2007 Review: 4 Advice For CGI Animators

As the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive completes its second year in operation, it's time to review the accomplishments of the past year. Here's a countdown of the ten most important subjects we've covered in 2007. See if your list matches mine. (View the complete list.) Click on the link to read more on this topic.


In 1914, Max Fleischer invented the rotoscope as a time and labor saving way of producing animation. He soon came to realize that although the device was a great aid in effects and technical animation, it was a poor substitute for character animation.



In 1986, engineer Ernie Blood developed motion capture techniques as a time and labor saving way of producing animation. A decade and several mocap features later, many CGI animators are coming to the same realization that Max Fleischer and his staff had more than a half century ago.

NUMBER 4: ADVICE FOR CG ANIMATORS

One of the principle purposes of this website is to provide the link between animation of the past and animation of the future. The principles that brought Pinocchio and Bugs Bunny to life are the same principles that should be used to create current computer animated characters. This is not a website devoted to promoting hand drawn animation. This is a website devoted to promoting animation.


Bakshi Phone Doodle
Ralph Bakshi is a monumental force in the world of animation. I convinced him to come out of retirement to speak directly to the CGI guys in the trenches and share his viewpoint on the current state of animation. Ralph has an uncanny knack for kicking your ass in a way that makes you want to say "thank you!" afterwards. These two articles are Bakshi at his best.

There are no sides here, only techniques. The important thing is to do something more than just sell dolls and hamburgers, or get the best table at some bullshit restaurant. Stop crying. Go out and do something. Starve to death if you have to. It's honorable. -Ralph Bakshi

Bakshi Speaks To CGI Animators August 13th, 2007

Bakshi On 2D vs. 3D August 31st, 2007

A few weeks ago, I stuck my own head on the chopping block with a post titled, CGI Animators Should THINK Like Artists. I received some flak from an industry pro who said, "You take an all-or-nothing approach, where everything ever done in CG animation is crap, and everyone making these films are dopes." Well, that isn't what I'm actually saying... Crappy animation is crappy animation, no matter what technique is used to create it. And a lot of great artists are working on crappy CG films. The problem isn't that CG animation sucks and the people making it are dopes... It's that the current crop of CG features don't come close to scratching the surface of what's possible using the medium.


In the late teens and early 20's, hand drawn animation was in the same place CG is today. Everyone was focused on developing technical processes and filing patents on techniques. The drawings were realistic and stiff, the stories were simplistic, and they recycled cliched formulas and stock animation without a great deal of variety. Audiences didn't mind, because they were amused by the novelty of drawings that moved. But the novelty eventually wore off.

The medium had to advance itself creatively to survive, and animators like Otto Messmer and Bill Nolan stepped up to the bat to pioneer personality animation, the Fleischers developed musical timing, and Walt Disney codified the fundamental principles of animation like overlapping action, follow through and squash and stretch. We can learn a lot from the past. Motion libraries and rotoscoping were a dead end in 1925 and they're a dead end now. Earl Hurd's patent for the cel system didn't make cartoons any more entertaining, and neither do new techniques for rendering fur or water in CG. The thing that makes cartoons better is to utilize the unique aspects of the medium to tell new and original stories in an expressive and creative way.


In this article, I use an illustrated book from a century ago to attempt to show how the reference on this website is relevant to artists working in the field of computer animation...

CGI Animators Should THINK Like Artists
November 28th, 2007

I ask every animator who walks through the doors of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive for the same favor... Use the resources I'm sharing with you to make animation that people like me who love animation would want to watch. That goes the same for animators who use a computer as it does those who use a pencil. Take Ralph's advice to tell fresh and original stories, and my advice to think like an artist, and you can't go wrong.

Go To Number 3 on the list of Top Ten Subjects of 2007

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
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Opinion: Bakshi Speaks To CGI Animators

In 1914, Max Fleischer invented the rotoscope as a time and labor saving way of producing animation. He soon came to realize that although the device was a great aid in effects and technical animation, it was a poor substitute for character animation.

In 1986, engineer Ernie Blood developed motion capture techniques as a time and labor saving way of producing animation. A decade and several mocap features later, many CGI animators are coming to the same realization that Max Fleischer and his staff had more than a half century ago.

The ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive documents the golden age of hand drawn animation, but it isn't intended as a resource exclusively for 2D animators. I encourage CGI artists to think of themselves as animators and build upon animation's rich history instead of reinventing it bit by bit. Animation is animation. Pencils and computers are only tools.

No one today has as much experience with hand drawn animation and rotoscoping than the legendary director, Ralph Bakshi (See related article Bakshi Phone Doodles). I've asked him to speak "animator to animator" to CGI artists and pass along his observations about the things that really count when it comes to animation. -Stephen Worth

BAKSHI SPEAKS TO CGI ANIMATORS

Frame to frame animation eventually came to a grinding end. I'm not sure which generation of young animators were at Disney redoing and relearning the tradition of making boring films and recreating cliched motion when it expired. Except for Jim Tyer, "Modern Animation" and Ralph Bakshi, animation was dying- while doing the same old thing. Big money and animators never really followed Bakshi, "Modern Animation" or Jim Tyer. They just rehashed its past.


(Read Chuck Jones' article on the failure of "Modern Animation")
UPA failed because it was nothing more than elitist designers trying to animate on museum walls. Content was unimportant to them, really. Matisse or Picasso were more important. Bakshi was hounded out of the business by controversy. And you'd be surprised how many animation directors at Terrytoons disliked Jim Tyer's work because it didn't look like Disney- or anything else for that matter. Terry kept him on because his weekly footage output was so large.


(See the gallery of images from Lord of the Rings on RalphBakshi.com)
Lord of the Rings was done in rotoscope animation because rotoscope made it physically possible to do it. You couldn't do Lord of the Rings in less than 25 years using traditional animation. Thirty years later- Wow! Along comes the computer... "We can do Disney story animation with another look and sell it back to audiences." Of course, I would have used computers and motion capture if they had been around during my day. But I turned to Tolkien to try to change the kinds of stories animation told. My city films were being thrown out of theaters.

So, what's the argument here? Unless hand-drawn animation finds new creative story approaches and new creative drawn motion exaggerations, it will look as it always looked at the end- faded and drawn. There'll be no great interest for it either. Computer animation has the exact same problem. Computer animation will eventually grow old, just like hand-drawn animation, unless something new happens. It will fall into manneristic boredom if it continues to endlessly redo what's already been done before. The success and the money will always follow the creative artists who take either of these two mediums and do something different with it.

A lot of people remember and love Jim Tyer's animation today because he really did something different with hand-drawn animation. He didn't follow the crowd.


(See Jim Tyer's work: Terrytoons: Barnyard Actor / Funny Animal Comics Part One and Part Two

Ralph Bakshi 2007

UNFILTERED: The Complete Ralph Bakshi isn't one of those "art books" with postage stamp sized pictures floating in oceans of tasteful white space and huge text blocks of scholarly blather that crowds out the images. It's just pictures, pictures and more pictures... along with just enough text to put them in context. The book is organized to show Ralph's career from his earliest days at Terry-Toons, to his groundbreaking features, to his revolutionary TV work, to his most recent fine art paintings. Even if you think you know all there is to know about Bakshi, this book will grab you by the lapels and shake you and show you things you've never seen the likes of before. Click through the link to pick up the Bakshi book at Amazon.
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