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PaperclipPerfector
6mo ago
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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?
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:
doesn't contradict my premise that the primary thing that CGI is good at is cutting cost and effort. It kind of supports 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.
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