The State of American Animation

[Zoatebix]

Dah! You played the "compare it to Satoshi Kon" card. I guess I'll have to convince the Anime co-op to go for Gantz, since I'm broke after rocking out a bunch of feature films, Read or Die (OAV and TV), Last Exile, etc. on my own money. I wish I could regret my purchases, but I picked up some rather good stuff.

I really like your opinion on style (and I've got a gang of people around here itching for Sin City to come out). Animation -hand-drawn, computer generated, and however the two shall meet- greatly expands the catalogue of film techniques available to a film maker, combining live-action and animation adds even more, and surely there are techniques still in animation and photography that have yet to be discovered.

Technique alone isn't going to make a great movie, and for every technique that exists there are (I'm guessing) immeasurably more ways to use and combine them poorly than there are effective and artistic uses. And you can do a lot in film with a very limited range of film devices. But sometimes it's nice to have an awful lot of tools in your toolbox.

 

[Zoatebix]

Just because I can't let a good thread die:

What I am saying is that it's a tad short-sighted to paint animation as inferior simply because it can be done live-action, in the same way as it would be foolish, IMHO, to say that there was no longer a need for painted art once photography was invented.

It's interesting that you mention painted art after photography. I'm no art history buff, but film theorist Siegfried Krakauer thought that photography freed painting from the constraints of realism and representation and allowed it to become more of a purely aesthetic art form. I also know that there's been a lot of painting and graphic art made specifically in reaction to photography examining and imitating its capabilities and limitations.

I can't find an example on the internet (my google-fu has failed!), but I've seen a painting or two (or perhaps they were some kind of metal-plate print like Intaglio) that imitated the effect of shallow focus on a portrait. The face is in photorealistic detail but the "further away" parts of the figure and especially the edges of the head and figure are blurred just as they would be if the light from the those parts of the figure were hitting film diffusely. There are paintings that imitate chemical film-processing effects out there, too, if I recall correctly. There are also "painterly" photographs and photographers out there which use long exposure times to get brush-like effects on film.

I'm not exactly sure how all this furthers my cause of defending filmed animation. I guess I'm just throwing more fuel on the fire for my "neither photographic, computer generated, nor hand-drawn cinema have been exhausted yet as media" argument. Heck - there's probably still stuff to be said for stop-action animation - did you see how well they smoothed up the tauntauns on the new Empire DVD? Ye gods!

Anywho, I'm out for now.
-George

 

[WizarDru]

Just because I can't let a good thread die:It's interesting that you mention painted art after photography. I'm no art history buff, but film theorist Siegfried Krakauer thought that photography freed painting from the constraints of realism and representation and allowed it to become more of a purely aesthetic art form. I also know that there's been a lot of painting and graphic art made specifically in reaction to photography examining and imitating its capabilities and limitations.

Well, I'm a firm believer in options. Krakauer's probably right: once photography came along, the need for painting to represent actual events as a tool for chronocling history was dramatically lessened. I mean, portrait painting was once a prestigious and important profession. The most famous pictures of the 18th century are best remembered by their portaits...portraits painted by professionals who travelled from Europe to do the job, since America had not developed it's own. While there was clearly alternative artistic styles long before photography was invented, they became much more prevalent after, I think.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not implying that movies should be made animated solely for the purpose of being animated. What I am saying is that animation, by it's nature, can do some things that live action just can't...without lots of work. Character designs, for example, can allow an artistic vision that is difficult or impossible to reproduce as live action. Compare the live-action Hellboy to the comic-form: equally good, but in different ways, IMHO. Mignola's artwork is an integral part of Hellboy...and while watching other artists emulate it is interesting, it's not always successful (as seen in the 'weird' anthologies).

Another example would be Dilbert. Yes, almost everything in the animated Dilbert could have been done as a live action show: but it was Adam's designs that make the strip and the animated series what they are. In Adams' case, it's borne as much out of his artistic limitations as not, but the point still stands, I think. Is Kiki's Delkivery Service's message of self-reliance and decency less effective because it's animated? I don't think so. Is Ghost in the Shell's questions about the nature of humanity less evocative because it's conveyed in the animated form? Again, I don't think so.

The more options an artist has for delivering a vision, the better. I merely would like to see animation added to the palette of colors available.