seen Monsters Inc. but I think it may show Pixar descending into mere competence as opposed to brilliance.
- adam
Executive: How's the "Tomb Raider: The Silicone Within" work coming?
Animator: We need to custom build a physics engine.
Executive: What? Why? It's all off-the-shelf now-a-days.
Animator: That's the problem; the physics engines are too realistic.
Executive: What do you mean?
Animator: Watch this test reel.
*Animator turns on a monitor, and runs an animation clip.*
Animation: *Lara Croft, in all her ray-traced glory, is standing as still as a statue on a flat plane. Suddenly she animates; her eyes start looking around, she starts breathing, her body is shifting ever so slightly on her feet, a breeze is playing with her hair. She stretches, arching her back.*
Animation: *as Lara arches her back, she gets a surprised look on her face*
Lara's Back: *SNAP*
Animation: *Lara's back snaps as gravity pulls her titanic brests downwards. She collapses in a hideously bent backward heap*
Lara: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!
Animation: Gravity pulls Lara down, bending the flat plane she's standing on into a cone, looking like those graphical renditions of black holes you always see.*
Animator: See what we mean? Sure, we could reduce the size of her breasts to normal human proportions, but...
Executive: Hell no! We want to make some money on this!
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Now they can just pay you a fat check, scan your image and voice once and use it in as many films as they like. Anyone want to take bets on how long it will be before they bring out a modern movie with John Wayne plaing the starring role? It's possible, even easy. After all, they did it with Brandon Lee in The Crow, but that was because they had no other choice. How long before that becomes an accepted way of making a film?
I'd give it 10 years at most before we see mainstream pictures using dead actors. That could go to a really bad place... corporations and movie studios with licenses to particular actors' digital counterparts, licensing of their digital avatars, patents on the technology... we could see a very real mess develop... after all, precedent of a sort is already set with currently existing animated characters (Mickey Mouse, Aki Ross, Jar Jar Binks, Gollum, etc.) and if those rules were applied to living actors I expect people would not be pleased...
Some of you will say that computer actors will never be as good as the real thing. You'd be wrong of course... not to say it would be easy, but 99% as good as the real thing is close enough for 99% of the people. Readers on this site in particular should know exactly what CGI technology is capable of, and it's definitely not out of reach. Better start thinking about it now, if we see it happening perhaps we can do something to prevent it from going down the wrong road.
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
I would have to agree that Shrek is too self-conscious and probably won't be funny in 5 years, although Lithgow's great performance does have redeeming quality. But I think you really hit the nail on the head when you pointed out that although you expect a happy ending in Pixar movies, you could never guess all the plot twists that take you there. Rest assured that MI's ending will not disappoint; if the rest of the movies seems slightly weaker than their previous films, the ending outshines those of any of their other movies, and the beautiful fur animation of Sully will have your eyes glued to the screen the whole time anyway.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
See how many of the same reactions there is?
:) ) and like I said before, they see only numbers. It's obvious that hollywood has a kool-aid receipe to make movies and bring in cash. The 3D CGI movies got in only because it was a continuation of the 2D art, so it blended in without causing too much noise. It fitted well and Hollywood noticed it generated quite an amount of cash. That's good in a way, that means we'll still se quality content like Pixar's and Dreamwork's, but the downside is we'll probably start seeing a LOT of crap in the next years in that field as well.
The main problem with hollywood is they are running a buisness. Some people in "the company" are brilliant, but the others (majority) are just seeing and "understanding" the numbers.
Pixar's been around for quite a while, Disney's been around forever in the realm of 2D animation. If you look at both entities, what made them a success is the mix of mastering their art (2d, 3d) AND the storyline. Obvious you might say? well for us, yes, but think "marketting guy" (no no!!! I don't mean like "what would I do if I had unlimited spending money and a ferrari"
Hollywood sees something that makes money, and they use use use and abuse it until it runs dry and people puke when they see that again. Instead of "risking" new material or storylines. How about a movie that doesn't end well? How about a movie where the good guy gets killed in the middle and you see the movie from the bad guy's perspective until the end (something bad/good happens to him?), How about an ecological catastrophe that CAN'T be avoided and resulting on the mass destruction of the human being with stuff like pollution/asteroids/younameit, instead of having some crap about one guy that defeats nature?
Yes it might flop, depending, again, on the story and more importantly, how it's told. But I don't think I'd see anyone SERIOUSLY pissed and boycotting hollywood because of a different ending. Of course there's always alternative movies from other countries or independant films if you want something special, but usually only hollywood has the cashflow to push effects in a film to give it that extra "magic".
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Most CG studios already use Linux. There was an article here on /. a while back about it. Maya is available for Linux. Most CG studios also make their own software, usually for Linux. Rendering is done on hundreds or thousands of Linux render servers.
A solution to the problem with music today
...who started thinking of "CGI scripts", in the sense of perl/PHP/etc server-side stuff? Or was it just me? :-\
________________________________________________
suwain_2
BWAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA!!
