GeorgeC wrote:I HATE modern art.
I'm no fan of UPA (ugly-looking cartoons IMHO with very limited animation), the great bulk of Hanna-Barbera, Disney's Sleeping Beauty (the most sterile-looking feature of Walt's era), and a bunch of the other artwork this book celebrates. This cheaper method of production has led to a sameness and sterility in TV animation that has continued to this day in the US with very few breaks in quality.
Let me put things straight -- aside from personal enmity for Amid Amidi and the great @#$%R@#-holedness that he represents, I'm not a big fan of 1950s animation. That, to me, is when animation in the U.S. began to go wrong.
Why celebrate this crap with a new book? I just don't get it...!
Interesting George. I actually share some of your sentiments....I have the Charles Solomon book Enchanted Drawings (stops at Lion King) and he devotes a whole chapter to UPA. I liked their look, thought it was interesting, (Weren't a lot of them former Disney animators too?) but....I'm also not crazy about the fact that it's limited animation and that it influenced television cartoons into going that route as well. I love the Gerald McBoing-Boing look, but that doesn't mean that's ALL I want to see.
It just seems like Cartoon Brew is ONLY interested in that look, and that look period. (Ditto John K)
It was a conscious, artistic choice with UPA but later on, with 1960s television and even current cartoons like Dexter's Lab, Foster's, Fairly OddParents etc....TOO limited and too exaggerated. Just my feeling though.
Exaggerated cartoony stuff can be great but like you said George, the guys in the 30s and 40s did it the best, full animation but still cartoony and beautiful to look at. I'm also no basher of realistic-type animation IN TRADITIONAL MODE, like say Cinderella, Wendy, Alice, Snow White....a lot of people hate that kind of character model but I never had a problem with it....it served the story.
With CGI, it's another world entirely. (again, just my opinion.
) A lot of stuff that looks good in 2d also looks good in CGI but not EVERYTHING. Cartoony stuff is best in CGI, and not all of it equally so. CGI is just so limited IMHO. (I mean artistically) People see it as having greater freedom but in my opinion it's the exact opposite. You are really boxing yourself in with computers. There's not a whole lot of places you can go aesthetically except "be more real." And who wants more real?
(Again, there are exceptions to this, like with The Steadfast Tin Soldier section in
F-2000 and the look of Glen Keane's
Rupunzel. Overall, however, this is basically how I see CGI. And motion capture--don't get me started. I'm no expert, but to me motion capture is basically like having a coloring book and filling in the lines, but not actually drawing the stuff yourself. And even regular CGI is not all that different, unfortunately.
Although there are exceptions of course, but in general, I don't think CGI, no matter how good it is, can ever have the cultural, emotional, and historical impact that traditional animation has had in its heyday. It's just not possible. )
GeorgeC wrote:There's also a tendency by too many artists to copy Mary Blair (Pixar loves Mary Blair to death but nobody seems to get it through their heads that her stuff just DOESN'T WORK IN ANIMATION 99% OF THE TIME!) and the Golden Books of the same era, too. And that's a GOOD thing?
Especially CGI animation!!
I looked up some info on her and she did some great stuff on the 50's traditional films like
Alice and Wonderland, etc....but it's a whole other thing when you do it in CGI. I like some of what Pixar does (I guess
Monster's Inc was meant to echo the Blair look?)
but even with being more cartoony than say, DW or other studios, their stuff is still too real-looking for its own good. There's just no way to escape that unless you STOP USING THE COMPUTER.
(Or make some radical changes, like Glen Keane. But how many studios would invest in that on a full-time basis?
)
One thing I can't understand about Cartoon Brew however: Amid seems to dislike everything that's CGI and is purely about older, pioneering, vintage animation from the 1950s and 60s.
So why does he always praise Pixar's art--Pixar
is CGI and has NEVER made one traditional cartoon, ever.
I guess it's the aesthetic choices Pixar makes, the whole "cartoony" thing influenced by the older styles, but IMHO, if the Brew REALLY loves that style, they would do better by encouraging Pixar to abandon CGI and go full-tilt into adopting it into traditional films.
Of course, that will never happen, but....
You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!
And yeah I know it came from YouTube, but still....)
