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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2143 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 3, 2023

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It seems that 3D CGI animation has completely won against more 2D traditional animation styles. Looking at the animated media consumed by my kids these days, EVERYTHING is 3D-modeled CGI. I don't know of a single piece of animated media for kids that is not anymore. But is any such 3D CGI better than traditional animation? When I say "better" I mean, does it make better art than it would be if they did the same thing in traditional animation? Is there anything that this medium does really really well? Does it connect with us in a better way, make us feel more in any way?

I'm going to guess that the best thing that CGI does is "be cheaper". This makes sense, as once you produce a CGI model, you can use it forever, and you can adapt it to make new models. Do you want to make a scene of a crowd cheering? For traditional animation, you'd have to draw each person in the crowd over and over and over again, 24 times for each second. That's a lot of people to draw! For CGI, you can take one model, change it slightly to make other people, or use other preexisting models, and then animate them in a much less time consuming process than drawing frame-by-frame.

However, most 3D CGI stuff that I've seen looks kinda bland. As a case study, we can look at all of the Disney live action stuff vs the original animation. With the original animation, the artists pour lots of character into their characters. They exaggerate movements, change their faces to be very expressive with human-like characteristics. With remakes that extensively use CGI like The Little Mermaid and The Lion King, the characters are just kinda flat. I suppose this is exacerbated that Disney has tried to make all of the characters seem anatomically appropriate, resulting in Simba looking kinda like he's meowing instead of horrified when he sees Mufasa die, etc. But even without this caveat, I can't really think of any CGI that I feel like did something amazing. As another example, I've heard about the animators who make pokémon sprites complaining when pokémon switched over from 2D sprites to exclusively 3D models starting around 2013 ish. They complained about how you just can't give the same level of character to a 3D model as you can to a 2D sprite. Just making something look realistic does not necessarily make it better art.

Can anyone point to any 3D CGI media that does something really well, that elicits an emotional response that traditional 2D animation could not? Is CGI just a cost-saving measure to churning out bland media?

Some extra thoughts:

One thing that 3D CGI excels at is total animation. 2D animation is really restricted by the medium. Characters usually move in the plane that is perpendicular to the camera and the camera can pan or zoom, but its orientation is fixed. Total animation, that is, having the whole scene move relatively to the camera, is incredibly expensive, as you can no longer rely on background cels staying put and animating just the characters.

Let's say you're drawing two characters running along a long hallway of sorts, constantly avoiding oncoming obstacles. The easiest way to animate them is to have them run to the right. If you want them to run towards the viewer, you have to radically simplify the corridor, probably having a relatively short loop of wall and ceiling decorations. Anything more complex is total animation and it simply blows the costs of the animation sky high.

3D CGI is total animation by default, so you can have your characters and camera do whatever they want. Model your hallway once and you can have your camera weave and bob around the obstacles, circle around the characters, have the characters get closer to it or lag behind and all this without having to redraw every frame from scratch.

Are you aware of bluey? Maybe you don’t have kids? Bluey is an outrageously popular 2D animation show for kids that looks like it could have been made in 1995. It’s made in a software called celaction2d.

I can’t really overstate how popular it is. It’s made in Australia. It’s so popular that I suspect it will start having more copycats from more modern first world countries. (Just kidding Australians).

It’s also extremely wholesome. I can’t think of a single but of degeneracy in the entire show.

I've heard of Bluey, but haven't watched it. Kids are slightly too young.

Not even a gay couple walking in the background? Strange.

Not that anybody online seems to be aware of.

Fellas, is it degenerate to walk down the street with another man?

I can't. 3D CGI is soulless trash as far as the eye can see. So is most 2D animation as well, of course, but to a noticeably lesser degree.

Can anyone point to any 3D CGI media that does something really well, that elicits an emotional response that traditional 2D animation could not?

The example du jour of technically masterful, visually beautiful 3D animation right now (well-deserved, IMO) is probably Fortiche Production's 2021 Netflix series Arcane, surprised nobody's brought it up yet. I wouldn't hesitate to put its visual design, character animation and acting, and general execution up on par with a Prince of Egypt or a Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind or Akira or whatever your high-water mark for excellence in 2D animation might be.

My impression is that even people who didn't connect with the story or characters still generally praise the visual style and animation as noteworthy. It's a pretty striking departure from what people have come to expect from big-budget 3D animation - with heavy use of a non-photorealistic rendering style, hand-painted model textures, key effects like fire and smoke actually animated traditionally in 2D and composited in, and other creative ways of sort of "bridging the gap" between 3D and 2D animation, with a result that ends up taking on a distinct character of its own. One of the most common things people say about it (which I agree with) is something like "every frame looks like a piece of traditionally painted concept art", and I think it achieves things that would be technically very difficult or prohibitively labor-intensive if it had been a fully 2D-animated production, particularly in character acting and environment, that strengthen the emotional beats and storytelling.

Is it funny to me that my personal high-water mark for 3D animation is a TV series set in the universe of the video game League of Legends? Yes, a little.

