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Disney Does Digital, Ditches Drawings
May Kasahara writes "This is something which has been the talk amongst animators for the past couple of weeks: Walt Disney Feature Animation is in the process of halting all work on traditionally-animated features and going completely CG. Supposedly, all of their animators-- even staunch traditionalists such as Glenn Keane-- are being trained on 3D computer animation techniques. The last hand-drawn high-budget Disney feature scheduled for release is Home on the Range, which is due out next April. It appears that Disney is bowing to the supposed pressures of the market, even though the hand-drawn Lilo and Stitch was considered a success and the all-CG Dinosaur (done at Disney's now-defunct FX house The Secret Lab) was not. However, I believe there's another factor at work: Pixar's contract with Disney is set to expire soon, and the revered CG house has been making their own demands of Disney for the contract's renewal."
I try to limit the amount of paper used as far as possible. In this day and age - graphics tablets, decent graphics software I'm sure Disney have figured out that it's cheaper and more efficient to use a computer.
It also gives the animators more artistic freedoms as well as freedom from some of the drudgery of cell animation where every single frame has to be drawn by hand.
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How was Pixar pushy? They got screwed over contract-wise for Toy Story, and Disney managed to make a CG for less than a traditional animated film.
For the next movie (Bugs life?) they got a bit pushier, yes. They asked for top billing alongside the Disney trademark, and Steve Jobs managed to make Pixar a household name. Anyone know about current relations? They seem to be a cash cow for both parties.
I will miss the old hand-drawn films. They have a certain nostalgia about them... the not-so-crispness lends a certain effect that is lost in computer-generated animation. CG is nice, but I don't think they should completely eradicate the old way.
The Present is the point at which time touches eternity. - C.S. Lewis
This is really just a sensible evolution, a transition to a newer way of making a polished product. Drawing by hand will still be around as an intermediate step for design and planning (storyboards and such).
Making a transition to "computer graphics" does not necessarily mean a move to "3D work." There's been tons of CG usage in Disney cartoons already (stampede in Lion King, flying through trees in Tarzan, etc.), and neither of those would be considered 3D animations (like Toy Story, Shrek, et. al.) ... hell, even South Park is animated completely by computer, and you can't seriously tell me that it looks in the least like it's 3D.
This is not going to be the end of a traditional 2D-look for cartoons, but I can see it as Disney just embracing the technology that's there, like they did with Snow White and the pseudo-3D frame photography that they used for that.
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To call Pixar pushy is to miss the point: right now they're getting screwed. Disney is getting 50% of their movies for doing nothing more than distributing. Pixar is investing years of labor and untold hours of computing time into making these as good as possible and Disney is pulling crap like not counting Toy Story 2 in the original 5 movie deal (Disney doesn't count sequels as new properties, even when they're immensely successful and have a veyr nice theatrical run).
Pixar deserves whatever they can get, and Disney deserves the same deal that Fox gets for distributing Lucas' work: 15% or lower.
That being said, I would also venture to guess that Pixar is looking to branch out into more adult fare as well. It's only time until a fully rendered CG film deals with adult themes (NOT porn...but that's a possibility too) instead of just catering to kiddie audiences. Finding Nemo was closer than anything else they've done, but my guess is that once Disney drops Pixar, they announce a PG-13 rated drama.
Quite honestly, Pixar doesn't need Disney at all. Pixar could easily get the capital necessary to build their own distribution house, especially considering that digital media are rapidly replacing film in theaters. If they did break off their relationship with Disney, it would provide Pixar the chance to offer some more serious fare, finally giving the US a studio to compete with some of the higher-budget anime of recent years (a la Ghost in the Shell or Final Fantasy).
On the other hand, the story writing and characters created by Pixar in the their last several movies could have easily been able to be done with traditional animation, assuming a good animation studio was behind it. The 3d CGI adds the right amount of sparkle to an already top-notch story, but the writing is so good, that the 3d is not necessary.
What Disney needs is to rethink their approach to their 'animated' features. Lilo and Stitch *was* funny and was a good movie, and beautiful to look at with the watercolor backgrounds. If it was done in 3d, it actually may have actually lost something in the final presenation. But the key improvement was the writing where they turned back to their past talent and got them to do their thing, and didn't muck about in making it family friendly. As such, it's a very witty movie. But when the management gets too deep in the details to make a movie more appealing to the very young crowd, it suffers drastically (such as Treasure Planet did).
Fortunately, I don't think Dreamworks is giving up their feature animation department. Sure, Sinbad didn't do so well, but they have had a few good shots with that and with The Road to El Diablo. (If anything, Dreamworks fault lies in too much 2D/3D overlap). WB has disbanded it's feature animation department (The new LT movie is not much as aniamted as it is live), and FOX killed it's line after Titan AE failed. It's a shame that people think that 3d is the only way that people will appreicate an animated movie. The only reason that every Pixar movie has worked is that every Pixar movie has great writing behind it, not just a bunch of render farms.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Lilo and Stitch wasn't a success becuse it was hand-drawn, it was a success because the story was interesting, the characters were fun, and the movie well-made. And Dinosaur wasn't a flop because it was a CG film, it was a flop because it sucked.
CG lets you do cool stuff that's not readily feasible by hand, but it's no substitute for a good story. The marketplace isn't pressuring Disney to abandon hand-drawing, it's pressuring Disney to make good films. They've just made a decision that they're better off producing them via CG instead of hand animation. Right now, though, Disney's good animated films are all coming from Pixar - who happen to be an all-CG shop.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
What Pixar has brought to its animation is a respect for its audience, high quality animation, and artistic integrity. And they have consistantly done something that other studios seem to do only by accident: create characters a wide spectrum of audiences can actually CARE about.