(wipes away tear)
You really kill me, Rob. "About to", hehe!! ^_^
Ooh! Here's the next joke you should post as a story, to make me smile:
"US 'about to' sacrifice neccessary freedoms to catch 'terrorists'"
Or how about:
"Enron 'about to' go bankrupt."
Keep the silliness coming! ^_^
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Here's my more practical question: What industry or industries will benefit from an increased use of CGI characters? If you know this, and you know it well, you can make some really good investments right now. The market is down, especially for technology, so it seems like a good time to strike. Sure technology stocks and technology investors are fickle, but if you have the money to make a few informed bets, you might just make yourself some money.
What do you think? What companies can capitalize on this trend?
(Note: People on Slashdot should ask these kinds of questions more often. Business questions would benefit many people here.)
How to Download YouTube Videos
I can just imagine the pitch session:
Producer: Ok, we can do Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak has agreed to supervise an army of sensitive consumptive artists to hand paint every cel. It'll be beautiful, and about 10 minutes long, but it'll be a shoe-in to win Best Animated Short.
Studio Exec: No way. Its gotta be feature length CGI or nothing! I can't put out a family film that isn't CGI! Not after Shrek!
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
The cave trolls motion was captured from a human actor.... Not generated by computer.
:-)
While the basic movements of the Cave Troll were done by motion capture, note that in the final movie the movements of the character had a herky-jerky feel like what you saw from the stop-motion work of Harryhausen. I think the CGI was deliberately done that way, hence my comment it was an homage to Harryhausen's special effects work.
WETA Digital could have rendered the Cave Troll so it moved smoothly, apeing the go-motion model designs from ILM. But then, it wouldn't be a homage to Harryhausen, would it?
In the triple pack they put on sale a few months ago. The third DVD contained a shitload of extras, including badly rendered sequences, misplaced artifacts, etc.
And while on the subject of contrived bloopers, I'm really not pleased with the "release the movie now, release the bloopers in 4 weeks" strategy that certain studios have adapted. Like I'm gonna sit through Monsters twice. It's cute, but in the end it's just another buddy picture. Like Lethal Weapon or Rush Hour.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
What Thagg didn't mention (yet I am positive he/she knows) is that not only was Jimmy Neutron made with an off the shelf package, it was made with a very inexpensive ($2500) one called Lightwave 3D. That, and an $800 plugin called Messiah were the backbone of the entire movie. It was bound to happen eventually and proves that if a large group of people got together who were talented enough, and had enough money to live off of for a year or two, the first "basement" movie could be produced. I see this as a step closer to that dream.
I guess I should mention that Final Fantasy was made mostly with Maya and Photorealistic renderman, (two programs that can be purchased) but it really isn't in the same league as Jimmy Neutron.
P.S.
All hail Edwin Catmull!
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Oh I guess that's why they are bloopers...(someone was telling me about an argument they had with someone trying to explain why they weren't really outtakes and had to be specifically made).
- adam
Many of the scenes in Tron that look like CGI, those that involve both live actors and effects, are actually hand-painted cel animation. Most of that glowing-line stuff is not CGI at all.
"Reboot" was the first all-CG TV show, and it was produced by about 30 people doing one episode per week. That's an incredible level of productivity for CG work. When that level of output can be sustained at what we now consider theatrical quality, the CG revolution will really happen.
I know some pro animators who are looking forward to that. They'd like to head a small team and do their own projects, rather than being a small cog in a huge project outsourced to ten animation houses.
Well, yeah, provided the system of intellectual property law doesn't interfere with it too much. The legal regime that the big studios are making will eventually make it nearly impossible for any form of major creative production to move ahead without a large, skilled, and well paid legal department, which raises the bar quite a bit...
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Yes, production companies have been getting on the CG bandwagon (like for the last decade, folks) but right now there are a lot of jobless folks in the industry--people with years of professional modelling/animation/compositing experience.
In six months, this, like the tech industry in general, may be a happier place, but they're hurting right now, too.
-db
As a matter of fact, "The Rescuers Down Under" (1990) was Disney's first "computer-generated" movie in the sense that every cel was painted on computer, instead of by hand. Movies like "The Lion King" and "Beauty and the Beast" have also used CGI characters (wildebeasts and dancing spoons) that look very much like hand-drawn animations.
What the article means, of course, is using fully 3D-rendered CGI with textures and shadows that would be nearly impossible to create using traditional animation. The distance between digital painting and 3D modelling is absolutely night and day.
Okay. I think I understand this statement. You're saying that this film makes a much stronger statement because it's not trying to be photorealistic. It's saying that CGI -- even CGI that doesn't look real -- is acceptable.
However, this film is a kiddy film. It doesn't contain anything that would engage adults like Monsters or Shrek. Isn't that like a step in the wrong direction then? Isn't that like saying unrealistic GCI is okay -- as long as it's for kids. Isn't that the problem animation in general has been having (at least in the west) since the very beginning? Haven't we been trying to fight the opinion that animated films just for the kids?
Who moderates the meta-moderators?