The "kids/family-friendly animation" equivalent to that approach would probably be something like TMNT: Mutant Mayhem (2023), which is also trying for that kind of 'Expressive 2D/3D Hybrid Painting' look. Puss In Boots: The Last Wish (2022) also did this to an extent. The initial positive reaction to Enter the Spiderverse (2018) might've actually kicked off the trend (on groundwork laid by things like Disney's 2012 "Paperman" short film). I can't really speak to the overall quality of any of those movies as stories, but they all strike me as visually interesting and inspired compared to the larger catalogue of 3D animated family movies of the last two decades. If everyone starts leaning into this kind of look and milking it on a superficial level without any of the creative vision that's supposed to come with it, it might start getting tired fast, but as it stands, these kinds of heavy stylistic experiments are pointing in a good direction to me. It's expressive in the way that stylized 2D animation can be expressive. High Photorealism, now that we can do it well reliably, is ... kind of boring to look at, it turns out.

All that being said, yeah, I can point to a couple examples of studios experimenting with the medium in interesting ways, but broadly, neither the high end (incredibly expensive photorealistic CGI lions that communicate 1/10th the emotion that a cel of expressive lineart overlaid onto a cel of color communicated in 1995) or the low end (Walmart clearance DVD rack or straight-to-youtube Disney Tinkerbell series #48) are particularly pushing the envelope of what's possible in the medium. Nothing Pixar has put out in a long time has really blown me away in a visual sense that I can think of offhand, and a lot of popular 3D-animated children's TV or web programming is just depressingly sparse, sterile, and unemotive.

(late edit: on the Pixar point - After thinking about it more I've remembered Wall-E, which I think actually does really owe a lot of its charm and emotional depth to the realism of the hard, mechanical robots and the contrast between a photorealistic dirty, dusty earth and clean, ultra-curated colony ship. I don't know if the stark divide between the two story settings could've been achieved as well in traditional animation, and I think the machine characters really do benefit from the fact that they're models and not drawings.)

I do think you're right that cost is a driving factor once you get below the production budgets of major studios. Honestly, in terms of bang for your buck, a lot of modern economical 2D animation techniques produce an arguably lower quality product than the equivalent cost 3D animation. Low-cost 2D animation doesn't look like The Magic School Bus (1994) anymore, it looks like The Magic School Bus Rides Again (2017). Or Star Trek: Lower Decks, which appears more polished and is 'for adults' but to me just looks fundamentally offputting. No amount of fancy lens flare and bloom in post can save that. That's not to say there's not also some great, traditionally-principled, technically-masterful 2D animation happening out there right now, but to my eye there's just as much slop and creative poverty in 2D productions as there is in 3D right now.

whatever your high-water mark for excellence in 2D animation might be

Pinocchio

I found I liked Arcane's art style in small doses, but to me it was too visually noisy. Watching it I felt like I had to work to pick out the important figures in each scene.

I think it's mostly a labor-saving measure, although modern AI art will help a lot with that.

I play a lot of AVNs, and I see that the quality of 3D art is a smooth slope. Anyone can set up a content pipeline with some mildly customized assets and start churning out a new render for each line, the biggest limiting factor is probably their GPU. Getting the renders to look good and not uncanny probably doubles the work, getting the animations to look good probably quadruples it.

2D art required a real artist to even start making something. That's why most, if not all, 2D VNs stick to blurred backgrounds and a few posed images of the characters for the majority of the scenes, with only the pivotal scenes switching to a few full-screen drawings with the characters in more dynamic poses. Animating 2D art is much, much harder. Tools like Live2D and Spine are incredibly labor-saving, but the barrier to entry is super high, as you can't just draw the key frames and hire some lesser artists to do the in-betweens. You have to know which scenes can look good with Live2D, how to break down your first key frame into pieces and rig them to make the animation. And it still won't let you do something like this, the vast majority of Live2D animations looks barely better than Saturday morning Hannah-Barbera classics.

In a couple of years AI art will help a lot. Right now, there's not enough LORAs or what's their name that let you churn out images in the style you want and almost everyone uses the one that has the same energy as polystyrene moldings. It forgets tiny details between different drawings, so animations are right out. But all of this can and will be fixed. I'm reasonably sure Disney is currently busy making AI tools that will let it go back to lavish 2D animation and open-source tools will catch up with Disney a few years later.

Blizzard cinematics like this one (battle robot has PTSD) are generally held up as great CGI shorts.

I'd say the thing they do really well - better than hand drawn animation - is sell a coherent physical world. Because it's all modeled, things persist accurately through the scenes, like the blades of grass on the robot's shoulders, the clovers, the moss, etc. If that were hand drawn animation, I would expect that to vary and change. A good hand animator would probably get most of it correct, but maybe the length might be subtly off in a way your brain would pick up on.