I'm happy Pixar is out there because their stories aren't cynical. They reflect an integrity that comes from imbuing their characters with a fundamental humanity we all can relate to. It's good for children. It's good for everyone.
I'm hoping they push up the rating scale and make more complex stories as well. If Pixar starts to write stories about ambiguous characters they can truly re-invent American animation.
It's a bit ironic that as Disney switches from the cell shaded look to the 3D, many video games are switching from the 3D look to cell shaded.
"After the deal was inked and signed, Steve looked up the records and found out that Disney ROUTINELY does movies for way more than that."
Jobs investigated Disney's demands AFTER the deal was made? What kind of businessman is he?
I don't believe random noise would make CG any more like human drawing. You would need a more complete model of the way the human brain sees and draws things, to consistently get the right effect.
Disney's 2D department is in limbo because recent scripts were weak. Their animators are still great!
Cynical businessmen have looted the Disney legacy, with classy projects such as "Peter Pan 2", "Hunchback 2", "Cinderella 2", "Aladdin: The Series" etc.
Disney dug its own grave, believing in their homemade "sure" formula for success. The formula is deader than dead. The audience didn't want to be fooled any longer and chose the better films: Those made by Pixar, where you can still see the spark and joy of the people creating these films.
If you're looking for what modern Disney could be, look for the films of Miyazaki. It's still a mystery to me why the old films from the back catalog of Ghibli is still being ignored by Europeans and Americans.
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atleast they seem loyal to their animators, by training them instead of laying off everyone and hiring new more qualified animators. thumbs up to disney
3D animation is a great medium, but unless Disney can develop some kind of style for it, they're screwed. They're throwing out their 2D style, which is absolutely unique, and jumping into 3D which they're not going to be able to brand anywhere near as easily.
Good point, but.....3D modelling gives you 2D automatically when a 3D scene is rendered for a frame. The trick for Disney is to create their own 3D modeling and 3D-to-2D rendering algorithms that replicate that Disney 2D animation style. Although many see photorealism as the Holy Grail for 3D, nothing is stopping clever programmers from rendering a 3D scenes as a series of flat "cartoon-like" objects or adding in embellishments like object distortion with speed or "whoosh" lines.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The fact is that Pixar knows how to tell a great story. The CG is meaningless without that. There are lots of CG movies and TV shows flooding the market these days, but Pixar is still able to make a name for themselves because it's about the story first and the technology second.
considering that every Pixar film has been a huge success, and the last animated cartoon Disney has put out that came close to any Pixar film was Aladin.
Of course, Disney films will continue to suck, CGI or not as long as they continue to do unoriginal, unimaginitive work. The reason Pixar has been successful is not because they do CGI, but because they don't rehash the same theme endlessly and they don't follow formulaic storytelling.
I swear PowerPoint is going to be the downfall of higher education in western society.
Disney will come out and have a press release stating they are doing away with hand drawn 2d animation and switching to all computer generated animation. People will ooo and ahh. Then their first movie under this change will come out and people will not like it and not go to see it. Disney will lose a ton of money and realize there is a time and place for everything and switch back to using a mix of hand drawn and computer generated like they do now.
You're assuming limitations of software that aren't inherent. Oh, they may be inherent to specific packages, but this is why the big studios have hordes of programmers to develop or customize software as needed.
Want to pull a sight gag like the classic Wile E. Coyote drawing a picture of a tunnel on a rock and having the RoadRunner go through it? Simple, first model the rock with a pixmap of the tunnel picture rendered on the surface (ditto when the coyote tries to run through it). For the roadrunner scene, substitute a model of the rock with an actual tunnel cut into it. No big deal. (Alternatively, model the real tunnel all along but put an invisible wall across it for the coyote to smack into.) Just keep the camera POV fixed.
Fox in "Ice Age" did a number of classic Looney Tunes-like character morphs, particularly of Scrat (the saber-tooth squirrel-rat), e.g. eyeballs bulging when it gets squeezed in the glacier, arms stretching ridiculously when it tries to pull the acorn from the ice, etc.
In a series of short clips Pixar did for the Disney Channel (IIRC), there are a couple with Woody and Buzz casting optically impossible (but funny!) shadows (in the light from, of course, a Luxo lamp).
Don't forget that you can not only change the camera parameters from frame to frame, but also the models (indeed, you have to do that to get motion) and your rules of model motion don't have to match the laws of physics. Even where they do, you can cheat. The scene in "Toy Story" where the toy soldiers parachute from the upper floor is faked -- there's a brief period where the soldiers are out of view as they go over the side and the "camera" follows; the animators set this up to have the original toys "hide" under the floor while two others with opening parachutes appear in their place (I forget why they had to do this, but it simplified something else).
Sure, there's probably a class of 2D sight gags that just aren't as funny in 3D. But there are also things you can pull off in 3D (or even CG 2D) because of the computerization that would just be way too labor-intensive in conventional 2D.
(For great examples of some other effects, see what happens when the modelling/rendering software glitches as in the "errors" reel from "Shrek" on the DVD.)
-- Alastair
Well, in 3D it's also true that if you can draw it, you can do it. The thing is that creating 3D models is a bigger PITA than simply sketching something, so you really want to leverage that by animating the model rather than creating a new, slightly different model for each frame. (Or rather, you want to let the computer create that new model rather than creating it manually.)
OTOH, once you've developed the algorithms (and maybe, acquired a fast enough computer) to generate a certain kind of model effect, you can re-use it again and again. (E.g., modelling how clothing reacts to motion.)
Of course, that depends on how close the computer simulation matches the real world vs taking shortcuts that render okay but are situation-specific.
-- Alastair