I suspect western animators have simply conceded the 2D space to Asian studios that do it better. Kids in China for instance are said to "live a 2D life" due to the ubiquity of Japanese-style animation there. While the popularity of anime and manga is increasing over here as well, I think the works aimed at younger audiences (<10 years old, say) haven't made the jump as well either for financial or cultural reasons (or gatekeeping by local networks). Older kids on the other hand can navigate the internet well enough to find what they're looking for if they have an interest.

The Lego Movie plays to the strengths of 3D CGI on account of the subject being made of countless tiny pieces of uniform rigid 3D shapes. I imagine it was a huge effort to make in CGI, never mind trying to do it freehand.

Replying to you and @RaiderOfALostTusken

I agree the Lego movie did a good job with the CGI and certainly wasn't lazy. But I think my point still stands of, would it have been better if they had done a more traditional 2D animation? Might the character movements have been accentuated in specific ways, such that it could have connected even more with its audience? Is there any particular strength of the way they animated the characters in CGI that would have been less effective if they had used traditional animation instead? The fact that you say:

I imagine it was a huge effort to make in CGI, never mind trying to do it freehand.

doesn't contradict my premise that the primary thing that CGI is good at is cutting cost and effort. It kind of supports it.

Only because the movie is about a real world dad and son relationship, making the lego scenes appear as realistic as they would if you were the kid playing with them helps put you in the kids shoes. If the movie was done in traditional 2D style, I believe you could tell the same story but I'm not sure if it would land as well emotionally.

In general I'm not sure. Would I like Toy Story as much if it was a standard cartoon style? I like the Miyazaki films well enough I suppose. Other than those I don't think there are any traditional 2D films I like as much as say, Ratatouille or The Incredibles. And I don't know if that's because of the animation or in spite of it

I totally agree with the broad thrust of your post, just pointing out that The Lego Movie is the rare example that justifies its use of 3D and CGI where something like Toy Story, another genuinely good 3D CGI film, could quite conceivably have been rendered freehand in golden era 2D style without any great loss, and probably faster and for a smaller budget - it's the script, the characters and the top tier voice actors that make Toy Story good, the CGI was a technical novelty.

You can't render complex mathematically accurate physics in freehand - and I'm not saying I'm certain they did in TLM - and that's okay because 99% of the time you don't need to to tell a story. But if you want a convincing effect of a tidal wave of tiny Lego pieces crashing over a Lego city, a box full of loose pieces being exploded, or a Lego model that accurately models the qualities of the real product then CGI is going to give a "better" result, and faster. I'm not actually sure it would be cheaper though, 3D rendering is notoriously intensive and the credits for that film are vast.

A talented artist certainly could draw something that looks like a lot of Lego pieces interacting, but the emphasis is on like. CGI will be more immersive for that use even if perhaps it's less graphically expressive in its line-work and frame advances. A hand drawn Lego Movie would give you the "what if you could draw Lego coming to life" feeling where CGI is that much closer to "what if Lego could come to life". The artificial plastic-ness of Lego is an ideal match for the blandness of CGI where something like The Jungle Book or Lion King remakes will fall into the uncanny valley by trying to make singing animals look realistic (I assume, I haven't watched either of them).

In short putting aside cost, speed and effort I think The Lego Movie really would be at the very best no better if it was made without CGI.

I think well done 2d animation tends to look more "real" than 3d animation for anything organic, which I think has to do with the complexity of organic movement that is too time consuming to replicate with 3d models (when all it takes is the right pencil stroke to emulate in 2d). I also notice this with "muppets", if you watch Fraggle Rock for instance they show a ton of expression and liveliness that would just be too time consuming to do on a computer.

I think if you aren't satisfied with what Pixar is putting out, you're probably not going to find anything more visually sophisticated than that in the realm of computer graphics.

I thought The Lego Movie was a innovative use of CGI that made something genuinely impressive, especially how well they got the lighting figured out. It made sense narratively that it should look like that, and acted as a good contrast for the later emotional live action beats.

I don't know of a single piece of animated media for kids that is not anymore.

Keep in mind that the old Disney films kept selling VHS/DVD copies long after their release, and today are available on Disney+, so it's unclear how well new releases correlate with their media consumption.

Putting that aside, any anime for kids would be the obvious exception. It's just that, other than a few examples like the Pokemon anime and the subset of Studio Ghibli films that are child-friendly, they are mostly only watched by children in Japan. The reasons for this are pretty obvious - young children aren't seeking out their own media, aren't good with subtitles, etc. I think it used to be more common for (dubbed and often heavily edited) anime to air on children's cartoon television networks, though even then the target audience was older than the stuff for really young children that stayed in Japan.

Even western 2D animated series are invariably actually animated in various asian countries (and Japan itself often outsources some of the animation work to Korea or China). The grunt-work of animation also gets subsidized by the fact that a career in anime is a dream for many in Japan, people put up with horrendous hours and wages trying to make it. In western countries that doesn't happen, there's no native 2D animation industry so nobody tries to get into it and there's no pipeline teaching new animators.

That's true, I wasn't thinking of anime. I suppose that might be because my kids are too young for that as of now.

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